Once, in 1942, after hearing that two million Jews had already been killed, he urged Rabbi Wise to stop pressuring him for immediate action. “The mills of the gods,” Roosevelt said, “grind slowly.”
Clearly Roosevelt squirmed, but just as clearly he dissembled, even to his closest aides. For example, in early 1942, he told Felix Frankfurter not to worry ? that the Jews were being dispatched to Eastern Europe not to be killed, but to build fortifications against a Soviet counter-attack. Roosevelt knew better.
On August 22, 1942, Roosevelt told reporters that the Nazi atrocities ‘give rise to the fear that … the barbaric and unrelenting character of the occupational regime will become more marked and may even lead to the extermination of certain populations.’
Was Roosevelt using code language? ‘Certain populations?’ Who was kidding whom?
The bottom line was that Allied leaders persuaded themselves that any humanitarian digression, such as bombing the railroad lines into Auschwitz, could only delay and possibly jeopardize the achievement of their ultimate goal of defeating the Nazis.
To which many of us may respond, ‘nonsense,’ but the Allied judgment contained the core elements of my second reason: anti-Semitism.
Just Below Boiling Point
Roosevelt, the politician who presided over the war and who read the polls, was aware that, in the late 1930’s, as the U.S. was struggling to emerge from the depression, a xenophobic anti-Semitism flourished among many Americans.
His ‘New Deal’ was often described as a ‘Jew Deal.’ A poll by Elmo Roper asked in 1938: “What kinds of people do you object to?” Thirty-eight percent answered, “Jews.” Another 27 percent answered, “noisy, cheap, boisterous, loud people.” Another Roper poll, same year: 70-85 percent opposed raising quotas to help Jewish refugees. In 1939, 53 percent of the American people told Roper that the Jews were ‘different’ and for this reason ‘deserved . . . social and economic restrictions.’
The war did not change American attitudes. In the spring of 1942, sociologist David Riesman described anti-Semitism in the U.S. as ‘slightly below the boiling point.’
David Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, concluded that 15 percent of the American people would actually have ‘supported’ an anti-Jewish pogrom of some sort, and another 20-25 percent would have been ‘sympathetic’ to such a pogrom. In the scholar?s own words, ‘As much as 35-40 percent of the population was prepared to approve an anti-Jewish campaign, some 30 percent would have stood up against it, and the rest would have remained indifferent.’
We are talking here about the American people in the closing months of a war against the Nazis, in which many Americans were killed.
Widespread Disbelief
The third reason is directly related both to this astounding anti-Semitism and to the enormity of the Nazi crimes. Many people simply could not believe that the German people, so highly educated, so sophisticated, so cultured, were engaged in the systematic extermination of the Jews. Many others, either because they were basically anti-Semitic or totally absorbed with the war effort, were indifferent to the Holocaust.
In late 1944, John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, turned to A. Leon Kubowitzki, a senior official of the World Jewish Congress, and said, “We are alone. Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that all those horrible things happened?” Kubowitzki later wrote: “His sources of information were better than mine. But he could not grasp the terrible destruction.”
There were also those Allied officials and ordinary citizens, already predisposed to look with supreme indifference upon Jewish suffering, who found the ‘Jewish problem’ to be a most annoying distraction from a day’s work. And, such a waste of time. A British diplomat in the Foreign Office explained in September 1944, why he did not want to be bothered. It would compel other busy diplomats, in his words, “to waste a disproportionate amount of their time in dealing with wailing Jews.”
