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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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[b]5. STRUGGLE FOR ACTION[/b]
Almost none of the numerous opinion surveys conducted during World War II dealt with the impact that the mass killing of the European Jews had on the American public. But one Gallup poll (January 7, 1943) provided some information. It included the following inquiry: "It is said that two million Jews have been killed in Europe since the war began. Do you think this is true or just a rumor?" Forty-seven percent of the respondents considered it true, 29 percent thought it rumor, and 24 percent had no opinion. Unfortunately, this finding does not tell what proportion of Americans was aware of the extermination news. But it suggests that during the preceding six weeks Jewish organizations had made important strides in getting the information before the public. The plausibility of such a conclusion is strengthened when one considers the lack of cooperation from the State Department and the Office of War Information as well as the limited interest of most of the mass media. [1]
The American Jewish Congress hoped that public opinion had become sufficiently aroused to bring government action. Its representatives approached the State Department week after week in early 1943, but received, in the words of one Jewish leader, "nothing but a runaround." Discussions with Sumner Welles, Adolf Berle, Breckinridge Long, and officials in the Division of European Affairs were all to no avail. [2]
In contrast to December, during January and much of February Jewish organizations were relatively quiescent; the extermination issue received limited public attention. Outing those weeks, however, shocking news reports from Europe began to reactivate the campaign for rescue. A courier from the non-Jewish Polish underground reached England in December with further confirmation of the systematic murder of the Polish Jews. He also brought an account of the hideous conditions on the deportation trains bound for the Belzec killing center. It was based on his own observations, for he had infiltrated a Nazi-controlled Polish police force. In Warsaw, he had seen some of the few "fortunate" Jews, children who had escaped from the ghetto and were attempting to survive in the city streets. He described them:
The greatest shock of early 1943 was another telegram from Gerhart Riegner in Switzerland, written in collaboration with Richard Lichtheim, an official of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. It disclosed an intensification of the systematic killing that Riegner had previously reported, Six thousand Jews were being killed per day at a single location in Poland. Vienna had been nearly emptied of Jews, and more deportations were going forward from Berlin and Prague. The condition of the Jews in Rumania was desperate. Of 130,000 Rumanian Jews deported to the Transnistria region in 1941, 60,000 were dead. The other 70,000 were destitute, sleeping in crowded, unheated rooms, prey to diseases, and dying of starvation. [4]
The State Department relayed a copy of the telegram to Stephen Wise on February 9, along with a letter signed by Welles which admonished that "the Department of State cannot assume any official responsibility for the information contained in these reports, since the data is not based on investigations conducted by any of its representatives abroad." The letter also applied the disclaimer retroactively to the documents given to Wise in November. [5]
The disavowal was undoubtedly engineered by the same group in the State Department's Division of European Affairs that had been trying for months to check the spread of information about the fate of the European Jews. For one thing, the Division of European Affairs had persistently sought to disassociate the State Department from Wise's public disclosures of mass murder. Furthermore, the day after forwarding the Riegner-Lichtheim telegram to Wise, the State Department dispatched the following instruction to its Bern legation. The obvious intent was to cut off such messages at their source.
As the signature indicated, Welles had approved the telegram. Almost certainly, however, he had simply initialed it in routine fashion. As the message crossed his desk, it would have attracted his attention only in the unlikely event that he had recalled what 482 from Bern actually was. The authors of the telegram undoubtedly assumed that he would not. Those responsible for telegram 354 were State Department adviser on political relations James C. Dunn and three officials from the Division of European Affairs-the acting chief, Ray Atherton, the assistant chief, John D. Hickerson, and Elbridge Durbrow. [8]
The ban on information from Switzerland ended two months later. as unforeseen developments upset the scheme. But that is part of another story, one that did not become clear until December 1943. [9]
Shortly after receiving the Riegner-Lichtheim message, Wise and his associates at the American Jewish Congress gave it to the press, along with three recently received eyewitness reports from Poland. The press release, timed to make the Sunday papers, had litde impact. The New York Times, for instance, reported it unobtrusively on page 37. [10]
On February 13, one day before the Riegner-Lichtheim information came out in the press, a report of great interest to those concerned about the European Jews appeared in the New York Times. By coincidence, it exactly meshed with the Riegner-Lichtheim description of the dreadful condition of the 70,000 Rumanian Jews still alive in Transnistria, and it threw a ray of hope into that darkness. A dispatch from C. 1. Sulzberger in London disclosed that the Rumanian government had offered to cooperate in moving 70,000 Jews from Transnistria to any place of refuge chosen by the Allies. The Rumanians suggested Palestine and offered to provide Rumanian ships for the voyage. In return, Rumania asked to be paid transportation and !dated expenses amounting to 20,000 Rumanian lei (about $130) per refugee, along with additional funds should Rumanian ships be utilized. [11]
An opportunity to rescue a large number of European Jews seemed to have materialized. Rumania's collaboration with the German war effort had been opportunistic. It now seemed unsure of an Axis victory and evidently was attempting a gradual shift into the good graces of the Allies in the hope of easing the coming terms of peace. If so, the Bucharest government was badly mistaken in assuming that the Allies would consider the release of 70,000 Jews an ingratiating gesture. In fact, as subsequent events showed, the American and British governments looked upon any release of large numbers of Jews as a threat, not an opportunity.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. immediately brought the Sulzberger article to Roosevelt's attention. The President said he knew nothing about the matter and suggested that Morgenthau see Welles. Welles, also unaware of the proposal, agreed to look into it. He learned from the British Foreign Office that a representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine had informed the British government a month earlier that Rumanian officials had made such an offer to the Jewish Agency. The Foreign Office characterized the plan as blackmail, though it did believe it might be an effort by "certain Rumanian circles" to show disapproval of the Nazi extermination of Jews. The Foreign Office also stated that weeks earlier it had asked the British embassy in Washington to inform the State Department of the proposal. Apparently, the State Department simply shelved the matter. [12]
An inquiry from Welles to the American embassy in Ankara brought some clarification. According to a representative of the Jewish Agency, a Dutch businessman, resident in Rumania, had called on him in Istanbul in early December carrying a proposal from top Rumanian officials. They were ready to permit the departure of the 72,000 Jews still alive in Transnistria and offered to provide ships to move them to Palestine or another Allied port. The Dutchman also stated that the Catholic bishop of Bucharest was prepared to permit the use of the Vatican flag on the ships. [13]
On February 24, Welles passed the information from London and Ankara on to Morgenthau, with a message that the investigation was continuing. But only two weeks later the State Department was responding to inquiries about the Rumanian proposal with stock letters signed by Welles. "This story," the letters asserted,
Clearly, the State Department's investigation had been superficial. Any careful consideration would have had to include inquiries sent to the Rumanian government through neutral governments or the Red Cross. Such indirect contacts with Axis governments were not uncommon during World War II; they were even made occasionally to protest persecution of European Jews. Instead of looking into it fully, the State Department had rejected the proposition out of hand. [15]
The Rumanian proposal might not have been workable. Quire likely it would have involved an element of bribery in addition to the actual costs of removing the imperiled Jews. But it most certainly was not a story ''without foundation." Nor had it "originated from an unofficial non-Rumanian resident of Bucharest." German Foreign Office correspondence assembled for the Nuremberg trials revealed that the proposal originated at the very top level of the Rumanian government and was seriously meant. The price asked may have been excessive, but it might have been reduced by negotiations. Even the problem of sending large amounts of money into an enemy nation had a solution. It was a procedure that the U.S. government agreed to many months later in connection with a program to buy food inside Rumania to send to the Jews in Transnistria. In that instance, Rumanian holders of Rumanian currency were willing to provide substantial funds in exchange for dollars or Swiss francs that would be kept in blocked bank accounts for them until the war ended. In that way, no foreign currency would have become available to the Axis. [16]
The main issue is not whether the plan might have worked. The crucial point is that, against a backdrop of full knowledge of the ongoing extermination program, the American and British governments almost cursorily dismissed this first major potential rescue opportunity. [17]
Not everyone, however, was willing to let the Rumanian proposal pass by in silence. On February 16, three days after it published Sulzberger's dispatch, the New York Times carried a three-quarter-page advertisement with the large headline "FOR SALE to Humanity 70,000 Jews." Its sponsor was the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, an organization formed in 1941 to exert pressure on the U.S. government, and through it on the British government, to permit the establishment of a separate Jewish army. According to the committee's plan, this independent force, based in Palestine, would fight side by side with the other Allied armies under the supreme Allied command. Its ranks would include Palestinian Jews, stateless Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, and Jews from nonbelligerent nations. Jews from America, Britain, or other Allied countries were expected to join the forces of their own nations. [iii] [18]
An independent Jewish army would offer Jews, the people most victimized by Hitler, an opportunity to fight back in their own units, under their own Bag and leadership. In late 1941 and for much of 1942, the threat of German North African forces to Suez and the nearby Jewish Palestine settlement underscored both the appeal and the logic of the proposal. Such a Jewish army would be immediately valuable in holding the Middle East; it could also permit transfer of some Allied troops from that region to other fronts. [iv]
The campaign mounted in 1941 and pressed through 1942 by the Committee for a Jewish Army (CJA) had attracted substantial support from several quarters, Jewish and non-Jewish. The driving force within the CJA was a group of ten young Palestinian Jews who had come to me United States in 1939 and 1940. They were Zionists, committed to a Jewish state in Palestine. But they were heavily influenced by the thought of Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose Revisionist Zionism called for a more militant policy toward British control in Palestine and aimed at the immediate establishment of a Jewish state there. [21]
These Palestinians were not associated with the New Zionist Organization of America, which was the Revisionist Zionist body in the United States. Most of them, in fact, were secretly members of the Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi), a Jewish armed underground in Palestine. While these men constituted a tiny, American-based wing of the Irgun, they did not conduct underground activities in the United States. During the war, they were almost completely isolated from the Irgun in Palestine. [22]
At the group's core were Hillel Kook and Samuel Merlin. Merlin, a journalist, had earlier served as Jabotinsky's personal secretary. Kook was descended from a noted rabbinical line. In the United States, he adopted the name Peter H. Bergson in order to keep his political activities from reflecting on the name of his late uncle, the former chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook. Quick and intense, Bergson was a dynamic speaker and the group's leader. Consequently, the Palestinians and the movements they initiated were referred to as the Bergsonites. [23]
The main Zionist movement harbored a deep-seated animosity toward the Irgun and thus the Bergsonites. At the root of this attitude were three factors. Regular Zionists viewed Jabotinsky and his followers as militaristic and virtually fascist. They strongly disagreed with the Irgun's use of violence in Palestine, in part because they believed it could damage the moral stature of Zionism and thus seriously hurt the Zionist cause. [v] Perhaps most important, they resented and feared the break in world Zionist discipline initiated by Jabotinsky and perpetuated by the lrgun. [24]
Operating first as American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, the young Palestinians' original purpose in the United States had been to raise money to supply arms to the Irgun and to finance its program of moving refugees from Europe to Palestine, in violation of British restrictions on Jewish immigration. In 1940, the expanding war had halted Irgun activities in Europe and severed communications between Palestine and the group in the United States. The Bergsonites had then shifted their focus to the Jewish army idea. [26]
In December 1941, American Friends of a Jewish Palestine was superseded by the newly organized Committee for a Jewish Army. The campaign for a Jewish army, which peaked in 1942, started to flag when the German threat to Suez and Palestine was broken later that year. When the news of systematic annihilation became known, in late November, the Army Committee changed its emphasis. [27]
The new approach was evident ten days later in the committee's large advertisement in the New York Times, written by the popular author Piette van Paassen, Its first objective was to dramatize and spread as widely as possible the recently released extermination reports, The second was to press for rescue action. The seed of an important idea, a commission of military and government experts to try to help the European Jews, appeared along with other tentative proposals. [vi] [28]
By February, when the next advertisement appeared, the commission of experts had become "our primordial demand," Within a week, the CJA announced its decision to open a rescue campaign centered on pressure for an intergovernmental commission of experts to seek out ways to counter the Nazi program of genocide. Although the Jewish- army goal remained, the rescue issue now claimed top priority. [30]
The point was underscored again in the large advertisement of February 16: "The principal demand, . , is that the United Nations immediately appoint an inter-governmental committee" to formulate ways to stop the extermination. The call for a rescue agency was not, however, the most striking aspect of the advertisement. Under the startling head lines
the advertisement aimed to rivet attention on the disastrous situation of the Jews in Transnistria and build popular pressure for rapid government steps to save them. [vii] [31]
"Roumania is tired of killing Jews," announced Ben Hecht, whose signature appeared on the ad. "It has killed one hundred thousand of them in two years. Roumania will now give Jews away practically for nothing," Hecht then lashed out: "Seventy Thousand Jews Are Waiting Death In Roumanian Concentration Camps ... Roumania Offers to Deliver These 70,000 Alive to Palestine ... The Doors of Roumania Are Open! Act Now!"
The CJA, the advertisement continued, had launched an intensive drive "to demand that something be done NOW, WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME." It invited readers to join the fight by informing friends, by writing congressmen, and by sending contributions "for the further distribution of messages like these." "In this way," stated the CJA, "you can help save European Jewry!"
Immediately, a barrage of protest came from the established Jewish organizations and press. They angrily charged the CJA with deliberately and deceptively implying that each $50 contribution would save a Rumanian Jew. Jewish spokesmen' castigated the CJA as irresponsible, unethical, and willing to edge "very dose to fraud" in order to raise funds. [32]
Undaunted, the Committee for a Jewish Army pushed ahead with its publicity campaign. Six days after the Ben Hecht plea, an advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune signed by Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado repeated the demand for United Nations action on the Rumanian proposal. And it, too, called for an intergovernmental rescue commission. Both advertisements soon appeared in other major newspapers. [33]
Even before the February denunciations, much of the American Jewish leadership had decried the Committee for a Jewish Army, accusing it of recklessness and sensationalism as well as gross effrontery in presuming to speak for an American constituency. Concern now arose that the Bergsonites would seize the leadership of the languishing effort for rescue. The inertia of the preceding several weeks dissolved rapidly. Aware of the CJA's plan to hold a demonstration at Madison Square Garden on March 9, Wise and the American Jewish Congress scheduled a March 1 mass meeting at the same location. [viii] To complete this display of disunity and rivalry, the Jewish Labor Committee in late February held many smaller meetings of its own throughout the New York metropolitan area. [34]
The American Jewish Congress's "Stop Hitler Now" demonstration of March 1 set off another wave of publicity and activity on the rescue question. This mass meeting was co-sponsored by the two giants of the American trade union movement, the AFL and the CIO, and by two tiny voices of Christianity and liberalism, the Church Peace Union and the Free World Association. Nearly thirty other Jewish organizations also lent support. As the meeting date neared, a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urged the public to attend and to insist that "America Must Act Now!" [36]
The public did come, in the tens of thousands. Twenty thousand jammed Madison Square Garden, while 10,000 others milled around outside in the winter cold and listened to the speeches through amplifiers. Still thousands more had dispersed after being turned away from the Garden. Police estimates indicated that, in all, n ,000 had come to the rally. [37]
The meeting opened with brief patriotic and religious exercises. Under lowered lights and amid audible weeping, a cantor chanted El Mole Rachamim, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. AFL president William Green, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and several other prominent non-Jews addressed the meeting, as did Stephen Wise and world-famous scientist and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Messages were sent to the gathering by Wendell Willkie, by New York governor Thomas Dewey, and by England's foremost churchmen, the archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley. [38]
Indicative of the progress made since the December conference with Roosevelt was a comprehensive list of specific rescue proposals approved by the mass meeting and forwarded to the President. Because the question arose both then and afterward as to what practical rescue actions might have been undertaken during that time of total war, the proposals merit attention here. The eleven-point program called for:
New York newspapers were impressed by the demonstration. Columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote in the Times that "the shame of the world filled the Garden Monday night." If the non-Jewish community did not support the rescue proposals "to the utmost," she declared, they would forever compromise "the principles for which we are pouring out blood and wealth and toil." [40]
The mass meeting modified the Times's earlier editorial view that the world was helpless "to stop the honor while the war is going on." A new Times editorial commended the rescue plans and asserted that "the United Nations governments have no right to spare any efforts that will save lives." Editorial support for the proposals also appeared in the New York Post, the Sun, and the Herald Tribune. [41]
The mass meeting and the favorable press response that followed forced a reaction of sons from the Roosevelt administration. Two days after the demonstration, the State Department released previously secret information disclosing that the United States and Britain were planning a diplomatic conference to deal with the refugee problem. A close reading of the State Department release, however, revealed that conference plans called only for a "preliminary exploration" of the question. [42]
Seeking to utilize the momentum generated by the mass meeting, Wise sent letters to President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hull, all members of the House and the Senate, and many newspaper editors. These letters described the proceedings at the rally and listed the eleven rescue proposals. The White House simply shunted Wise's letter over to the State Department, where a reply was prepared. Signed by the President, it vaguely asserted that "this Government has moved and continues to move, so far as the burden of the war permits, to help the victims of the Nazi doctrines of racial, religious and political oppression." [43]
Meanwhile, in a biting editorial entitled "While the Jews Die," the Nation reminded readers that Hitler was carrying out a program of total extermination of Europe's Jews and charged that "in this country, you and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt." "What," asked the Nation, "has come over the minds of ordinary men and women that makes it seem normal and indeed inevitable that this country should stolidly stand by and do nothing in the face of one of the world's greatest tragedies?" The editorial printed and strongly endorsed the eleven-point rescue program. [44]
On the evening of March 9, another outpouring of concern and anguish over the European Jewish catastrophe occurred at Madison Square Garden. That night the Committee for a Jewish Army presented a pageant called "We Will Never Die," a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It drew on some of the nation's foremost theatrical talent. Ben Hecht wrote the script, Billy Rose produced and Moss Hart directed the drama, and Kurt Weill created an original score for it. The large cast included Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, who occupied center stage, as the narrators. [45]
Two weeks prior to the pageant, Billy Rose sought a brief statement of encouragement from President Roosevelt that could be read at the meeting. The White House staff was in a quandary; it did not like to turn down Billy Rose, because of his frequent cooperation with some of Roosevelt's pet charitable projects, but neither did it want to issue any such statement from the President. On request from the White House, the OWI produced an innocuous reply regarding the savage tyranny of the Nazi regime. It did not mention the extermination of the Jews; it did not even mention Jews. Yet, apparently, the statement was still too strong for David Niles and Stephen Early of the White House staff. They decided that no message be sent. [46]
The Committee for a Jewish Army had equally scant success in its attempts to attract unified Jewish support for the pageant. Meeting in January with representatives of several Jewish organizations, Hecht and Bergson volunteered to withdraw the CJA's formal sponsorship of the project if that would bring about its endorsement by the established Jewish organizations. The CJA, however, would quietly contribute to the work involved. The plan was not accepted. [47]
Later, when the American Jewish Congress announced its Madison Square Garden rally for the week before the presentation of "We Will Never Die," the CJA offered to stage the pageant as a joint project and to cooperate with the congress in its mass demonstration. The pageant's script was delivered to the congress to be examined for possibly unacceptable material. The congress rejected the proposal. [48]
"We Will Never Die" drew an audience of 40,000, setting an attendance record for Madison Square Garden. The record was the result of a decision to repeat the performance late that same night. Other thousands remained in the chilly streets hoping that a third showing might take place. The event was also broadcast by radio. [49]
The pageant was performed against a background dominated by two forty-foot tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. Suspended over them was an illuminated Star of David. In the darkened hall, the stark scenes, dramatized by sharp beams of light and contrasting shadows, concentrated on three themes: Jewish contributions to civilization from Moses to Einstein; the role Jews in the Allied armed forces; and a vision of the postwar peace conference at which groups of Jewish dead told of their extinction at. the hands of the Nazis and pleaded, "Remember us." [50]
No formal addresses were made, but the pageant's final passages dealt pointedly with the inertia and silence of the non-Jewish world:
The ninety-minute memorial closed with the choir and twenty aged refugee rabbis singing the Kaddish for the dead Jews of Europe. [51]
Press and newsreel coverage in New York and across the nation was extensive. With hopes of awakening America to the European Jewish tragedy, the Committee for a Jewish Army pressed forward with plans to present "We Will Never Die" in dozens of other cities. Highly successful performances took place in Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Hollywood. Over 100,000 Americans witnessed the drama. Present at the Washington performance were Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court justices, members of the Cabinet, some 300 senators and congressmen, numerous military officials, and foreign diplomats. All in New York, the event was broadcast by radio in the other live cities where it played. Each performance set off a new ground swell of publicity. [52]
In her "My Day" column, Eleanor Roosevelt described "We Will Never Die" as
Mrs. Roosevelt pointed to the great dangers of intolerance and cruelty, but as to the need for action to help the trapped Jews of Europe she wrote nothing. [53]
"We Will Never Die" had won acclaim throughout the United States. Yet it had drawn almost no support from the established Jewish leadership. Coverage of the pageant in Anglo-Jewish weekly newspapers was widespread but generally less enthusiastic than in the regular daily press. The New Yolk Yiddish newspapers tended to be critical. Most English-language Jewish magazines failed even to report the event. [54]
Far more devastating were steps taken by some Jewish groups to prevent further presentations of the pageant. Because the CJA had little money, it had to depend on ticket sales in order to pay the heavy expenses involved. (The New York showing cost $25,000.) But since a considerable pan of the expenses had to be met before the performances occurred, sizable advances of money were needed. To obtain such funds, the CJA organized local sponsoring committees in each city. [55]
This system worked effectively in the first six cities. After that, however, the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations managed to block the Bergsonites. Pressures on prominent sponsors and telephone and letter campaigns vilifying the CJA led many, if not most, local backers to withdraw their support. In Baltimore, Buffalo, Kingston (New Yolk), and Gary (Indiana), the CJA was arranging to present the pageant when the American Jewish Congress and allied groups intervened locally and brought the process to a halt. Plans to take "We Will Never Die" to several other cities similarly came to nothing. The consequence of this bitter conflict, as one observer pointed out, was that "the most powerful single weapon yet produced to awaken the conscience of America" was stopped in its tracks. [56]
What lay behind this strife? The Bergson group was anathema to most of the established American Jewish leadership. The Bergson organizations, opponents insisted, had no legitimate mandate to speak for American Jews, since they represented no constituency in American Jewish life. They were interlopers who had intruded into areas of action that were the province of the established Jewish organizations. Opponents also accused the Bergsonites of irresponsibility, both in their sensational methods (such as the Hecht advertisement) and in their use of the sizable amounts of money they solicited. They were charged, in addition, with injecting into already complicated Jewish issues an dement of confusion that made understanding not only more difficult for many Jews but neatly impossible for most non-Jews. [57]
***
The success of the American Jewish Congress's "Stop Hitler Now!" demonstration had, in the meantime, given rise to another series of developments. In November 1942, as has been noted, seven major American Jewish organizations had formed a coordinating council (called the Temporary Committee) to carry out a series of projects aimed at stimulating action to save European Jews. In December, soon after the group had sent a delegation to meet with President Roosevelt, Stephen Wise had dissolved this council because it had completed the tasks it had originally undertaken.
By mid-February 1943, however, Wise was moving to reconstitute the committee. Most likely, he was activated by the shocking information from Riegner and Lichtheim in Switzerland and by the startling report that Rumania had offered to release 70,000 Jews. Shortly after the mass demonstration of March I, leaders of eight major Jewish organizations began meeting; on March 15 they officially organized the Joint Emergency Committee on European Jewish Affairs (JEC). Carried over from the earlier council were the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Synagogue Council of America, and Agudath Israel of America. Newly added were Agudath Israel's close associate, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, and the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, a political-action agency representing several Zionist organizations. Not included on the Joint Emergency Committee was the Committee for a Jewish Army, though it had asked to join. [58]
The Joint Emergency Committee immediately commenced efforts to influence the upcoming British-American refugee conference, set for late April in Bermuda. One early step was to initiate mass meetings throughout the United States patterned after the American Jewish Congress's Madison Square Garden demonstration. Through the meetings themselves and subsequent press and radio publicity, the JEC hoped to inform Americans of the Holocaust and to mobilize public opinion behind the e1even·point rescue program. During spring 1943, forty such rallies were held in twenty states. They were conducted by local Jewish community organizations with help from the Joint Emergency Committee and the local branches of its eight constituent bodies. In many instances, Christian church groups and local units of the AFL and the CIO cooperated. The national office of the Federal Council of Churches endorsed the entire project. [59]
The rallies held at smaller auditoriums drew capacity audiences in the low thousands, while crowds of more than twenty thousand were recorded in some larger cities. The main speakers at these meetings were nationally known Jewish leaders, important regional Catholic and Protestant clergy, representatives of the AFL and the CIO, and prominent political figures. Although JEC personnel estimated that two-thirds of the mass meetings generated "very good" or "good" overall publicity, they expressed disappointment with the generally sparse amount of editorial comment relating to them. [60]
An interesting aspect of the JEC's campaign (and a sign of the terrible urgency of the European Jewish situation) was the full collaboration of the American Jewish Committee. Through the years, the committee had almost never encouraged mass demonstrations. It wished to keep Jewish issues out of public attention while quietly working to protect Jewish rights through negotiations with high government officials and other powerful persons. The committee's president, Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, had opposed holding the "Stop Hitler Now'" mass meeting. But the dignified manner in which the demonstration was handled ("it was decently conducted; it was addressed by prominent speakers; it was not flamboyant or vulgar") and its joint support by labor and Christian organizations had convinced him and his administrative council that similar demonstrations could help influence American opinion "in a decent and decorous way." [61]
A second objective of the Joint Emergency Committee was to induce the U.S. Congress to go on record in support of rescue action. In January, congressional leaders had assured representatives of the American-Jewish Congress that such a resolution would be passed. But weeks of follow-up discussions had proved fruitless. [62]
In mid-February, Rabbi Meyer Berlin went to Washington to speak with congressional leaders. Berlin, a resident of Palestine, was then visiting in the United States under the auspices of the Mizrachi Organization of America (Zionism's Orthodox wing). In a conversation with Senate majority leader Alben W. Barkley, Berlin noted that nothing had thus far been heard in either the House or the Senate about the mass murder of European Jews. Barkley replied that he had already discussed a proposed congressional resolution with Rabbi Wise and Congressman Emanuel Celler. Barkley also said that he personally supported the resolution, but thought it important for the proposal to gain a broad cross-section of support in Congress. Consequently, he was seeking, but had not yet obtained, the backing of the Republican leadership. [63]
In another conversation, Berlin declared bitterly to Senator Robert F. Wagner (Dem., N.Y.) "that if horses were being slaughtered as are the Jews of Poland, there would by now be a loud demand for organized action against such cruelty to animals." [ix] Though clearly sympathetic, Wagner saw little hope for any practical help from Congress.
Rabbi Berlin next went to Congressman Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (Rep., Mass.), the House minority leader, and frankly told him that he had learned from Senator Barkley that the Republican leadership was keeping Congress from taking a stand on the Jewish catastrophe. According to Berlin's report of the interview, Martin stated that he was familiar with the resolution but "not at all posted on the broader aspects of the question." He did agree to do what he could to hasten action on this measure.
Two weeks later, Barkley introduced the resolution into the Senate. It declared that "the American people view with indignation the atrocities inflicted upon the civilian population in the Nazi-occupied countries, and especially the mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children." It then resolved that "these brutal and indefensible outrages ... are hereby condemned" and "it is the sense of this Congress that those guilty ... shall be held accountable and punished." The resolution said nothing about rescue. It was simply another general condemnation of Nazi atrocities, another call for the eventual punishment of those responsible. [65]
The Joint Emergency Committee dispatched two delegates to Washington to persuade congressional leaders to add a paragraph urging both the United States and the United Nations to act immediately to rescue the Jews of Europe. But their effort failed. On March 9, Bark ley's resolution, in its original form, passed the Senate unanimously. The next week, the House approved the same resolution without dissent. [66]
As the JEC had feared, Barkley's resolution was so insignificant that it received little publicity. For example, when the Senate acted on the resolution, the New York Times devoted less than two and a half inches to the story, on page 12. Later, when the House passed the measure, the Times carried a similarly brief report on page 11. In both instances, the tiny headlines omitted any reference to Jews. [67]
The project on which the Joint Emergency Committee placed its greatest hope was a conference it sought to arrange between top State Department officials and a delegation of Jewish leaders accompanied by representatives of the AFL, CIO, Church Peace Union, and Federal Council of Churches. The plan depended largely on the cooperation of Myron C. Taylor, President Roosevelt's personal representative to the Vatican. Taylor, formerly chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, had been the chief American representative at the Evian Conference on refugees in 1938. He continued to be involved in refugee matters in succeeding years and to maintain close connections with the State Department. Despite his assignment in Rome, Taylor was in the United States during much of the war. He had access to both Roosevelt and Welles; equally important, he was willing to cooperate unhesitatingly with the Jewish leadership. Taylor, it was hoped, could open the way for a meaningful hearing at the State Department. [68]
The strategy was for Taylor to conduct preliminary discussions with Welles and other State Department officials. These talks were to be based on the JEC's specific rescue proposals, a program that closely followed the eleven-point list that came out of the March 1 Madison Square Garden mass meeting. But the day before Taylor was to begin his discussions, a meeting of the Joint Emergency Committee learned of more alarming reports just received from overseas. One carried information from Geneva:
Another cablegram disclosed that 8,000 Bulgarian Jews had already been deported. Every message stressed the absolute need for rapid and extraordinary action. [69]
This turn of events impelled the JEC to revise its strategy. Tune was too short for Taylor to negotiate with the s1ow·moving State Department on the whole list of proposals. Instead, especially since British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was then in the United States, the time had come to go directly to Welles and press for immediate American and British action on the two most imperative proposals. One called for approaches to Germany and its satellites to obtain release of the Jews. The other asked for organization of a program to feed Nazi victims unable to get out of occupied Europe. If the two powers would agree to these steps, the JEC believed, the other points could be acted upon in a less urgent manner by the intergovernmental rescue agency that it was hoped would emerge from the forthcoming conference at Bermuda. [70]
Taylor succeeded in arranging for Wise and Proskauer to see both Eden and Welles, separately, on March 27. The meeting with Eden was most discouraging and presaged the outcome of the Bermuda Conference. Opening the discussion, Proskauer stressed the request that Britain and the United States call on Germany to permit the Jews to leave occupied Europe. Eden rejected that plan outright, declaring it "fantastically impossible." Nor was he taken by the proposal to send food to European Jews. To a suggestion that Britain help in removing Jews from Bulgaria, Eden responded icily, "Turkey does not want any more of your people." Any such effort, furthermore, would require the Allies to ship additional goods to Turkey, and that would be difficult. All in all, Eden offered no reasonable hope of action. Shortly afterward, Wise and Proskauer met with Welles; who stated that he would do what he could concerning the JEC's proposals. [71]
The meeting with Eden dealt a crushing blow to the American Jewish leadership, as is reflected in the following description of the reaction of the Joint Emergency Committee when Wise and Proskauer reported back to it:
Incredible though it may sound, what lay behind Eden's adamant opposition to the plea that the Allies call on Germany to release the Jews was the fear that such an effort might in fact succeed. Later during the same day on which Eden spoke with Proskauer and Wise, he met with Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, and the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax. Also present were a British Foreign Office official and Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's special assistant. Hull raised the issue of the 60,000 to 70,000 Jews in Bulgaria who were threatened with extermination unless the British and Americans could get them out. He pressed Eden for a solution. According to Hopkins's notes, Eden replied
Nothing in Hopkins's notes indicates that anything was said questioning, let alone objecting to, this brutal statement. In a group that included all of the foremost statesmen of the democratic world except Winston Churchill-a group that was well aware of what was happening to the Jews of Poland and Germany-no one expressed any qualms about Eden's callousness. Nor did anyone challenge the contrived reason Eden gave for advising care lest Hitler be encouraged to release the Jews.
Even if one accepts Eden's contention that transportation was not available, can anyone doubt that Jews would have walked, if necessary, across the Balkans and out through Turkey? The hard fact of the matter is that, despite the excuse used constantly throughout World War II that the rescue of Jews was impossible because of the shortage of transportation, shipping and other resources were somehow found for nonmilitary purposes when the Allied leadership so desired. illustrations of that fact will appear in a later chapter. For now, let it be noted that ten days after Eden's discussion with Roosevelt and the other statesmen, the British government announced plans to take 21,000 non-Jewish Polish refugees to East Africa. They were some of the 100,000 non- Jewish Polish, Yugoslav, and Greek refugees whom the Allies moved to sanctuaries in the Middle East and Africa during World War II. [74]
The real problem as far as Eden and the British were concerned was not ships. It was the immense pressure that .the release of thousands of Jews from Europe would place on the British policy of placating the Arabs by strictly limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. Placed in its broader context, this was part of the fundamental problem of where Jews could be put if they were rescued. No country wanted to take them in, as had been proved between 1933 and 1941 when persecuted Jews had been free to leave Nazi Europe. American Jewish groups had been correct in devising several proposals for havens of refuge for those who could get out. Unwillingness to offer refuge was a central cause for the Western world's inadequate response to the Holocaust.
Eden's fear that the Axis powers might agree to send the Jews to the Allies instead of to the killing centers was by no means unique. For instance, in December 1943 the British government opposed a plan for evacuating Jews from France and Rumania because "the Foreign Office are concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory. . . . They foresee that it is likely to prove almost if not quite impossible to deal with anything like the number of 70,000 refugees whose rescue is envisaged." Six months later, the British War Cabinet's Committee on Refugees declined to pursue a possible arrangement for the exodus of large numbers of Jews from Nazi Europe, partly because it could "lead to an offer to unload an even greater number of Jews on our hands." [75]
The same callousness prevailed on the American side. In November 1941, in the midst of months of mass terror against Jews in Rumania, Cavendish W. Cannon of the State Department's Division of European Affairs spelled out the reasons why the United States should not support a proposal to move 300,000 Jews out of Rumania to safety in Syria or Palestine. He specified, among other problems, that "endorsement of such a plan [was] likely to bring about new pressure for an asylum in the western hemisphere" and that, because atrocities were also under way in Hungary, "a migration of the Rumanian Jews would therefore open the question of similar treatment for Jews in Hungary and, by extension, all countries where there has been intense persecution." Cannon added, "So far as I know we are not ready to tackle the whole Jewish problem." In May 1943, Robert C. Alexander of the State Department's Visa Division described rescue proposals as moves that would "take the burden and the curse off Hider." [76]
Similarly, R. Borden Reams of the Division of European Affairs, referring to efforts in the spring of 1943 to persuade the Allies to negotiate with Germany for the release of the Jews, spoke of the potential "danger" of such action:
Since policymakers in both the State Department and the British government viewed the escape of Jews from sure annihilation as a "burden," or a "danger," it is hardly surprising that they looked upon the rescue of Jews as something to avoid rather than to strive for. Seen from this perspective, such State Department decisions as the failure to follow up the Rumanian proposal to release 70,000 Jews and the attempt to shut off the flow of extermination information take on a certain grim logic.
Even after the disheartening encounter with Eden, the Joint Emergency Committee pushed ahead, continuing to place its hopes in Taylor and Welles. But by early April the committee was reasonably convinced that neither the State Department nor the British would seek to effect a rescue program at Bermuda. If anything significant were to occur at the conference, it would have to come at the insistence of President Roosevelt. [78]
Accordingly, Wise telegraphed the White House asking that a few JEC leaders be granted the opportunity to talk with the President as soon as possible regarding the fate of millions of European Jews. Although the committee expected to have no trouble seeing Roosevelt, Wise's request got them nowhere. The White House simply relayed it to the State Department for acknowledgment. Five days later, Hull signed a letter informing Wise that such a meeting could not be arranged. He suggested that the committee convey its information in a memorandum. for the President and the delegates to the conference. [79]
Meanwhile, on April 1, the seven Jewish members of the House of Representatives, led by Emanuel Celler, did succeed in talking with Roosevelt. [xi] Although Celler had kept in close touch with the Joint Emergency Committee, the Jewish congressmen did not press its rescue proposals on the President or place much emphasis on the Bermuda Conference. Rather, they concentrated on criticism of the State Depart ment's complex and stringent screening process, which was keeping refugee immigration into the United States at less than 10 percent of the legally established quotas. The congressmen asked for simplification of the procedures. [80]
Although simplification would certainly have been a help, the failure of the congressmen to focus on the major policy issues enabled Roosevelt to avoid the pressure they might otherwise have been able to put on him. The emphasis on immigration procedures opened the way for him to sidetrack the group to Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary in the State Department who supervised immigration regulations. He could be depended upon to respond courteously ro the congressmen, to offer to consider whatever suggestions they would submit, and perhaps eventually to make a few superficial modifications. In that way, Long could largely neutralize their potential for forcing the administration to make any real policy changes regarding the rescue of Jews. [81]
During the first months of 1943, while some Americans were asking why their government was doing nothing to help the European Jews, others were wondering about the near silence of the American Christian churches. Jewish Frontier pointed out that although information on the annihilation of the Jews was widely enough known to elicit a Christian reaction, none had been forthcoming. Congress Weekly voiced the same dismay. It asserted that a declaration from leading American churchmen expressing their horror and their readiness to act would arouse public opinion and help bring a response from the government. [82]
On an individual level, Rabbi Israel Goldstein, president of the Synagogue Council of America, wrote to his friend Dr. Everett R. Clinchy, a Presbyterian minister and president of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Goldstein was concerned about the National Conference's apparent inaction and asked, "How can an organization whose program is brotherhood, exclude from its sphere of concern ..., the dying gasp of European Jewry?" [83]
Clinchy replied that the National Conference was already working on the extermination issue. It had publicized the situation through its Religious News Service, which reached both the religious and general press. It also hoped to sponsor sometime in the spring a nationwide exchange between churches and synagogues that woll1d feature appeals for action. Clinchy had shown that the National Conference was not entirely inactive. It was probably doing more than most non-Jewish organizations. But, in truth, it had attempted very little, and Clinchy did not indicate that it would do much more. [84]
A handful of minor Christian and interfaith movements did urge rescue action. But none of the great American Protestant denominations took a stand during these critical months-or later in the war, for that matter. The American Roman Catholic church also was virtually silent. Neither its bishops nor other prominent church leaders pressed the issue. [85]
The American Christian organization that was most active in the campaign for rescue was the Protestant interdenominational Federal Council of Churches. But even it did not do much. The New York office occasionally assisted the Joint Emergency Committee and other Jewish groups. In mid-March, the Federal Council's executive committee called on the government to offer financial help for refugees who reached neutral European nations and to provide havens outside Europe to which refugees could be Sent until the end of the war. At the same time, the executive committee urged American Christians to sup port steps for rescue. And it designated Sunday, May 2, a nationwide Day of Compassion for the Jews of Europe, recommending that church services that day concentrate on the Jewish tragedy. [86]
In preparation for the Day of Compassion, the Federal Council distributed worship suggestions and other materials to church leaders. And it devoted one of its weekly Information Service bulletins to a carefully documented summary of evidence of the ongoing "elimination of the Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe." This bulletin, prepared with the help of the Joint Emergency Committee, was mailed to 70,000 Protestant ministers. The JEC assisted in several other ways with arrangements for the Day of Compassion, even to the extent of compiling and paying for some of the printed matter. [87]
The Federal Council hoped that tens of thousands of local churches would focus the attention of their congregations on the terrible plight of Europe's Jews and thus create a favorable public opinion for action in their behalf. The outcome of this effort cannot be fully determined, but available evidence indicates that the impact was slight.
In Boston, for instance, the Joint Emergency Committee and the American Jewish Committee, with cooperation from some Protestant clergymen, made thorough preparations for the Day of Compassion. Publicity was conducted through mailings, subway posters, newspaper advertisements, press releases, and editorials in the Boston daily news· papers. Sympathetic ministers were supplied with materials from the Federal Council and other sources. An honorary committee of sponsors included the mayor of Boston, the governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, members of Congress, and many church leaders. But Boston's Protestant churches hardly responded. By the eve of the Day of Compassion, only eight Boston-area clergymen had agreed 10 center services around its theme. [88]
In New York City, the outcome appears to have been even more meager. Several city church services were summarized in the next day's Times. In only one instance was the observance of the Day of Compassion mentioned. In Pittsburgh the results were minimal. A Jewish organization there set out to write a story on the Day of Compassion for release to Pittsburgh newspapers. But phone calls to the leading churches affiliated with the Federal Council found that none of them had planned anything connected with the occasion. The most positive response came from a minister who thought his church might do something next year. [89]
Perhaps more significant in retrospect than the slight impact of the Day of Compassion is the fact that this modest effort turned out to be the Christian church's main attempt during the entire war to arouse an American response to the Holocaust. And even it came only after months of prodding by Jewish friends of the Federal Council's leaders. [90]
***
Momentous developments had occurred in Europe and North Africa in the months between the emergence of the extermination news in late November 1942 and the solidification of plans for the conference at Bermuda the following April. The Allies had seized the initiative in the war and clearly were on the road to victory, while the German slaughter of the Jews had continued relentlessly. At Auschwitz, four huge new gas chamber-crematorium installations had come into operation, increasing the already high rate of mass killing to a capacity estimated at 6,000 to 12,000 murders and cremations per day.
During those same months, the patterns of the American government's response to the ongoing annihilation of the Jews became evident. The State Department had shown itself to be entirely callous. Most members of Congress seemed to know little and care less. And the President, who was well aware of the catastrophic situation, was indifferent, even to the point of unwillingness to talk about the issue with the leaders of five million Jewish Americans.
The months had seen a variety of efforts by American Jews, aided by a comparatively small number of non-Jews, to stir the conscience of America and its government and thereby bring about some first steps toward trying to save European Jewry. The main Jewish organizations had managed for a time to subdue the chronic fighting among themselves and join in a united operation to press for government action. The results so far had been depressing. But the upcoming Bermuda Conference offered a little hope that something positive might develop.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
[i] This referred to the telegram that had transmitted the Riegner-Lichtheim report from Bern to Washington. It carried the number 482.
[ii] Actually, throughout the war the State Department relayed hundreds of private messages from Switzerland to American business firms. [7]
[iii] Great Britain did allow Palestinian Jews to volunteer for the British army, but in limited numbers. [19]
[iv] Zionist circles widely supported the idea of a Jewish army. Obviously, such a fighting force would greatly increase the chances for the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine after the war. It would give Zionists a sound basis for pressing their claims at the peace table and at the same time leave a trained and equipped Jewish army available to insist on Jewish postwar interests in Palestine. These factors were, of course, also recognized by the plan's main opponents, the British government and the Arab powers. Late in the war (in September 1944), the British government relented and formed a token Jewish brigade within the British army. Members of the Jewish brigade still in Europe after the war played an important role in the "illegal" movement of Jewish survivors through Europe and onto ships headed for Palestine. [20]
[v] The Irgun had earlier used terror tactics to retaliate for Arab attacks on Jews. In 1944 it reinstituted the use of violence, this time against the British in Palestine. [25]
[vi] A major instrument of the various Bergson groups was the large display advertisement placed in leading metropolitan newspapers. A series of these ads produced during 1942 saw Merlin develop that medium into an effective form of propaganda, which drew on such skilled writers as van Paasen and Hollywood dramatist Ben Hecht. [29]
[vii] Fifty dollars per refugee was the CJA's estimate of the value of the 20,000 lei cost mentioned in Sulzberger's article.
[viii] The American Jewish Congress had been planning since December to hold a mass demonstration at Madison Square Garden. First set for January, then early February, it had been continually postponed. It and similar rallies projected in other cities were the only remnants of the Planning Committee's original program of nationwide mass processions and demonstrations in Washington. [35]
[ix] In fact, near the end of the war, an American Army tank unit went out of its way to rescue a herd of valuable Lipizzaner horses. The Germans had seized the horses in Vienna and transported them to Czechoslovakia. The U.S. Senate later cited the unit for its "heroic efforts" in saving the horses. [64]
[x] Reams did not explain why the German government would have insisted on immediate transportation of all the freed Jews or why such an unlikely requirement could not have been modified by further negotiations.
[xi] Besides Celler, the Jewish congressmen were Sol Bloom (Dem., N.Y.), Samuel Dickstein (Dem., N.Y.), Daniel Ellison (Rep., Md.), Arthur G. Klein (Dem., N.Y.), Adolph J. Sabath (Dem., Ill), and Samuel A. Weiss (Dem., Pa.)
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