But anyone who assumed that would be wrong. Those ellipses in the February quotation obscured the reality of what McDonald and FDR actually discussed, which becomes clear only from reading the full, original diary entry in the book.
According to that diary entry, what the president was “deeply interested” in was Hjalmar Schacht, president of Germany’s Reichsbank, and “what sort of a person he was.” The “appeal” FDR was considering, according to McDonald’s diary entry, was going to be about the German government’s “general policies.” McDonald’s long entry describing his conversation with FDR, which occupies almost three full pages in the book, does not mention German Jewry even once.
This explains why it is that the “warning” which The New York Times and the Holocaust Museum trumpeted was, in fact, never issued. FDR and McDonald were not discussing the Jews at all, and the “appeal” to which Roosevelt referred had nothing to do with the Jews. They were actually discussing the military situation in Europe and two upcoming conferences on disarmament and the world economic order.
And sure enough, just two weeks after the McDonald-Roosevelt meeting, the president issued an appeal – but it was not about the Jews. On May 16, 1933, FDR sent identical telegrams to the 54 countries represented at the disarmament and economic conferences, outlining America’s hopes for peace and progress. Not exactly evidence of FDR’s “concern” for the Jews.
Not Everyone Was Silent
While Roosevelt refrained from publicly speaking about German Jewry in the early and mid-1930s, others did speak out – much to the administration’s chagrin.
On July 26, 1935, the German ocean liner S.S. Bremen, proudly flying the swastika flag, sailed into New York’s harbor. It was greeted by throngs of anti-Nazi protesters. Some of them managed to burst past the police lines and tear down the Nazi flag. Six of the protesters were arrested.
When the demonstrators were brought before New York City Magistrate Louis Brodsky on September 6, Brodsky immediately dismissed charges against five of them (the sixth was held because he was charged with striking a police officer). Brodsky said the defendants were justified in doing what they did, because the Bremen was guilty of “gratuitously brazen flaunting of an emblem which symbolizes all that is antithetical to American ideals.” The S.S. Bremen was the equivalent of “a pirate ship with the black flag of piracy proudly flying aloft,” the judge said.
The Nazi German press responded with hysteria. Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels’s newspaper, Der Angriff, called Brodsky “an Eastern Jew” who promoted “Jewish-communistic agitation.” Berlin’s Boersen Zeitung accused Brodsky of “incomparable impudence and brazen-faced provocation of the honor of the German people.” The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung denounced Brodsky’s ruling as “an unheard-of insult to Germany.”
Hitler’s ambassador in Washington, Hans Luther, demanded an official U.S. government apology – and got one. To the shock and dismay of American Jewish leaders, Secretary of State Cordell Hull publicly apologized to the Nazis.
Rabbi Wise was dumbfounded by Hull’s action. In his Rosh Hashanah sermon, which was quoted in The New York Times, Wise issued his strongest criticism ever of the Roosevelt administration:
The horror of the recent Nuremberg Nazi party days [he was referring to the proclamation of the notorious Nuremberg Laws in September 1935] are made more full of horror by the act of our own government in apologizing with exaggerated profuseness and abjectness to the Nazi regime for a word of disrespect and contempt for that regime, uttered in the course of a judicial decision from the bench of the lower criminal court of our city. Such apology would have come more fitly if our government had ever uttered one brave word in condemnation of the program and the practices of the Nazi regime.
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