1944 by Jay Winik
Morgenthau pondered his next steps. He now knew he had to speak directly with Roosevelt. To pave the way, he discreetly met with Cordell Hull for a second time to feel him out; predictably, the meeting went nowhere. So he called Sam Rosenman, Roosevelt’s speechwriter and trusted aide. A sharp exchange followed. Rosenman had his doubts. He also worried about negative press coverage, insisting that everything be off the record. Morgenthau winced, then exploded: “Don’t worry about the publicity! What I want is his intelligence and courage—courage first and intelligence second.”
Morgenthau convened an unusual meeting of the Treasury staff at his home, away from the watchful eyes of the press and the intrigues of the bureaucracy. The idea was to develop a strategy to persuade Roosevelt to approve a separate American rescue agency. He also invited Oscar Cox, who had long been a vigorous proponent of such an organization; Ben Cohen, a key member of Roosevelt’s brain trust; and Rosenman. Morgenthau’s assistant, Harry Dexter White, said that Roosevelt would never pay attention to the problem unless he was forced “to make a decision.” Morgenthau felt that if the facts were properly laid before the president, he could be cajoled into doing the right thing.
Now Morgenthau moved to put everything into place. For starters, he decided to drop DuBois’s politically charged title and replace it with a more neutral heading: “A Personal Report to the President.” Everything else in the memorandum stayed the same. He also signed off on Cox’s proposal to preempt legislation on the Hill by setting up the refugee board through an executive order.
Meanwhile, at another Treasury Department meeting, White took stock of where things stood, and provided an overview of the political labyrinth of refugee policy. To this point, Britain had dominated a number of decisions by the Allies on the Jewish question in Europe. Only Roosevelt, he maintained, could provide the leadership to overcome not just American resistance but British resistance to helping the surviving remnants of European Jewry. In turn, only Morgenthau had the stature to persuade the president to take decisive action on the proposed rescue agency. Having already reached this decision on his own, Morgenthau agreed.
Things were now moving very quickly. With a tinge of anxiety—he couldn’t shake his fear of alienating the president—Morgenthau hastily arranged a rare Sunday meeting at the White House. For Roosevelt, it was to be an otherwise light day: tea with the crown prince of Norway, a visit to the doctor, and dinner alone.
AT 12:40 P.M. ON January 16, 1944, Morgenthau, his general counsel Randolph Paul, and John Pehle were escorted into the upstairs oval room of the White House family quarters, where Roosevelt greeted them. They carried a copy of the report, as well as a copy of the proposed executive order setting up the agency. Almost certainly, Rosenman had already briefed Roosevelt on the purpose of the weekend meeting. For his part, Roosevelt, though dapperly dressed, was still ailing from the aftereffects of the flu.
The president asked Morgenthau to give an overview of the report, then responded. As in the past, Roosevelt defended Long, asserting that he did not intentionally seek to block rescue measures; nonetheless, he acknowledged that Long had “somewhat soured” on refugees, seeing them as a security risk. Morgenthau quickly countered that according to the attorney general, in the entirety of the war, only three Jews admitted to the United States were in any way “undesirable.”
Then he told the president what he had been saying to anyone else who would listen for weeks now. If Roosevelt did not act, Congress would step in and take matters into its own hands.
The president briefly examined the executive order and proposed one change: the new agency would be headed by Morgenthau, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Leo Crowley. But then, because only the army had the ability to provide assistance to refugees and dispense relief, Roosevelt suggested that Secretary of War Henry Stimson serve on the agency, rather than Crowley. For the president, Stimson would provide the added benefit of injecting caution into the efforts of the War Refugee Board (WRB), as the agency would be named. Morgenthau agreed.
Otherwise, Roosevelt speedily signed off on the new agency. As a measure of the president’s heightened interest, he proposed that Sam Rosenman, a former judge and now the president’s eyes and ears on significant issues, be kept in the loop; he and Morgenthau also talked about the possibility of rescuing Jews by getting them into Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey. In hindsight, the challenge of persuading Roosevelt seems to have been far easier than Morgenthau expected: Roosevelt needed little convincing. Increasingly isolated on this issue, confronting a mounting political scandal, preparing to run for a fourth presidential term, and concerned about the Senate’s moving against him, the president understood that he could no longer put the rescue organization aside. Moreover, by this stage of the war, Roosevelt knew that there were opportunities to save Jews.
Yet hard questions persist. Why had it taken fourteen months from the time Stephen Wise met with the president to discuss the shocking facts of the ghastly Nazis’ extermination campaign? (Morgenthau himself called this period “those terrible eighteen months” and later exploded to his staff, “The tragic thing is that—damn it!—this thing could have been done last February.”) Why was so little imagination or effort devoted to rescuing the Jews, and so much imagination and effort put into covering up their terrible fate? Why was this president, who so masterfully was able to lift Americans’ hopes and mobilize popular energy to attack the Great Depression and lead the United States in another world war, coming so late to this matter? Why didn’t this president, who so ably understood that his departments, Treasury and State and War, were “large and far-flung and ingrained” in their practices; who once mockingly laughed about intransigence at the Pentagon, scoffing “Oh, don’t worry about all those people over there”; and who once said that trying to change anything in the navy was like punching a featherbed (“You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching”); and who by a contest of wills and skillful timing knew how to outwit and outsmart the foot-dragging bureaucracy and recalcitrant officials, why did he not do more earlier? Why, it was asked by critics; why, why?
But now the president acted. On January 22—two days before the Senate was scheduled to debate the Gillette-Rogers resolution—Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9417 formally establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB).
The order stated: “It is the policy of this government to take all measures within its power to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death” as well as to provide “relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.”
A U.S. Army Air Force reconnaissance photo of Auschwitz from November 1944.
Part Three
The Fateful Decision
13
Trapped Between Knowing and Not Knowing
FEBRUARY 1944. EUROPEAN JEWRY had been nearly annihilated.
How to appreciate the magnitude of it all? But for an accident of birth or the grace of a passport, untold others could have perished. The rolls of the death camps could easily have included: Edward G. Robinson; Billy Wilder (among the best filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age, he fled Germany when Hitler came to power); Mae West; Ingrid Bergman; Gertrude Stein; the artists Mark Rothko and Marc Chagall; Leonard Bernstein; the great songwriter Irving Berlin; the founding CEO of Neiman Marcus, Stanley Marcus; the chairman of Sears, Lessing Rosenwald; Jack Benny; Arthur Miller; Martin Buber; Jonas Salk; Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers; Sid Luckman of the Chicago Bears; and the tennis player Helen Jacobs. They could have included, as well, no less than one of the greatest minds who ever lived, Albert Einstein; J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, fathers of the atomic and hydrogen bombs; Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize—winning economist; Eugene Meyer, owner of the Washington Post, and his granddaughter Katharine Graham, its publisher; the Sulzberger-Ochs family, owners of the New York Times; and the publisher Alfred Knopf. Th
Five million Jews were now dead, 2 million of them at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibór. And Auschwitz was working overtime.
AS 1944 OPENED, THE Allies seemed unstoppable. Indeed, by the end of January, after a nine-hundred-day siege, the Red Army had slashed through the Leningrad blockade. In February, it trapped and destroyed ten German divisions in a pocket near Cherkassy and took Estonia, and the next month it reached the Bug River in Poland and the Dniester. Within weeks, it would seize Sebastopol, pause, then recapture Odessa as well as the Crimea. In Italy, the Allies landed at Anzio and were lunging for Monte Cassino. Meanwhile the Americans and British carried out unremitting bombing raids over France and the Netherlands, not to mention raids on Hamburg and Nuremberg and directly over Berlin—the first major daylight bombing of the Nazi capital itself. In late February alone, during a seven-day bombing campaign called “Big Week,” the Eighth Air Force damaged or destroyed 70 percent of Germany’s aircraft production facilities and 290 German fighters, degrading Germany’s industrial backbone in the process. And with the onset of spring, the Strategic Air Forces flew twenty-one thousand sorties in April against bridges, railroads, and other German supply lines. As Sir Arthur Harris, chief of the British Bomber Command, observed, “The Nazis entered this war under the delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody is going to bomb them. . . . They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind!”
And all this, of course, opened opportunities for the WRB.
FUNDED LARGELY BY PRIVATE donations, the War Refugee Board (WRB) was founded frightfully late, and in millions of instances too late. Nonetheless, after the appointment of a new interim director, Morgenthau’s hard-nosed counsel John Pehle, the board got down to business. Provided with both institutional backing, $250,000, and, finally, genuine moral authority—it nominally consisted of the secretaries of the treasury, state, and war, but for all practical purposes it was run by Morgenthau’s department—it quickly injected into the administration’s efforts a spirit that had for so long been woefully lacking.
The WRB rapidly developed multipronged plans for the rescue and relief of Hitler’s victims, wherever they could be found. Speed was one watchword; action was another. Morgenthau himself remarked that the board was made up of “crusaders.” While there remained influential opponents of the WRB—one State Department official snidely commented, “That Jew Morgenthau and his Jewish assistants like DuBois are trying to take over this place” (actually DuBois was Protestant)—converts to its way of thinking were now found even in the least likely places.
As early as February 11, 1944, staff officers gathered around a large oak table in the secretary of war’s conference room to discuss the new WRB and how to explain it to commanders in the field. “We are over there,” one officer protested, “to win the war and not take care of refugees.” John McCloy’s executive assistant, Colonel Harrison Gerhardt, snapped back: “The president doesn’t think so. He thinks relief is a part of winning the war.” So the WRB scoured Europe for opportunities. The board was nothing if not ambitious. That spring, Pehle proposed that the Spanish government open its borders to the pockets of Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied France; notably, here the WRB had the support of the War Department. Meanwhile, the WRB financed a series of covert operations to protect the thousands of Jewish children remaining in France; the agents provided counterfeit birth certificates, work permits, and baptismal certificates—anything and everything that would do the job. And soon, an escape route was organized, over the Pyrenees from France into Spain.
For refugees seeking to make their way to Palestine, the WRB representative pressured Turkish officials to allow two hundred Jews every ten days to use Istanbul as a way station; this measure rescued some seven thousand in all. In the Balkans, under Pehle’s aggressive leadership, the WRB opened a land route for the Jews in Bulgaria and a sea route for those in Romania. The Romanian government, desperate to quit the war, was finally prodded into evacuating forty-eight thousand Jews (out of the original seventy thousand) from Transnistria to the Romanian interior, saving their lives by taking them out of the way of the German troops frantically retreating from the front lines. In Switzerland the WRB bribed border guards to let refugees slip into the country; all told some twenty-seven thousand Jewish refugees made it. In a small but symbolic step, the Irish government was induced to take in five hundred Jewish refugee children; approaches were also made to Portugal and Sweden to accept fleeing Jews.
Not every battle was won. Later, Pehle came up with a sweeping proposal for the president to announce that the United States would now temporarily accept “all oppressed peoples escaping from Hitler.” Would the president accept it? Pehle dictated a memo for Roosevelt, arguing that no rescue program could succeed unless refugees had some prospect of a haven. In reality, he assured the president that very few refugees would come to the United States. But he pleaded with Roosevelt to understand that to induce other countries to fling open their doors to aid the Jews, Washington had to set an example. The solution, Pehle recommended, was for the president to do what he had done so many times before: take unilateral action and sidestep a reluctant Congress, in this case by issuing an executive order allowing refugees into the country on a temporary basis. Morgenthau strongly endorsed this proposal.
But the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, vehemently dissented, and Roosevelt agreed. “I fear that Congress will feel that it is the opening wedge to a violation of our immigration laws,” Stimson said. The president vetoed Pehle’s draft, and instead approved only a far more modest compromise. Two days after Normandy, he offered temporary haven to 982 refugees, principally Jews from southern Italy, a number of whom had survived the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald. In August 1944, they would be housed in a shabby, run-down shelter at Fort Ontario in the town of Oswego, New York, where they would remain through the frightfully cold winter like prison inmates, behind a barbed-wire fence and guarded by the army. Ironically, Roosevelt was proud of this measure, saying to Morgenthau, “I know the Fort very well. It . . . is a very excellent place.” Actually, it was not. Oswego proved to be a meager step at best, and to most observers, including the refugees themselves, it was a dismal failure. But in the face of continuing nativist sentiment in the public and during an election year, it was as far as the president would go.
But an even greater challenge for the WRB, if not for Roosevelt himself, had come in March.
Hungary.
IN EARLY MARCH, HITLER, suffering from a cold, his left leg trembling and the vision in his right eye blurred, called for Joseph Goebbels to come to the Berghof. Now badly losing the war, the Führer was nonetheless adamant about putting an end to the ongoing “treachery” in Hungary. For some time the Hungarians, watching the Nazis’ fortunes wane, had put out feelers both to the western Allies as well as to the Russians. Admiral Miklos Horthy, the seventy-five-year-old Hungarian head of state, had also allowed the almost 1 million Hungarian Jews to exist largely unmolested, and thousands of Jews from Poland, Slovakia, and Romania had already sought refuge in Hungary.
Two weeks later after the meeting with Goebbels, while Hitler was bullying Horthy to sign a joint declaration consenting to the military occupation of Hungary, the German armies were readying for their last invasion of the war.
The next day—March 19, 1944—Adolf Eichmann’s men entered the capital accompanied by throngs of German troops. Hungary was now firmly a Nazi client state.
The Nazis wasted no time. In a matter of days, two thousand Jews were siezed. Within a month, the first deportation train carrying over three thousand Jews, sandwiched together in horrific surroundings inside forty cattle wagons, departed. Their destination was Auschwitz, the centerpiece of the Final Solution.
An astounding number of lives were at stake.
MORGENTHAU AND THE WRB exhorted the president to make a strong statement about Hungary; the staff of the WRB drafted it. But could the president deliver it? Roosevelt was now seriously ill, his lungs filled with fluid and his heart faltering, yet he was also still smarting from Morgenthau’s report on the government’s acquiescence in the fate of European Jewry. Thus, on March 24, just a few days before his fateful visit to Dr. Bruenn at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, the president went to great lengths to articulate the government’s goal. That was to provide assistance not simply to the Jews facing Nazi brutality in Europe, but as Roosevelt’s aide William Hassett explained, the aim had been “enlarged also to include an appeal on behalf of all who suffer under Nazi and Jap torture.” Roosevelt spoke in a raspy voice, but his statement was nevertheless his most compelling to date.
“In one of the blackest crimes of all history,” the president said, his usual sonorous tones sounding out of pitch, “the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour.” He continued: “As a result of the events of the last few days hundreds of thousands of Jews, who while living under persecution have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler’s forces descend more heavily upon these lands.” Knowing that the D-Day invasion was not far off, he added, “That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolized, would be a major tragedy.”