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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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[b]3. THE WORST IS CONFIRMED[/b]
News of the existence of a plan for the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews reached the United States in August 1942. Sent from Switzerland, the shocking revelation circumvented State Department roadblocks and came into the hands of American Jewish leaders. They found it credible. State Department officials, however, were skeptical. They asked the Jews not to publicize the disclosure until the government had time to confirm it. Not until late November was the news, along with corroborating evidence, released to the press.
During the first days of August, as desperate Jews were being forced onto deportation trains in France, in Warsaw, and elsewhere, a message from a prominent German industrialist reached Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. This industrialist, whose position in the German war economy gave him access to confidential Nazi sources, had arrived in Switzerland from Berlin at the end of July. He carried news of a Nazi plan to kill all the Jews of Europe. The German revealed the information to a Jewish friend who brought it to the attention of a Swiss Jewish leader, Dr. Benjamin Sagalowitz. Sagalowitz. who conveyed the report to Riegner, also checked into the reliability of the industrialist and found him completely trustworthy. [1]
Riegner, thirty years old and trained for a career in international law, was himself a refugee from Germany. On Saturday morning, August 8, he took the information to the American consulate in Geneva. There ne talked with Vice-Consul Howard Elting, Jr., whose summary of the discussion noted that Riegner had come to him "in great agitation" with a report from an apparently thoroughly reliable source
When Elting mentioned that the report' seemed fantastic, Riegner replied that it had looked that way to him at first, but it did mesh exactly with the recent mass deportations from France, Holland, and other countries. He handed Elting a summary of the message and asked that it be telegraphed to Washington and the other Allied governments and to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. Elting immediately sent Riegner's information to the American legation in Bern, along with his endorsement of Riegner as "a serious and balanced individual," and his recommendation that the report be dispatched to the State Department. [3]
The American legation telegraphed Riegner's message to Washington on August 11, adding that it had no information to confirm the report, which it characterized as having the "earmarks of war rumor inspired by fear." The recipients, middle-level officials in the State Department's Division of European Affairs, dismissed Riegner's disclosures as totally unbelievable. They were convinced that Jews were being deported for labor purposes. The only disagreement within the State Department was on the question of whether the message should be delivered to Rabbi Wise. [4]
Paul T. Culbertson, who could see no justification for the Bern legation "to have put this thing in a telegram," nonetheless spoke for releasing it to Wise on the grounds of caution:
Elbridge Durbrow, another official in the Division of European Affairs, thought it inadvisable to transmit the dispatch to Wise, citing as reasons "the Legation's comments, the fantastic nature of the allegation, and the impossibility of our being of any assistance if such action were taken." Durbrow's view prevailed. [5]
Durbrow also wanted to instruct the Bern legation to refuse to send any more such messages "for possible transmission to third parties unless, after thorough investigation, there is reason to believe that such a fantastic report has in the opinion of the Legation some foundation or unless the report involves definite American interests." This suggestion, however, was not implemented. and the information channels from Switzerland remained open. But the idea had been planted. Six months later, State Department officials would attempt to cut off the flow of extermination news from Switzerland. [6]
To the State Department's experts on European affairs, the German industrialist's disclosure was only another war rumor, a "fantastic" one at that. They saw it in isolation from numerous other reports that had reached the department concerning the Jewish calamity. Riegner, relating the new information to earlier accounts, recognized it as the key. It brought into focus the previously hazy picture of what was befalling the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The information would have the same impact on American Jewish leaders, because it revealed an overall pattern that explained the terrible events reported by the Polish Jewish Labor Bund, the other accounts of large-scale killings, and the ongoing mass deportations "to the East."
Despite the Division of European Affairs, Riegner's message reached Wise, but not until late August. Riegner had given the British consulate in Geneva a summary identical to the one he delivered to Elting. He asked that it be telegraphed to the Foreign Office in London and passed on to Samuel Sydney Silverman, a member of Parliament and chairman of the British section of the World Jewish Congress. Riegner had prudently added one line to the version he took to the British: "Please inform and consult New York." [7]
Riegner's message reached London on August 10. The Foreign Office hesitated for a week, then delivered it to Silverman, but advised him that "we have no information bearing on or confirming this story." Silverman cabled the report to the United States on August 28. Addressed directly to Wise, Silverman's telegram apparently did not attract the attention of the Division of European Affairs, for the War and State departments both cleared it, and it went on to Wise. [8]
Unaware that the State Department already had the Riegner report, Wise sent Silverman's cable to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on September 2. In his covering letter, Wise vouched for Riegner as "a scholar of entire reliability" and "not an alarmist but a conservative and equable person." He asked Welles to have the American minister in Bern confer with Riegner to find out what added substantiation he might provide. Wise also suggested that the information be brought to President Roosevelt's attention. [9]
Shortly after receiving the message, Welles phoned Wise. The undersecretary seems to have been unwilling to take Riegner's report to Roosevelt, for the next day Wise wrote Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter suggesting that he inform the President. Wise also told Frankfurter that Welles had tried to be reassuring: "He seems to think that the real purpose of the Nazi government is to use Jews in connection with war work both in Nazi Germany and in Nazi Poland and Russia." Welles had also asked Wise not to release the Riegner information until the State Department had a chance to confirm it. [10]
Meanwhile, the Division of European Affairs suppressed another telegram to Wise, this one from the World Jewish Congress in London. It called for urgent steps in response to Riegner's report: a press conference, a public declaration by political and religious leaders of the democratic nations, and appeals for action to the Vatican and the United Nations. [11]
In the midst of the developments connected with Riegner's message, another bombshell exploded in the faces of the Jewish leaders. On September 3, Jacob Rosenheim of New York, president of the Agudath Israel World Organization, received a telegram from Isaac Sternbuch, the Orthodox group's representative in Switzerland:
Rosenheim did try to "cause an American reaction," although he was "physically broken down from this harrowing cable." That same day, he telegraphed Sternbuch's message to Franklin Roosevelt. Much of the following day, Rosenheim and other Orthodox Jewish leaders conferred in New York with James G. McDonald, chairman of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. McDonald, who was on good terms with Eleanor Roosevelt, sent a copy of Sternbuch's telegram to her, along with a message saying that he did not know what could be done, but felt she should. be informed. No reaction from Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt is recorded. [13]
Rosenheim also notified Wise and other Jewish leaders. These men met to exchange views. Wise gave the others the Riegner information, but expressed some hesitation about the credibility of Sternbuch's report, even though he did see it as circumstantial confirmation of Riegner's disclosure. The group decided to send a delegation to the State Department to ask that American intelligence check into what had happened at Warsaw. Welles received the Jewish leaders on September 10 and agreed to have an investigation made. Within a few weeks, most of Sternbuch's disclosures were authenticated by further reports from Poland. [i] [14]
A sidelight on Sternbuch's message is that it reached Rosenheim through two independent telegraphic channels. The cablegram that came on September 3 was transmitted through the coded facilities of the Polish government-in-exile. The same dispatch arrived soon afterward through a conventional route, from the American legation in Bern to the State Department and then to Rosenheim. Use of the Polish channel for such communications was illegal. But Polish diplomats in New York and Bern relayed messages to and from Europe for Agudath Israel and related Orthodox rescue committees. Although this process sometimes involved delays, it avoided censorship, especially that of the very stringent American censor. Sternbuch, the Orthodox representative in Switzerland, had underground communication lines into much of Axis Europe. From mid-1942 until the end of the war, use of the Polish facilities between Bern and New York enabled him to transmit messages secretly between sources in Nazi-controlled Europe and Jew ish leaders in the United States. [16]
In accord with Welles's request, Wise kept the Riegner information out of the press. During September and October, though, he revealed both the Riegner and the Sternbuch disclosures to several individuals -- to government and Jewish leaders, as part of a desperate behind-the-scenes effort to develop some sort of action to help the doomed Jews, and also to a few close friends to ease his own psychological burden. Among the latter was the prominent Protestant clergyman John Haynes Holmes, to whom Wise confided, "I am almost demented over my people's grief." [17]
Wise's attempts to devise some means for countering the extermination plan began with his steps in early September to alert Washington (his approach to Welles and his appeal to Frankfurter to inform Roosevelt). After Rosenheim showed him Sternbuch's report, Wise took the lead in forming a temporary committee of Jewish leaders to seek ways to help the European Jews. Shortly afterward, he met in New York with the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, a small, quasi-governmental organization formed in 1938 to counsel Roosevelt on refugee matters. He urged Myron C. Taylor, the President's personal representative to the Vatican, to appeal to the Pope to intervene. And during September and October he journeyed to Washington several times. [18]
On one such trip, he showed the terrible telegrams to Vice-President Henry Wallace and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson in an effort to obtain support for allowing food shipments to Jews in Poland. In October, he carried the same news to a very sympathetic Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, and asked him to attempt to convince the President to open the Virgin Islands as a temporary haven of safety for perhaps 2,000 refugee Jews. [19]
Throughout those weeks, Wise was pessimistic about achieving any results. In Washington, he found many officials unable to perceive the deportations from Warsaw and from western Europe as anything other than part of a forced-labor program. He felt uncertain whether Pius XII could wield any real authority and doubted that he would even try. During this highly depressing time, Wise believed that even Roosevelt could not intervene effectively. [20]
As Wise had feared, his overtures to prominent officials brought meager results; only a few reacted at all. Ickes, whose Interior Depart ment administered the Virgin Islands, did write to the President asking whether he would be willing to consider using the islands as a small-scale refuge. Roosevelt turned this request down. The State Department offered to approve a very limited program for sending individual food parcels, but not bulk shipments, from Portugal to people in German-occupied countries, including Jews in the Polish ghettos. Under this arrangement, $12,000 worth of food bought in Portugal could go to Polish Jews each month, an amount privately described by one high State Department official as "infinitesimal." Ironically, Dean Acheson, the official Wise bad thought most approachable on the issue, was the only one in the State Department who opposed this feeble gesture. [21]
Meanwhile, as the autumn of 1942 unfolded, more signs of a campaign of planned extermination appeared. In late September, the New York Yiddish-language Jewish Morning Journal published information derived from a Swedish businessman who had traveled through Poland, stopping at Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and Lvov. He had learned that half the Jews in those ghettos had been killed. Relying on an entirely different source, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in early October that "in Lodz thousands of Jewish families are taken away from the ghetto systematically and nobody ever hears from them again. They are poisoned by gas." [22]
Before October ended, observations from two widely dissimilar quarters indicated that people who followed European developments very closely were about to piece together the puzzle of genocide. National Jewish Monthly, the B'nai B'rith magazine, asked in its October issue why the Nazis were clearing western Europe of Jews and moving them to Poland. This step, maintained the editors, "doesn't make sense, even from the Nazi point of view," because Hitler's war industry badly needs labor in Germany. Even granting that masses of Jews in Poland might be moving into occupied Russia to carry out German construction projects, the writers could not break loose from the enigma: "but they still need workers in Germany." Furthermore, they pointed out, Soviet guerrilla forces report no Jews in all of Nazi-controlled White Russia, including Minsk and Vitebsk, formerly large centers of Jewish population. Then where are they? Not in Germany, because news dispatches from there declare that Germany is "Jew-free," except for some tech nical workers. Are they all in the Polish ghettos? Apparently not, for another report points out that 300,000 Jews have disappeared without a trace from the Warsaw ghetto. This analysis forced the National Jewish Monthly to the very edge of the appalling reality: "it is feared that the Nazis may be resorting to wholesale slaughter, preferring to kill all Jews rather than use their labor." [23]
In England, the archbishop of Canterbury, unconvinced by the "forced labor" explanation for the mass deportations from France, was quoted in the press as being almost certain that planned annihilation was under way. Speaking in late October to a London mass meeting to protest Nazi persecution of the Jews, William Temple declared that it is "hard to resist the conclusion that there is a settled purpose to exterminate the Jewish people if it can be done." [24]
Only days later, another voice declared with no hesitation whatever that Europe's Jews were being systematically wiped out. The editors of Jewish Frontier, whose earlier uncertainty had led them to place the gravediggers' account of the Chelmno gassings at the back of their September issue, had been apprised of Riegner's disclosures. Convinced that planned annihilation of the Jews was indeed in progress, they omitted their October issue to put full effort into collecting all the trustworthy documentation they could find for a special edition on the mass murder of the Jews. Printed with black borders, the Jewish Frontier for November 1942 declared:
Realizing that people would find the information hard to accept, the editors had worked cautiously. Their estimate of one million Jews killed "through massacre and deliberate starvation" represented a conservative reading of reports then available. And they carefully avoided the use of "material whose authenticity was in any way doubtful." Even so, the documentation that they printed definitely pointed to extermination. Viewed against that evidence, the Jewish Frontier maintained, "the deportation of Jews from France and Poland to unknown destinations allows of only the most sinister explanation." [26]
The Jewish Frontier's main editorial closed with a call to the Allied governments "to do whatever may be done to prevent the fulfillment of this horror." The vagueness of the appeal testified to the state of mind that prevailed among American Jewish leaders in the last part of 1942. Stunned by the dimensions of the disaster now revealed to them, they seemed unable for a time to devise concrete proposals for action. [27]
Rabbi Wise, who had been wrestling since late August with the problem of developing practical action, continued to work under the additional handicap of having to withhold his information from the public. Although Sumner Welles had agreed on September 10 to initiate attempts to confirm the Riegner and the Sternbuch disclosures, the State Department did not notify Wise of its progress until late November.
Neither Welles nor others in the State Department pursued the inquiry with much energy. On September 23, a request for information that might authenticate the reports was sent on its way to the Vatican. An unsigned, informal response from the Holy See arrived in Washington three weeks afterward. The Vatican stated that it, too, had reports of "severe measures" taken against the Jews, but that verification had not been possible. (Near the end of November, the Vatican did send Washington a message it had from Warsaw with explicit verification of much of the worst that previously had been asserted, including killing in specially built gas chambers.) [28]
By October 5, a day when Wise saw Welles and pointed out that reports of mass murder in eastern Europe were continuing to reach American Jewish leaders, the only corroborative information received at the State Department was a brief message that Jews in Warsaw and other ghettos in Poland had been "shipped east" in lots of five to ten thousand. Their whereabouts and fate were unknown. This news had been relayed to Washington by Leland Harrison, the American minister to Switzerland, who had obtained it from the Polish exile government's mission in Switzerland. [29]
Right after this discussion with Wise, Welles wired Harrison asking him to make contact with Riegner and telegraph back whatever additional information he could supply. Harrison delayed for more than two weeks, then relayed his findings in two slow-moving letters. [30]
Before Harrison's letters arrived in the United States, other evidence of extermination reached the State Department. Late in September, Riegner, on his own initiative, conferred with Paul C. Squire, the American consul at Geneva. He handed Squire photostats of two letters that had recently reached him. They offered persuasive evidence that the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto were being deported and exterminated in vast numbers. The letters were written in German and enclosed in envelopes bearing the marks of the German censor. They had been sent to Switzerland from a Jew in Warsaw on September 4 and 12. Innocuous on the surface and thus able to pass German censorship, the letters were actually written in a semicode. A literal translation of part of the September 4 letter follows. The meanings of the coded words, as interpreted to Squire, are in brackets.
Wholesale extermination was reiterated in the letter of September 12, which began, "I too was in sorrow, for I am now so lonely. Uncle Achenu has died." [31]
Squire forwarded photostats of the Warsaw letters to Washington on September 28. Sent via the diplomatic airmail pouch, the material reached the State Department only on October 23. It was not brought to Welles's attention until much of November had passed. [32]
By that time, Welles had received Harrison's two letters from Bern. When supplemented by a follow-up telegram that Harrison sent on November 23, they revealed that a prominent non-Jewish Swiss had disclosed to Squire, "privately and not for publication," that he, too, had learned, through two separate high government contacts in Berlin, that an order had been issued in Hitler's headquarters for the physical elimination of the Jews. The Swiss informant was Dr. Carl Burckhardt, a high official of the International Red Cross and an unimpeachable source. [33]
The materials from Squire and Harrison, weighed with other reports sent that autumn from Europe to American Jewish leaders, convinced Welles. On Tuesday, November 24, he telegraphed Wise to come at once to the State Department. Late that day, Wise arrived at Welles's office. [34]
As Welles handed the rabbi several documents sent from the American legation in Switzerland, he conveyed the terrible news: "I regret to tell you, Dr. Wise, that these confirm and justify your deepest fears." Welles added, "There is no exaggeration. These documents are evidently correct." As for releasing the information to the news media, Welles stated, "For reasons you will understand, I cannot give these to the press, but there is no reason why you should not. It might even help if you did." [ii] [35]
That same evening, while still in Washington, Wise called a press conference. He told reporters that through sources confirmed by the State Department he had learned that two million Jews had been killed in an "extermination campaign" aimed at wiping out all the Jews in Nazi Europe. He disclosed that only about 100,000 of the 500,000 Jews formerly in Warsaw were still there and that the Nazis were moving Jews from all over Europe to Poland for mass killing. [37]
Wise returned to New York the same night. The following day, he met with a committee of Jewish leaders. By then, he had independent confirmation of Welles's news from Myron C. Taylor, Roosevelt's special representative to the Vatican. That afternoon, Wise held another press conference, at which he spoke as a representative for most of the leading American Jewish organizations. He announced that the Jewish groups were convinced, on the basis of the State Department documentation, that Hitler had ordered the annihilation of all Jews in areas under Nazi control. The purpose in publicizing the extermination information, he stated, was "to win the support of a Christian world so that its leaders may intervene and protest the horrible treatment of Jews in Hitler Europe." [38]
Just as Wise was revealing the annihilation plan to the world, additional evidence of genocide was appearing in Jerusalem and London. On November 23, the Jewish press in Palestine published black-bordered reports of systematic extermination brought from Poland by Jews who had recently been exchanged for German citizens from British-controlled territories. The following day, information released in Jerusalem included an account of concrete gas-chamber buildings in eastern Europe and a report that trains were carrying Jewish adults and children "to great crematoriums at Oswiecim, near Cracow." (Although mass murder of Jews at Oswiecim, the Polish name for Auschwitz, had been under way since mid-1942, this was one of the first indications of it to reach the outside world.) [39]
In London, dire reports were again coming to the Polish government- in-exile from underground sources in Poland. On the same day that Wise received the documents from Welles, the London Polish government asserted that Heinrich Himmler had ordered half of the three million Jews of Poland destroyed by the end of 1942 as the first step in their complete annihilation. The Polish statement included graphic descriptions of Jews packed into freight cars and deported to "special camps" at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Many died of suffocation or lack of water en route; the rest were murdered at the camps. "Under the guise of resettlement in the east," advised the Polish authorities, "the mass murder of the Jewish population is taking place." [40]
The very next day, Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Jewish member of the Polish government, informed the press that one million Polish Jews had perished since the war began. They had been killed by shooting, gassing, and the intentional creation of ghetto conditions characterized by starvation, crowding, and disease. Two days later, in New York, Henryk Strasburger, the Polish minister of finance, announced that "at least a million Polish Jews have been killed." At about the same time, a Catholic underground organization reported from Poland that "the total of Jews murdered already exceeds one million." [41]
German documents seized after the war reveal that almost 1.5 million Polish Jews had been deported to killing centers by December 31, 1942. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews had perished either through starvation and ghetto conditions or at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen in what had been pre-war eastern Poland. It turns out that the statistics dispatched by Polish underground sources were cautiously compiled indeed. It is also apparent that Wise's estimate of two million Jewish dead in all of Europe was long out of date by November 1942. [42]
The emerging picture of the Jewish catastrophe was not well defined in its particulars. It could not be. Reports that filtered out were at times confusing and contradictory. Only after the war did a definite understanding of the six killing centers and their operations crystallize. Even Auschwitz was not widely recognized as the pivotal installation that it was until 1944. But after November 24, 1942, it was evident that the reports were basically correct. A hideous and unprecedented mass murder program was in progress. Hitler had been serious when he ad. dressed the German nation from the Berlin Sports Palace in September 1942. Referring to a speech delivered in 1939, he asserted that he had then warned that
Now, in 1942, he threatened:
The events traced so far throw light on two questions which have been raised frequently since World War II; one concerns Gerhart Riegner's August report, and the other Stephen Wise's handling of it. The first asks why Riegner's information from the German industrialist proved to be the key to decisive recognition that the Jews were undergoing systematic extermination. Why not one of the earlier revelations?
One authority has maintained that the Jewish Labor Bund document that reached England from Poland near the start of June 1942 "should have been far more effective (than Riegner's report) in awakening both the Jewish and the non-Jewish worlds to what was going on." After all, it not only listed specific killing actions and provided an estimate of 700,000 Polish Jews dead but also pointed out that the Germans had determined to "annihilate all the Jews in Europe." In fact, the Bund report and the publicity it received were of pivotal importance in the emergence of a coherent view of what was happening to the Jews in Nazi Europe. And it was effective in starting to break down the barriers of disbelief that tended to wall extermination information out of people's minds. It was also instrumental in setting off mass protest demonstrations in the United States. [44]
As it worked out, the Bund report, the other accounts of Jewish slaughter, the mass meetings, and the deportation news from France all combined to form a milieu that made Riegner's information credible -- "fantastic" though it may have seemed to State Department functionaries. The disclosure that an authoritative person had knowledge of a specific plan of annihilation made a vital difference. It not only fit into the previous knowledge but crystallized it all into a meaningful pattern. The deportations from the West, the accounts of killing sites in the East, the mass slaughter of Polish Jews came into focus around a Hitler order. It was equally significant that the source of the report was Berlin. Events outside Berlin could be used to infer a campaign of total extermination, but evidence that an actual plan existed in the decision center was compelling. Moreover, the fact that Riegner's report was finally released through the American State Department endowed it with an important stamp of authenticity.
The other question revolves around Wise's acquiescence in Welles's request not to release the Riegner information until the State Department had confirmed it. Wise has been criticized on the ground that his silence cost three irretrievable months desperately needed to build pressure on Washington. True, time was already short by September 1942 and the Roosevelt administration needed strong prodding before it would act. But three points need to be considered before this burden is placed on Wise. [45]
For one thing, there was strategic advantage in awaiting State Department confirmation. The Riegner report might have been discounted if based only on Jewish authorities. Government verification made it far more credible. (The State Department, of course, could have moved much more expeditiously to confirm the information.)
More important, Wise had no viable choice in the matter. The State Department was responsible for American rescue policy. Had Wise contravened Welles's request, he would have alienated the department of government whose cooperation was essential in the effort to help the European Jews.
And finally, if Wise is to be criticized in this instance, numerous others should be also. The British section of the World Jewish Congress had the Riegner report, as well as the British Foreign Office's permission to publicize it. Moreover, it might have used the House of Commons as a forum, since its chairman, Samuel Silverman, was a Labour MP. In addition, Wise showed Riegner's information to many Americans, including the temporary committee of Jewish leaders that formed in New York in early September and the distinguished members of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, as well as Felix Frankfurter, Myron C. Taylor, Dean Acheson, Henry Wallace, and Harold Ickes. Anyone of more than twenty prominent Americans could have called a press conference and broken the news. [46]
***
November 1942 was a pivotal month in World War II. During its opening week, the British broke Rommel's line at El Alamein and began the chase westward, reaching Benghazi two weeks later. On the eighth, Eisenhower landed forces in French North Africa; by the end of the month, they had driven nearly to Tunis. And in mid-November the great Russian counteroffensive at Stalingrad began to encircle and isolate an army of a quarter-million Germans. The war was still far from over, but the Germans were dearly in serious trouble.
November 1942 was also crucial in the American response to the Holocaust. The month dosed with Rabbi Wise's shattering announcement of confirmed reports that the Nazis were carrying out a plan to annihilate all Jews under their control. November had opened with another development, far less momentous, but nonetheless potentially harmful to prospects for helping European Jewry. That was the sizable gain registered by conservatives in the American congressional elections of 1942.
Although liberal congressmen, both Democratic and Republican, had generally sympathized with the persecuted Jews throughout the Hitler years, few had been willing to press for increased immigration or other measures to aid them. But liberals had not attempted to block the few small steps that the President had taken. Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, on the other hand, had consistently resisted Roosevelt's moves to help Jewish refugees. [47]
Illustrative of the power of congressional conservatives to thwart proposals to help European Jews, and of the failure of liberals to challenge that power, was the fate of legislation introduced into the House in September 1942 by Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York. Appalled by press reports of the mass deportations from France, Celler, a Jew, hoped to convert the widespread indignation aroused by that news into practical action. His bill called for opening America's doors to refugees in France who could prove they were facing roundup, internment, or religious persecution at the hands of the Nazis or the Vichy authorities. [48]
Celler's measure went to the House Committee on Immigration, where it languished almost unnoticed while the great crisis in France passed. A handful of Jewish organizations and the Yiddish press spoke out for it; otherwise silence prevailed. Congressman Samuel Dickstein, another Jew and a New York Democrat, was chairman of the House Immigration Committee. He agreed to hold hearings on the bill, but only after the elections. The hearings were never held, however, and the bill died in committee. Dr. Samuel Margoshes, a columnist for the Day, a New York Yiddish newspaper, explained that Jewish leaders had not launched a campaign for Celler's proposal because the question of large-scale immigration was an "extremely delicate" one. [49]
The heavy Republican gains in the 1942 elections surprised even the most optimistic GOP leaders. And conservative Democrats from the South retained their near monopoly on that region's seats. Although the Democrats continued to control Congress, the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and right-wing northern Republicans was the main force on Capitol Hill. A liberal victory in the off-year elections would not have meant a sustained American effort to help European Jewry. But the decisive conservative gains signaled that even limited steps in that direction would probably encounter stubborn opposition. [50]
Bolstered by the election's results, conservatives did not wait for the convening of the new Congress to display their new resolve. Almost immediately, they smashed the President's Third War Powers Bill, legislation that he had requested at the beginning of November. The response to rhis measure provided a barometer not only of anti-Roosevelt sentiment in Congress but also of anti-refugee and anti-immigration strength on Capitol Hill. [51]
The bill would have given the President the power, during the war, to suspend laws that were hampering lithe free movement of persons, property and information into and out of the United States." Roosevelt wanted to bypass the maze of complicated forms and procedures required by the tariff, customs, and immigration laws. [52]
These requirements were hindering the war effort in various ways. For instance, for secrecy's sake, citizens of Allied nations flown to the United States for military or industrial consultation frequently landed away from the ports of entry where immigration officials were available. To comply with the law, such persons then had to travel to a port of entry, slowing their missions and increasing the risks to their confidentiality. Again, prisoners of war, even those shipped through New York under full guard en route to Canada, had to be processed individually and inspected like any aliens entering the United States. The tariff and customs laws, for their pan, were delaying deliveries of imported materials essential to war production. It was not the fees that were at issue, for the government ultimately paid these to itself. Rather, it was the precious time and manpower that the legally required paperwork was absorbing. [53]
The President's proposal, though a reasonable step to facilitate war production, set off a furor in Congress. Conservatives saw it as yet another Roosevelt attempt to grasp more power and as a thinly disguised device for sneaking open the gates to let in thousands of European refugees. Republican Roy Woodruff (Mich.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, spoke for many of his colleagues when he asserted that the legislation would "make the President a virtual dictator." Norwegian-born Harold Knutson (Rep., Minn.) voiced another anxiety abroad in Congress: "As I read it, you throw the door wide open on immigration." The conservative press took up the cry, led by the Chicago Tribune, which expressed "shock" (along with geographical confusion) at finding politicians attempting "to flood this nation with refugee immigration from Europe and other nations." [54]
The Ways and Means Committee tabled the original legislation by a vote of twenty-four to nothing. A subcommittee redrafted the measure, deleting the word persons from it, thus removing the, immigration aspect. But even then opponents stalled the bill until the session ended, thereby killing it. They correctly foresaw that in the new, more conservative Congress the proposal would have no chance. [55]
The centrality of the refugee issue in the uproar over the Third War Powers Bill was noted by an insider, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who testified before the Ways and Means Committee. Long, the architect of the State Department's extremely stringent immigration policy, steadfastly opposed any increase in the small numbers of refugees then entering the United States. And he realized that Roosevelt had no intention whatever of using the proposed legislation to increase that trickle. But he recognized what the problem was and recorded it in his office diary:
Long was convinced that if the bill that first came to the committee had not involved immigration, it would have sped through Congress. Newsweek magazine, which saw the refugee problem as a mostly Jewish refugee problem (as indeed it was), made the point more explicitly:
With a more conservative Congress due in Washington in January 1943, prospects for congressional support to help the stricken Jews of Europe were bleak. Furthermore, in the face of the shift to the right, Roosevelt, reluctant in the past to run political risks to aid the persecuted Jews, would be very slow to respond to appeals for rescue action. [58]
***
Seventeen months of systematic, cold-blooded murder ran their course between the time the Einsatzgruppen were turned loose on the Russian front, in June 1941, and the day in late November 1942 when the extermination plan was confirmed to the world. The Nazis perpetrated their genocide program for nearly a year before the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland recognized what was happening and managed to send an alarm to the outside. Two months later, at a time when approximately 1.5 million Jews had already perished, Gerhart Riegner transmitted solid proof that planned annihilation was in motion. Three more months of calamity for European Jewry then passed before Western officialdom accepted the facts. In those three months, about one million more Jews were killed. The second sweep of the Einsatzgruppen was operating at full speed, and train after train rolled from the Polish ghettos and from western Europe, through the suffocating heat of sum mer, the chill autumn nights, and the numbing cold of November to meet the timetables of death. [59]
Delays in gaining the attention of the world were costly for the European Jews. Although much of that critical time may have been unavoidably lost, some of it had been dissipated by bureaucratic inertia and the indifference of government leaders. Even more tragic, fourteen additional months of mass murder were to pass before President Roosevelt and his administration, although fully cognizant of the ongoing genocide, could be persuaded to act. And when they did act, it was only in response to pressures that could no longer be disregarded.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
[i] Production of soap from human remains, however, was not definitely established. But rumors to that effect circulated in various parts of Axis Europe. [15]
[ii] This paragraph is based on Wise's account of his meeting with Welles. Officials in the Division of European Affairs maintained for months afterward that the State Department had never confirmed the extermination reports. But all the evidence indicates that Wise's description of the meeting was accurate. [36]
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