Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy has been slid back under the microscope recently as his efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression are scrutinized. Now a piece of his foreign policy is also being re-evaluated in a soon-to-be published book that upends a widely held view that he was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and asserts that new evidence shows that the president pushed for an ambitious secret rescue plan before the war began.
...“It is a book that will change the consensus about the role of President Roosevelt,” said Deborah Lipstadt...
The book, “Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945,” will undoubtedly reignite the charged debate over whether Roosevelt could have done more to rescue millions of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, dissidents and others who died in Nazi death camps...Mr. McDonald was the high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations, the chairman of a presidential advisory committee on refugees and later the first American ambassador to Israel...
The editors — the historians Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart and Severin Hochberg — maintain that Roosevelt did a lot...“He was a man of grand vision who wanted to resettle a much larger number of refugees from Germany” and elsewhere, the editors conclude, citing a directive from Washington in June 1938 indicating that officials should deal with “the problems of refugees from all countries.” They agree that such efforts were completely dropped in 1940 when Roosevelt turned his attention to the war...
...On May 4, 1939, Roosevelt met at the White House with Jewish leaders and told them that there was no time to set up a new foundation, but that an existing organization should immediately agree to the plan.
“It was not so much a question of the money as it was of actual lives, and the president was convinced that the warnings given by our embassy in Berlin were sound and not exaggerated,” according to the diary of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, a State Department official at the meeting.
Refugee leaders were still at odds when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1.
David Wyman and Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, who have written extensively about America’s response to the persecution of Jews, are unimpressed with the excerpts from “Refugees and Rescue” that they’ve read.
Most of the actions have been mentioned in some form before, they said in a statement. In their view, Roosevelt may have talked about some pie-in-the-sky plans, but when it came to taking substantive action, he did nothing. For instance, they said, he opposed the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill that would have permitted the United States to take in 20,000 Jewish children from Germany in addition to the existing German-Austrian quota of 27,370.
“F.D.R. failed to ask for that $150 million, just as he failed to support Wagner-Rogers,” they said. “Both actions by F.D.R. indicate his lack of seriousness about helping Jewish refugees.” They added that his “administration discouraged and obstructed would-be immigrants.”
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