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Review
| Roosevelt and the Holocaust: A Rooseveltian Examines the Politics and Remembers the Times, by Robert L. Beir with Brian Josepher. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2006. 320 pages. $26.95, cloth.
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| The Englishman Enoch Powell once wrote that "all political lives end in failure." Despite contrary claims, Robert Beir aims to ensure that readers comprehend the tarnish on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's legacy. Although generally ranked among America's half dozen greatest presidents, FDR is judged a severely flawed chief executive by a select group of scholars. For Beir, that flaw relates to Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust. Categorizing Roosevelt and the Holocaust is not easy. The initial 70 pages, largely a memoir, are the book's most compelling segment, providing an often riveting narrative about a young American Jew encountering a frequently antisemitic society. Americans should be reminded of this history. The remainder of the book, save for the final chapter, is history. (The last chapter, a useful essay on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rebirth of antisemitism in Europe, seems misplaced.) |
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Beir recounts key events from Hitler's January 1933 appointment as German Chancellor to the Allies' 1944 failure to bomb the Birkenau crematoria. Among other topics, he highlights Avery Brundage's determination to take an American team to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, the gruesome antisemitic excesses associated with the Anschluss of March 1938, the failure of the July 1938 Evian Conference, the outrages of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, the distressing voyage of the St. Louis in May 1939, and the horrors of the Holocaust itself. Beir's purpose, however, is to highlight American indifference. Whether targeting the White House, Congress, the State Department, or the press—especially the New York Times—his judgment feigns balance but is ultimately unequivocal: Roosevelt's United States failed Europe's Jews. |
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The book is not an objective recounting of the past. As Beir admits, he once approached Roosevelt with "a sense of hero worship." When he learned that his hero had warts, the knowledge proved devastating. With heart on shoulder, Beir tracked down whatever information he could find regarding Roosevelt's relationship to both the persecution of Germany's Jews and the Holocaust. In the process, he errs with a number of facts (Beir relies too much on William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for material on Nazi Germany) and weaves a story about the United States in the late 1930s and early '40s that often neglects historical context. |
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In Guarding the Golden Door, Roger Daniels warns that "it is not really useful to view the policies of the 1930s, as too many do, through the prism of the Holocaust. Some of the literature can induce one to believe that Franklin Roosevelt and even Rabbi Stephen S. Wise were somehow responsible for the Holocaust." Historians now generally contend that no one, either inside or outside of Germany, realized in 1933 that the establishment of a Nazi regime would culminate in the extermination of Europe's Jews. When did Auschwitz become inevitable? Certainly, the prewar years witnessed the boycott of April 1933, the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, and the pogrom of November 1938. Yet, these measures hardly suggested genocide. In the late 1930s one may have argued equally for lowering immigration barriers for refugees from Fascist Italy or Franco's Spain. Indeed, thousands of anti-Nazi Germans, both Jews and non-Jews, were threatened by Nazi aggression. Hindsight informs us that only the Jews faced mass extermination. But historians must use care in being informed by hindsight. |
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Gerhard Weinberg argues that historians should confront their "fairly common tendency to write, talk, and teach about the Holocaust and about World War II as separate and only barely related events." Historians of the war too often treat the Holocaust as "a sort of addendum or afterthought," while those grappling with the Holocaust too often "have little interest in and familiarity with the war as a whole." Weinberg also reminds us that the "Western Powers were losing the war on land until the end of 1942, losing the war at sea until the fall of 1943, and were unable to assure victory in the war in the air until February-March 1944." This resulted in a virtual inability to do anything practical to assist Europe's Jews. Indeed, Allied decisions were taken without regard to their implications for the Jews. Whereas that truth is painful, we must remember that Hitler failed in his intended plan of total annihilation. At a minimum, the Final Solution aimed to consume the life of every Jew in Europe. It did not succeed because Hitler was defeated before completing his task. Only defeat brought the trains to a halt. Yes, in humanity's greatest crime, the Third Reich murdered approximately 5.9 million Jews out of a European population of over nine million. Beir should be reminded that Hitler failed to liquidate them all because Roosevelt and Churchill were committed to destroying his regime. |
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| Keene State University |
Paul Vincent |
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