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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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[b]AFTERWORD[/b]
More than fifty years have passed since the Holocaust, yet in country after country it is still difficult to face and to acknowledge what was done and not done regarding the Jews. Many nations have begun to deal with these issues, but progress has varied greatly from country to country. In the 1970s, the Netherlands put aside the myth that the Dutch nation had struggled gallantly to save its Jewish citizens from the Germans. The Dutch came to grips with the historical record and acknowledged their failure. In France, clear-cut confrontation with the reality of the record has only recently begun, as in the formerly Communist countries of Europe. Switzerland, and several other nations.
In the United States, public consciousness of the Holocaust began to grow in the 1970s and reached a high level before the end of the 1980s. This growing attention to the Jewish catastrophe can be traced in the spread of annual Holocaust commemoration services, increasingly involving American Christians and increasingly becoming civic rather than almost exclusively Jewish ceremonies. The expanded consciousness of the Holocaust was also marked by the significant increase in the number of high school and college courses dealing with the Holocaust, as well as by the formation of dozens of museums, memorials, and educational centers in all parts of the country. Another important indicator was the large outpouring of Holocaust-related films, novels, and scholarly works. The Holocaust was also integrated into theological studies and became a core issue in Christian-Jewish relations. By the 1990s, recognition of the Holocaust as an issue of importance had been embedded into American culture.
Naturally, one of the main questions in the United States has been how the American people and their government responded to the Holocaust. As that part of the historical record emerged, it became evident that, despite a few bright areas, the overall American response to the European Jewish catastrophe was a dismal failure. With that knowledge came, for some, an impulse to apply its lessons to the future. When the Indo-Chinese refugees, the "boat people" of the late 1970s, confronted the world, the Carter administration took a very different approach from that taken toward the Jewish refugees of the 1930s and 1940s. Vice President Mondale pointed out that in the Nazi era the United States and the other democracies had "failed the test of civilization." He called on the nations not to "re-enact their error." In time, 800,000 Indo-Chinese reached safety in the United States.
From the Carter years onward, a commitment to take action when confronted with outbreaks of massive persecution has been affirmed at the highest levels of American civic responsibility. This has been true of both the Congress and the Presidency. A clear instance is seen on the outside walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. There, chiseled in stone, are the words of the three presidents who served during the years the museum was planned and built:
At the dedication of the museum in 1993, President Clinton spoke in the same vein: "For those of us here today representing the nations of the West, we must live forever with this knowledge: Even as our fragmentary awareness of crimes grew into indisputable facts, far too little was done."
Already, it is true, there have been failures to honor the commitment to act (for example, the tragically slow response to the horror in the former Yugoslavia). There will almost surely be further failures, but the critical first step has been taken. The responsibility to act has been recognized. It has been recognized because of the widespread realization that the failed American response to the plight of the desperate Jews was also a failure to uphold our nation's most cherished and civilized traditions.
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First published in November 1984, The Abandonment of the Jews is the history of America's response to the Holocaust. This new edition offers an opportunity to look back at how the book was received when it first appeared. It also allows for a brief discussion of the main criticisms that have been leveled at it by other historians. And it permits an examination of some recent attacks on Abandonment, including the publication of two books aimed at countering it.
When The Abandonment of the Jews appeared late in 1984, it drew immediate attention. The New York Times printed four pieces on it in November and December, including a front-page review in its Sunday Book Review section. I appeared on NBC's Today, ABC's Nightline, and Larry King's radio program. Numerous other television appearances followed, along with scores of radio and television interviews. Abandonment was a selection of the History Book Club and the Jewish Book Club. Book reviews ran in almost every important metropolitan newspaper in the United States and in the major scholarly publications.
Abandonment -- despite its seventy pages of source notes -- appeared for five weeks on the New York Times Book Review's best seller list, in addition to making the lists of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Long Island's Newsday. With time, the book went into seven hardcover printings (a total of more than 50,000 copies); a paperback edition sold more than 48,000 copies; a condensed version appeared; and German, French, Hebrew, and Polish editions were published. I received about 500 letters of response during 1985, and participated in 106 speaking engagements in that year alone.
Abandonment was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the National Jewish Book Award. and the Present Tense Literary Award. Among other honors received were awards from the Isaac M. Wise Temple in Cincinnati and the Brooklyn Holocaust Memorial Committee. Significant scholarly recognition came with the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society. (Both societies are associated with the Organization of American Historians.)
As 1985 ended, Abandonment was included in the New York Times Book Review's eleven "Best Books of the Year." The book also brought me honorary doctorates from Hebrew Union College and Yeshiva University and a named professorship (The Josiah DuBois Professor of History and Judaic Studies) at my home institution, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Early in 1985, a copy of The Abandonment of the Jews was provided to each member of Congress. Twice that year, I met with groups of members of Congress to discuss the book. Senator Paul Simon called it "one of the most powerful books I have ever read," and I learned later that The Abandonment of the Jews had helped influence the United States government's decision to airlift 812 Ethiopian Jews from the Sudan to safety in Israel earlier that year.
More recently, I edited a set of thirteen volumes of the most important documents used in writing The Abandonment of the Jews. This set, published under the title America and the Holocaust, was keyed to Abandonment, chapter by chapter. In 1994, the film America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference was aired by PBS as part of the prestigious American Experience Series. It drew on The Abandonment of the Jews and my earlier book Paper Walls.
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The reviews of The Abandonment of the Jews that appeared in the general press were overwhelmingly favorable. Some of those comments are quoted on the cover of this edition. In addition, the scholarly response was almost entirely positive, and, in many instances, very strongly so. Abandonment received high praise from such distinguished scholars as Irving Abella, who, writing in the American Historical Review, called it a "landmark study.... Objective and dispassionate, the book is a model of historical writing." In the Journal of American History, Leonard Dinnerstein characterized it as "a telling account of one of the sorriest episodes in world history" and concluded that "we will not see a better book on this subject in our lifetime." A. J. Sherman wrote that Abandonment was "exemplary in its clarity and thoroughness" and referred to "its judicious tone and preference for marshaling evidence rather than apportioning blame." Yehuda Bauer described it as "authoritative, scholarly, and fascinating."
But there were also those who disagreed with some of my findings. Michael Marrus claimed that I failed "to appreciate how difficult it was [for contemporaries] to grasp the full horror of the Holocaust." Marcus's strongest criticism was that historians should assess people of the past "from the standpoint of their own culture, priorities and preoccupations," and not on the basis of "what we assume ought to have been their beliefs and actions." This mistaken approach, he asserted, imposes "our own values" on them. The thrust of such historical work, he declared, is to lament the fact that "the people written about failed to live up to our standards."
This is an argument frequently used to try to excuse people of the past from moral responsibility for their actions. In reality, the Americans of a half century ago were not members of some distant culture with different basic values and standards from our own in regard to human responsibility for assistance to other humans in desperate need of help. There has been no moral revolution between the 1940s and now that has endowed present-day Americans with standards notably superior to those that prevailed two generations ago.
Richard Breitman and Alan Kraur published American Refugee Policy and European Jewry in 1987, three years after Abandonment appeared. They praised Abandonment, but they also stressed what they saw as substantial differences between their interpretations of the facts and mine. They concluded that anti-Semitism was significantly less a factor in America's failure than I had maintained. They instead emphasized the influence of the narrow-minded and entrenched State Department bureaucracy, the solidity of the immigration laws (and the public's opposition to changing them), and "the reluctance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to accept the inherent political risks of humanitarian measures on behalf of foreign Jews."
The most significant difference between the Breitman and Kraut interpretation and mine was their attempt to justify Roosevelt's paucity of action. They charged that I unfairly criticized Roosevelt "on the basis of limited evidence." Yet, based on the same evidence and a good deal of speculation, they excused him because "refugee policy was one area where Franklin Roosevelt, so venturesome in other spheres, did not feel free to take on much additional risk." Roosevelt, they surmised, "undoubtedly regretted reported Nazi killings of Jews in Europe, but they did not affect him deeply enough to override his basic instinct: for domestic and foreign policy reasons, he could not allow the United States to be seen as giving Jews special leniency or assistance." This is essentially the same justification that has been made for Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese Americans, despite the fact that they did not pose a security threat: It was politically expedient.
In a further argument, presented in a review of Abandonment, Breitman has maintained that, in any event, a strong commitment by Roosevelt would not have made much difference, although "at least some additional lives would have been saved." How many were required?
The most negative assessment of The Abandonment of the Jews came from Lucy Dawidowicz. Her review, which was declined by the New Republic and eventually published in This World, revolved around the argument that Roosevelt was correct in his view that "the only way to rescue the European Jews was to win the war against Hitler as fast as possible." In an attempt to back up her assertion that there was an "absence of real opportunities to rescue the Jews," she sweepingly dismissed the rescue proposals that I discussed in Abandonment, putting major emphasis on the significant diversion of airpower that she claimed an attack on the Auschwitz gas chambers would have entailed. Yet, she never even mentioned a crucially relevant point that I had discussed: During 1944, 2,800 American heavy bombers had struck oil targets within forty-seven miles of Auschwitz, and 223 of them had bombed industrial areas at Auschwitz itself, less than five miles from the gas chambers.
Near the end of the review, Dawidowicz inexplicably changed course. Regarding the United States, she stated: "No doubt that a more humane refugee policy on this country's part would have saved tens of thousands of lives." And shortly afterward she endorsed a central theme of my book. Here is the passage from her review:
I agree. But if a tiny Jewish state would have had such an impact, what might a real commitment from the United States have achieved? [i]
The Abandonment of the Jews was also attacked by Henry Feingold. In 1970, he published The Politics of Rescue, a narrowly researched, error-prone study that is his main contribution to the question of America's response to the Holocaust. He has continued to discuss the subject in numerous articles in the years since. As Feingold's work has made clear, there is little disagreement between us as to the basic facts. If anything, his view is the harsher one. He refers to the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust as a record of failure and "tragic inaction." It was an administration in which the rescue of the Jews "had no priority at all." And he unhesitatingly pointed out that Roosevelt, "after all, was responsible for the actions of his administration." Referring to the administration's steps that reduced refugee immigration to a trickle in 1940-41, Feingold charged: "Not only did that cost Jewish lives directly but the restrictionist policy also played a crucial role in Berlin's decision to solve its 'Jewish problem' by more radical means." As for the Roosevelt administration's response during the period of the mass killings (1941-45), Feingold emphasized: "Nothing that rescue advocates might suggest -- food packages to the camps, change of the designation of the inmates to POW's, retributive bombing and finally destruction of rail lines leading to the death camps and bombing of the gas chambers -- would be considered. The Jews would be allowed to perish." The Roosevelt administration "generally did all in its power to prevent a more active rescue effort." It was, he summed up, a record of "failures, missed opportunities, lying, sabotage, inurement and incompetence."
What, then, was at the center of Feingold's persistent criticism of The Abandonment of the Jews? His main argument was that, in the parts of the book where I assessed responsibility for America's failure, I inappropriately judged those who were involved by measuring them against my own "outraged Christian conscience." He maintained that "his [Wyman's] standards for human behavior are set so impossibly high that ultimately all the protagonists in the drama fall tragically short." Furthermore, he asserted that I had judged them "exclusively by his [Wyman's] own moral standards rather than those that prevailed at the time."
My response to a similar criticism by Michael Manus also applies to Feingold's position, but there is more to be said. Is it really an "impossibly high" ethical standard that criticizes responsible people, especially government and other leaders, for not attempting to do what could reasonably be done (and would not have interfered with the war effort) to help fellow humans who were facing mass murder? I do not believe that is an extreme moral position or that an "outraged Christian conscience" is a prerequisite to holding it. Large numbers of Americans -- Christian, Jewish, nonreligious, and others, both then and now -- would agree that this is not an "impossibly high" standard.
As for the assertion that I drew my conclusions based exclusively on my own moral standards "rather than those that prevailed at the time," one may ask what Feingold believes the United States was like then. If the nation was such a wasteland of amorality on this issue during World War II, there would have been no struggle for rescue action, no impact when the Treasury Department uncovered the scandalous behavior of the State Department and summarized it in its "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," no War Refugee Board, no results at all. The nation was populated by a mixture of concerned, indifferent, and hateful people then, as now, but too many of the country's leaders failed those who were concerned or whose concern could have been aroused.
The explanation is not, as Feingold indicates, that after Auschwitz there is "ample reason to wonder about the power of morality, even about its existence." The logic of Feingold's position is that no one in that era is to be held accountable because substantially less elevated standards prevailed then than now. This would have to apply outside the United States, too. To the Swiss and Swedish bankers, for example, to the International Red Cross, the French and Portuguese governments, and so on.
Finally, I have to wonder at Feingold's perception that I drew my historical conclusions based on my "own moral standards rather than those that prevailed at the time." When does he think my moral standards were formed? The answer is: at that very time -- in the 1930s and early 1940s -- in a lower middle class family in an unexceptional town near an East Coast city.
Unfortunately, but understandably, it has been very difficult for some of the most ardent admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt to accept the realities of America's response to the Holocaust and of Roosevelt's central role in that response. Since 1994, The Abandonment of the Jews has been heavily criticized by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, an organization led by William vanden Heuvel, a lawyer, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The attempt to discredit Abandonment has been central to their campaign to rearrange the history of the Holocaust years to show that Roosevelt and his administration did virtually all that was possible to save the European Jews. This assertion, however, contradicts not only my work but the views of numerous other historians.
Robert Dallek considered Roosevelt's "cautious response to appeals for help" for the European Jews an "unnecessary and destructive" compromise of moral principles. Robert Herzstein wrote that "historians may properly condemn Roosevelt for his policy toward refugees," a policy that he described as one of FDR's "three great failures." Alan Brinkley commented that "this is not an issue on which Roosevelt's reputation for greatness will rest. Quite the contrary -- the record is quite poor." William Leuchtenburg called that record "shameful." Frank Freidel told the New York Times: "I'm afraid what Wyman has found is all true -- his portrait of Roosevelt is unflattering but it's fair." Doris Kearns Goodwin concluded that "one must also concede [Roosevelt's] failures of vision that led to the forcible relocation of the Japanese Americans, and the lack of a more decisive response to the extermination of the European Jews.... Eleanor's failure to force her husband to admit more refugees remained, her son Jimmy later said, 'her deepest regret at the end of her life.'" The list could go on and on.
Vanden Heuvel, Schlesinger, and the Roosevelt Institute, well aware of this near-consensus of historical thought, convened a conference of scholars at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in late 1993. The objective was to try to deal with what the institute described as "the opinion expressed with growing frequency during the preceding twenty-five years that Franklin D. Roosevelt personally, as well as individuals and institutions within his administration, failed to rescue the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust and, therefore, bear some responsibility for the death of six million Jews." I was not invited to the conference, though the report on its proceedings noted that The Abandonment of the Jews "set the tone for much of the debate."
In April 1994, five months after the conference, PBS's American Experience Series of documentary films broadcast America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. I was historical adviser for the film but the filmmaker, Martin Ostrow, carefully studied all of the relevant scholarship and consulted with several historians in carrying out his project. The resulting film was not aimed at Roosevelt but, given the historical record, it could not present a favorable picture of his policies and actions. Schlesinger and vanden Heuvel obtained an advance print of the film and were very displeased with it. They mailed a packet of material attacking the film's credibility to television critics across the country. The main component of that packet was the heavily flawed review of Abandonment which Lucy Dawidowicz had published in This World more than eight years earlier. This strategy was undoubtedly a factor in the negative reviews of the film by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, and in a few additional attacks in the print media. But across the country most reviews and other reactions to the film were positive. The broadcast scored a high rating for audience size and America and the Holocaust went on to win several film awards.
One lasting effect of the film on the Roosevelt Institute has been to spur a continuing effort to discredit the scholarly standing of The Abandonment of the Jews. In January 1996, the institute published FDR and the Holocaust, edited by Verne Newton, director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. This small volume, which grew out of the conference at the Roosevelt Library, was mainly an attack on my work. It opened with a twenty-six-page summary of the conference. The rest of the book consisted largely of previously published essays, most of which either dealt favorably (or very gently) with Roosevelt's record on the Holocaust or criticized The Abandonment of the Jews. Because there are not many such articles, the Roosevelt Institute's selection was narrow. Henry Feingold, Richard Breitman, and Michael Marrus, along with Schlesinger and vanden Heuvel, accounted for eight of the twelve chapters. Two other chapters were long essays assailing the section in Abandonment that examined the question of bombing the Auschwitz gas chambers. As far as anyone has yet discovered, this issue did not involve Roosevelt at all.
One of the Auschwitz bombing essays was produced by Richard Levy, a nuclear engineer with no training or background in historical scholarship. It was based on virtually no archival sources and it is marked by glaring errors and omissions. The other was by James Kitchens III, who has a Ph.D. in early modern French history and, by his own acknowledgment, "is not expert" in Holocaust studies. He did, however, spend several years as an employee at the U.S. Air Force Historical Research Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Both sought to excuse the U.S. War Department's refusal in 1944 even to look into the possibilities of bombing the gas chambers. Both bypassed the matter of the War Department's deceit in replying to the requests for bombing. Neither was willing to discuss the facts that industrial targets at Auschwitz were twice bombed in force during the summer of 1944 and that hundreds and hundreds of American bombers struck other targets within fifty miles of the killing installations.
Vanden Heuvel, however, was especially impressed with Levy's arguments that the United States could not have effectively bombed the Auschwitz gas chambers and that, in any case, Jewish leaders at the time had never seriously proposed such an attack. Accordingly, he supported Levy in his effort to bring the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to change its exhibit on the Auschwitz bombing question. In May 1996, the museum revised that exhibit to include the statement that: "A few Jewish leaders called for the bombing of the Auschwitz gas chambers; others opposed it." This modification is historically inaccurate. More than ten Jewish leaders and three Jewish organizations supported the bombing and only one Jewish leader is known to have opposed it. Levy and vanden Heuvel have continued to press for additional changes in the museum's exhibit.
In December 1996, the New York Times Magazine published a vanden Heuvel article entitled "The Holocaust Was No Secret." Its subheading was: "Churchill knew. We all knew; and couldn't do anything about it -- except win the war." In this essay, vanden Heuvel, quoting a forthcoming book by a British professor, William Rubinstein, maintained "that not one plan or proposal, made anywhere in the democracies by either Jews or non-Jewish champions of the Jews after the Nazi conquest of Europe, could have rescued one single Jew who perished in the Holocaust." This ran directly counter to the facts regarding the achievements of Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest and many other (though sadly too few) rescue actions that did take place. Vanden Heuvel, drawing on Levy's claims, also contended that bombing the Auschwitz gas chambers "was never seriously suggested." The New York Times Magazine reported that it received hundreds of letters challenging vanden Heuvel's remarks.
Rubinstein's book was published in September 1997. It was called The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. Its main target was, in the author's words, Wyman's "egregiously and ahistorically inaccurate" work. The book's thesis appeared in its opening sentence: "No Jew who perished during the Nazi Holocaust could have been saved by any action which the Allies could have taken." This claim is as preposterous as it is sensational. Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands more could have been saved by a stronger and earlier commitment to rescue.
The Myth of Rescue included no new information, for Rubinstein did no archival research. What was unusual about the book was the attempt to rescind the factual record of the responses of the United States and Britain to the Holocaust. Also unusual was its sweeping arrogance: "All of the many studies which criticise the Allies ... for having failed to rescue Jews during the Holocaust are inaccurate and misleading, their arguments illogical and ahistorical." Actually, it was Rubinstein's book that abounded in inaccuracies; they appeared on page after page, virtually at any point where one opened the volume. Its logic was often convoluted, even bizarre. For instance, Rubinstein maintained that there was little isolationism and almost no anti-Semitism in the United States of the 1930s and the pre- earl Harbor 1940s. Inconsistencies also marked the book. "No person or group in the democracies," he asserted in his chapter on the bombing of Auschwitz, "proposed the destruction of any extermination camp." Three pages later he pointed out that "suggestions to bomb both the rail lines and the extermination camps were now made," and less than three pages after that he noted that the director of the War Refugee Board wrote to the War Department "officially advocating the bombing of Auschwitz."
Walter Laqueur's review of The Myth of Rescue was sharply to the point. He referred to Rubinstein's "willful ignorance and lack of judgment," and to his book as part of a new genre of writings about World War II that are "flatly and often outrageously wrong." He also asserted that the book was "part and parcel of the new trend of staking out unsustainable claims in a preposterous way." Reacting to Schlesinger's description of the book as a "commanding work of historical criticism," Laqueur declared that it was "anything but."
Schlesinger and vanden Heuvel championed Rubinstein's book because it upheld one of the two main arguments in their campaign to rehabilitate Roosevelt's image. The argument was that little had been possible in the way of rescue and FDR and his administration did practically everything that could have been done. This, however, ran contrary to a very large amount of historical evidence, including the strongly pro-Roosevelt Treasury Department's findings that were carefully summarized in 1944 in the "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews." Rubinstein's supposed demonstration that no rescue had been possible would, they hoped, cut the ground from under those who criticized FDR for taking so little action.
The other main argument presented by Schlesinger and vanden Heuvel to rationalize Roosevelt's failure was that FDR won the war and thus saved the European Jews who survived. This echoed the Roosevelt administration's claim at the time that the only way to help the Jews was to win the war as quickly as possible (which of course was already happening). As if it were a choice between winning the war and rescuing Jews. There was no conflict between the rescue proposals submitted to Washington and the most rapid possible pursuit of victory. No one, Jewish or otherwise, suggested diverting the war effort to save Jews. Proof that rescue efforts could go forward without interfering with the war effort, and that winning the war was not the only way to save Jews, came when Roosevelt himself established a government rescue agency, the War Refugee Board. Beyond that, it is specious to imply that the war was fought in any way to save the Jews. There were several important Allied war aims, but saving Jews was not among them. That a small Jewish remnant managed to survive in Europe until Hitler's defeat is hardly an adequate excuse for the failure to have attempted to save as many of the others as possible. As Deborah Lipstadt has pointed out, and as Jewish leaders warned at the time, Washington's "policy of 'rescue through victory' [was] a policy which meant that when victory came there was virtually no one left to rescue."
In many countries, the process of acknowledging and dealing with the actions of their nations during the Holocaust has moved slowly or has only recently begun. In the United States, however, recognition of the failed American response to the European Jewish catastrophe was widespread by the end of the 1980s. One of the saddest aspects of the attempts in the 1990s to justify that shameful record is that they reflect a continuing inability or unwillingness on the part of some Americans to confront a disturbing historical reality that has long since been revealed.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
[i] The three examples that Dawidowicz used to point to a Jewish state's probable impact are little different from items three, four, and five of the series of twelve rescue plans that I discussed in Abandonment.
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