After the outbreak of World War II, the administration exhibited what Wells calls “a hefty dose of paranoia” over possible Nazi espionage in the Western Hemisphere. FBI officials actually suspected Jewish refugees in Sosua of carrying out espionage for Hitler by flashing lights from the beach to signal Nazi submarines off shore – until an investigation forced the red-faced FBI to admit the mysterious lights came from the flashlights of refugees going about their evening chores.
Convinced – despite the absence of evidence – that German Jewish immigrants would agree to become Nazi spies to protect their relatives in Germany, the Roosevelt administration in 1940 ordered Sosua’s organizers to refrain from admitting Jews who came from German-occupied territory.
Soon the Dominican government itself was restricting Jewish immigration. This was cruel irony indeed: in 1938 the Trujillo regime had believed it could improve its relationship with the United States by admitting Jewish refugees; just two years later, it sought to impress the U.S. by limiting Jewish immigrants. By the end of 1940, only about 250 Jewish immigrants had settled in Sosua, a pittance compared to the numbers proposed in the aftermath of Evian.
Meanwhile, new research by Dr. Racelle Weiman (Temple University) and Prof. Dean Kotlowski (Salisbury University) has shed light on efforts to bring Jewish refugees to the Philippines, which was then under American control. Despite attempts by the State Department to discourage them from doing so, U.S. High Commissioner Paul McNutt and the local government of Manuel Quezon opened that nation’s doors to more than 1,200 European Jewish refugees.
This, then, is the serious problem defenders of President Roosevelt face: the more research that is done, the more unflattering information about FDR is revealed. His record simply cannot stand up to scholarly scrutiny.
