On the other hand, Rosen also contends that speaking out about the persecution of the Jews was not only ineffective, but even harmful: “Even though FDR did so, speaking out did not stop or even slow down the Holocaust. In fact, it may have increased Hitler’s determination to kill more Jews,” he writes. And again: “Indeed, FDR’s declaration of December 17, 1942, not only failed to deter the Nazis, it also may have spurred the Germans on to even greater efforts at genocide.”
Rosen offers no evidence to back up this claim. But it also seems as if he never thought carefully about the point he was making, because if he did, Rosen’s logic would compel him to condemn Roosevelt for “spurring the Germans” to kill more Jews.
Rosen, like the devoted attorney he is, will not admit that anything his client ever did was wrong. He defends FDR’s refusal to take in more Jewish refugees, insisting that the State Department’s argument that the refugees might be Nazi spies “had merit.” He praises Roosevelt’s mild response to Kristallnacht, and quotes half a sentence by historians Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut to make it appear as if they, too, praised FDR’s response – while omitting the rest of their sentence, in which they criticized Roosevelt. Rosen claims FDR strongly opposed the British White Paper of 1939, and cites historian Peter Grose as his source – omitting statements by Grose that contradict Rosen’s claims.
Rosen’s discussion of the White Paper reveals another of his glaring contradictions. Although he praises FDR for supposedly fighting against the White Paper, Rosen himself praises the White Paper for closing off Palestine to nearly all Jewish immigration as of May 1939. He writes: “[U]nrestricted Jewish immigration [to Palestine] would have pushed millions of Nazi-sympathetic Arabs into Hitler’s arms.”
Rosen even defends Roosevelt’s failure to bomb Auschwitz, mainly on the grounds that, as he puts it, “No notable or important Jewish leaders or organizations in America or Palestine request[ed] that American forces bomb Auschwitz …”
To make that case, Rosen resorts to blatant manipulation of the historical record. He cites a June 11, 1944, meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, in Jerusalem, at which the bombing of Auschwitz was opposed by most of the members, including David Ben-Gurion, because they feared Jewish prisoners would be accidentally harmed. Aha! says Rosen: this proves that the Jewish Agency opposed bombing Auschwitz. How, then, can anyone blame for FDR for not bombing it?
What Rosen does not explain is that, according to the transcript of the June 11 meeting, the participants opposed bombing Auschwitz because at that point they believed it was “a labor camp,” not a death camp. During the next few weeks, the Agency leadership received reports from Europe revealing the truth about Auschwitz. In the months to follow, Agency representatives in numerous countries – including Agency president Chaim Weizmann in London and Ben-Gurion’s deputy, Eliahu Epstein, in Cairo – met with Allied diplomats and urged that Auschwitz be bombed.
On the American side, Rosen points out that one senior official of the World Jewish Congress, A. Leon Kubowitzki, urged the Allies to send ground troops to attack Auschwitz, rather than bomb it, for fear of civilian casualties. Aha!, says Rosen: this proves that even the World Jewish Congress opposed bombing it, so how can anyone blame Roosevelt?
What he fails to acknowledge is that Kubowitzki’s boss, World Jewish Congress co-chairman Nahum Goldmann, did urge British, American, and Soviet officials to bomb Auschwitz. A letter from Goldmann to the Czech leader in exile, Jan Masaryk, on July 3, 1944, mentions Goldmann’s lobbying efforts. The letter is significant because it is actually cited in Rosen’s book (p. 614, note 11) – meaning that Rosen had in hand evidence that Goldmann lobbied for bombing, yet he chose to write otherwise.
