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Reviews
| Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, by Robert N. Rosen. New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2006. 688 pages. $32.00.
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| In this book's Forward, Gerhard Weinberg observes that no reader "is required to agree with all the conclusions set forth here." But he then contends that those who have managed to "divorce the events" of the 1930s and 40s "from the reality of the time will need to reexamine their" views in light of the evidence presented by Robert Rosen (p. xvi). Scholars resolved to view Roosevelt as a closet antisemite prepared to abandon Europe's Jews to their genocidal fate—it is alleged that he callously turned away the passengers on the St. Louis and then vetoed proposals to bomb Auschwitz—will find Rosen's arguments provocative. Those arguments are founded, however, on a solid analysis of historical evidence and argued with a lawyer's precision. They are also in desperate need of a hearing. |
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Rosen recounts in his preface a visit he made in 2001 to the Holocaust Memorial near Boston's Quincy Market. At the site, he found the following engraved in stone: "By late 1942, the United States and its Allies were aware of the death camps but did nothing to destroy them" (pp. xxi-xxii). The words angered him and motivated the research for this study. He chose to address six issues: United States immigration laws, the St. Louis incident, failure to denounce the Holocaust, the Bermuda Conference, the War Refugee Board, and the decision against bombing Auschwitz. Because a far different version of these topics is widely accepted, Rosen's conclusions will occasionally startle. He underscores, for example, that in June 1939 Roosevelt "did not ignore the passengers on the SS St. Louis, an episode much trumpeted against him." Indeed, his Jewish friends, including Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, "saved all the passengers on the St. Louis" (p. xxiv). Working with Joint Distribution Chairman Paul Baerwald, the State Department ensured that none of the refugees would return to Germany. Of the ship's 936 passengers, 29 disembarked in Havana while the remaining 907 were divided between England, France, Belgium, and Holland. None returned to Hamburg. Yes, 254 would later die in the Holocaust. But who foresaw that outcome in June 1939, roughly three months before Hitler's invasion of Poland sparked World War II? |
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Rosen's differences with those who charge Roosevelt of "doing nothing" while Hitler murdered millions are clearest in his consideration of World War II. Failure to recognize the momentous quality of a war that could have been lost but for the combined efforts of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States should be untenable for any serious historian of the Holocaust. The more comprehensive one's knowledge of the facts and their complex connections, the more difficult it is to conceive alternatives to Roosevelt's actions. Some rescue protagonists presuppose, for example, that if given a lucrative enough offer, the Nazis would have stopped the killing and allowed the Jews to emigrate. This notion underscores how misinformed scholars can be about the true nature of the Third Reich. The linkage between the war and the Final Solution was as clear to Hitler as was the linkage between the war and expanded "living space" (Lebensraum). He was as likely to surrender the Jews as he was to release Poland. Unless we embrace the inextricable link between the Holocaust and the war, we will never properly discern either Hitler's underlying Weltanschauung or the virtual impossibility of wholesale rescue efforts. |
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In his extended essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin recalls a line from the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Rosen is a fox struggling with hedgehogs. So convinced are his antagonists of Roosevelt's moral culpability in failing to rescue the Jews—indeed, it is the single organizing principle lending coherence to much of what they say and believe—that they are unable to comprehend that man's deep hatred of the Nazis. Sadly, few will likely reexamine their positions on the basis of Rosen's evidence. |
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Rosen maintains that it "is inaccurate at best and mendacious at worst to portray Franklin Roosevelt, Jewish Americans, and Americans generally as mere 'witnesses' and 'bystanders' to a war they won at great cost" (p. 495). Hitler's intent was to murder every Jew in Europe—perhaps, every Jew on the planet. Sustaining staggering losses, the Allies defeated Hitler before he accomplished that task. In humanity's greatest crime, the Third Reich dispatched approximately 5.9 million Jews out of a European population of over nine million. It failed to liquidate them all, Rosen reminds us, because Roosevelt insisted upon unconditional surrender and Hitler's destruction. |
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| Keene State College, NH |
C. Paul Vincent |
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