While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, by Arthur D. Morse, was the first book written about America's response to the Holocaust. In the aftermath of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed near-iconic status in the public mind. It was virtually unthinkable to criticize the president...
Read more →
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, large numbers of Jews sought to flee Nazi Germany. A ship called the St. Louis, carrying 930 German Jewish refugees, set sail from Hamburg in May 1939. The passengers held visas to enter Cuba. But Cuban public opinion was turning sharply against immigration, and when...
Read more →
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, a period coinciding with the Nazi persecution of European Jewry. Roosevelt's response to the plight of the Jews was influenced by political and diplomatic considerations, as well as his personal...
Read more →
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) tried on several occasions, without success, to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to soften his positions regarding Jewish refugees. Mrs. Roosevelt, like many members of her extended family, is known to have made antisemitic remarks as a young adult....
Read more →
In the autumn of 1943, members of Congress introduced a Bergson Group-authored resolution urging creation of a government agency to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. The battle over the resolution played a major role in bringing about the establishment of the War Refugee Board. Stymied by the Roosevelt...
Read more →
Joseph Proskauer (1877-1971), who served as president of the American Jewish Committee during the 1940s, staunchly opposed any Jewish criticism of the Roosevelt administration's refugee policy. Raised in an assimilated German Jewish family in Alabama, Proskauer became a successful attorney and served...
Read more →
Former Roosevelt administration official Henry F. Pringle (1897-1958) was active in the Bergson Group's campaigns challenging U.S. policy on Jewish refugees. A newspaper reporter who later become a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Pringle won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931...
Read more →
Frances C. Perkins (1880-1965), the first woman to serve in an American president's cabinet, was one of the few cabinet members who sought to promote the rescue of Jews from Nazi Germany. Perkins, who had served as Commissioner of Labor in New York state when Franklin D. Roosevelt was governor, was appointed...
Read more →
Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Roosevelt administration began planning for the arrest and postwar prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Even at that early stage, the Allies knew enough about Nazi atrocities against Jews and others to know that if and when they won the war, they would...
Read more →
On November 8, 1942, American and British forces, under the command of U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, invaded Nazi-occupied Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It took the Allies just eight days to defeat the Germans and their Vichy (pro-Nazi) French partners in the region. For the 330,000 Jews...
Read more →
David K. Niles (1892-1952), the son of Polish Jewish immigrants (their family name was Neyhaus), came to Washington as the personal assistant of White House aide Harry Hopkins. In 1942, Niles was appointed to serve as President Franklin Roosevelt's liaison to labor groups and ethnic minorities. Niles...
Read more →
The Nation, a leading U.S. political affairs weekly, spoke out early and vociferously for government action to rescue Europe's Jews. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, the journal called for admission to the U.S. of at least 15,000 German Jewish refugee children. The Roosevelt administration’s...
Read more →
U.S. Senator James E. Murray (1876-1961), Democrat of Montana, strongly supported the Bergson Group's campaign for U.S. action to rescue European Jewry. Murray was an unlikely ally of the Jews. He was elected to the senate on a platform pledging "one hundred per-cent support" for President Franklin...
Read more →
Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (1891-1967), the only Jewish member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet and FDR's closest Jewish friend, enjoyed regular access to the president and belatedly used it to advance the cause of rescue. Morgenthau was the son of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who had served as America's...
Read more →
During World War II, the Roosevelt administration established a government commission, nicknamed the Monuments Men, to rescue historic paintings and monuments in war zones. Refugee advocates urged the administration to take a similar interest in rescuing Jews from the Nazis. In May 1943, shortly...
Read more →
James G. McDonald (1886-1964), scholar, journalist, and diplomat, served as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany from 1933 to 1935, was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Evian refugee conference in July 1938, and chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Political...
Read more →
As Assistant Secretary of State from 1940 to 1944, Samuel Breckinridge Long (1881-1958) was the senior official responsible for implementing the Roosevelt administration's policies regarding European Jewry during the Holocaust years. The son of wealthy Kentucky horse breeders, Long became friendly...
Read more →
As Franklin D. Roosevelt's lieutenant governor of New York from 1928 to 1932, Herbert H. Lehman (1878-1963) enjoyed some access to FDR as president but seldom used it. In the early 1930s, Lehman occasionally sent the president information about the plight of Germany's Jews. In 1935, he wrote to the president...
Read more →
By the time he was 26, Jan Karski had been imprisoned by the Soviets, tortured by the Gestapo, and nearly drowned while escaping from a hospital in German-occupied Slovakia. Had he chosen then to end his service in the World War II-era Polish underground, few would have challenged his decision. Instead,...
Read more →
As secretary of the interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harold L. Ickes (1874-1952) repeatedly found himself at odds with the president over U.S. policy toward Europe's Jews. A draft of a speech by Ickes condemning the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany was censored by the president...
Read more →
As secretary of state under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cordell Hull (1871-1955) faithfully implemented the Roosevelt administration's policy of refraining from any substantial action to aid Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. Hull was a first-term Senator from Tennessee at the time of his appointment...
Read more →
Laura Delano Houghteling, first cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and wife of the United States Commissioner of Immigration, strongly opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees to the United States. Houghteling's sentiments were immortalized by State Department official Pierrepont Moffat....
Read more →
In late 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a Beirut-born U.S. army officer, Lt. Col. Harold Hoskins, to the Middle East to canvass Arab opinion. Hoskins's final report to the president, the following spring, predicted that "world-wide [Zionist] propaganda" and "Arab fear of American support for political...
Read more →
Rabbi Dr. Arthur Hertzberg (1921-2006), a prominent Jewish leader and civil rights activist who took part in the 1963 March on Washington with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also participated in the 1943 rabbis' march to the White House. Writing about that experience, in the introduction to an online...
Read more →
New York Post columnist Samuel Grafton (1907-1997) was a strong proponent of U.S. government action to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. In the spring of 1944, Grafton authored a series of columns advocating what he called "free ports" for Jewish refugees. "A 'free port' is a small bit of land, a kind...
Read more →
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) was close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt but was reluctant to raise matters of Jewish concern with the president. Born in Vienna and raised in New York City, Frankfurter gained renown as a member of the Harvard University law school faculty...
Read more →
The plight of Austria's Jews in the aftermath of the Anschluss generated pressure from some Members of Congress and journalists for U.S. intervention. State Department officials decided to "get out in front and attempt to guide" the pressure before it got out of hand. On March 24,1938, President Franklin...
Read more →
William E. Dodd (1869-1940), a University of Chicago historian, was chosen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's as ambassador to Germany in June 1933, four months after Adolf Hitler rose to power. The president instructed Dodd that while he could "unofficially" take issue with Nazi Germany's antisemitism,...
Read more →
Samuel Dickstein (1885-1954), a Democratic congressman from New York, challenged the Roosevelt administration's failure to aid European Jewry. Dickstein served eleven consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, from 1923 through 1945, and chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization...
Read more →
Thomas L. J. D'Alesandro (1903-1987), a member of Congress in the 1940s, supported the Bergson Group's campaigns for rescue of refugees and Jewish statehood. D'Alesandro, a Democrat, was a member of the House of Representatives from 1939 to 1947, and then mayor of Baltimore from 1947 to 1959. Beginning...
Read more →
Oscar S. Cox (1905-1966), an official in the Roosevelt administration, helped Treasury Department staffers in their behind the scenes efforts to promote the rescue of Jewish refugees. From 1941 to 1943, Cox served as general counsel of the Lend-Lease Administration and the Foreign Economic Administration....
Read more →
Charles A. Buckley (1890-1967), a Democratic congressman from New York, sought to open Alaska to Jewish refugees from the Nazis. First elected in 1934, Buckley represented his Bronx district on Capitol Hill for thirty years. In November 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom, Rep. Buckley wrote...
Read more →
Supreme Court Justice and American Zionist leader Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) tried but failed to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to take a greater interest in the plight of German Jews in the 1930s. Brandeis recognized early on the grave danger that the Nazis posed to the future of German...
Read more →
Dr. Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950) was a key adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on population settlement issues and strongly influenced the president's view of the Jewish refugee problem. He was widely known as "Roosevelt's geographer." As chief territorial adviser to President Woodrow Wilson...
Read more →
Beginning in the late spring of 1944, representatives of Jewish organizations in the United States, Europe, and British Mandatory Palestine began urging Allied officials to take military action to interrupt the mass murder of Jews in Auschwitz. About thirty different Jewish officials were involved,...
Read more →
Sol Bloom (1870-1949), a congressman from New York, staunchly supported the Roosevelt administration's policies on refugees and Palestine and undermined some Jewish groups' initiatives to promote rescue action. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Bloom found early professional success as a vaudeville...
Read more →
A rising tide of calls in the British parliament, media, and churches for Allied assistance to Jewish refugees in early 1943 prodded the British Foreign Office and the State Department to plan an Anglo-American conference on the refugee problem. They initially chose Ottawa as the site for the event,...
Read more →
During World War II, future U.S. senator and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern flew bombing missions near Auschwitz. McGovern (1922-2012), a pilot of a B-24 “Liberator” plane in the 455th Bomb Group, was stationed at Cerignola, an Allied air base in the Italian province of Foggia....
Read more →
Cyrus Vance (1917-2002) served as secretary of state from 1977 to 1980, in the administration of Jimmy Carter. While visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust center on February 16, 1977, Vance took note of a display that included a letter from Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy rejecting an appeal to bomb...
Read more →