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THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS -- AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST, 1941-1945 |
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PREFACE TO THE 2007 EDITION
To mark the twentieth anniversary of The Abandonment of the Jews the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, the leading scholarly publication in its field, devoted its Fall 2003 edition to an assessment of the significance and impact of Abandonment. In my afterword to that issue I emphasized the need for additional research on many aspects of America's response to the Holocaust. I had never expected Abandonment to be the last word on the subject. On the contrary, I have been pleased to discover that my work has played some role in stimulating younger scholars to delve into topics that I had not addressed in depth, since they were not central to my narrative.
Scholarly interest in these subjects has increased significantly in recent years. Moreover, there has been a continued, even growing, public interest in understanding the ways in which Americans responded to the persecution of German and Austrian Jewry in the 1930s and then the mass murder of Jews throughout Axis-occupied Europe in the 1940s.
An important example of this trend is the surge of interest in the rescue mission to Vichy France by the young American journalist Varian Fry in 1940-1941. I had the good fortune to interview Mr. Fry for my first book, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941, and to make reference to his lifesaving activity. In recent years, Fry became the first American to be named one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" by Israel's Holocaust center, Yad Vashem; he was the subject of two biographies; his own memoir, Surrender on Demand, was republished by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; a dramatic film about Fry debuted at the White House, and a documentary by the filmmaker Pierre Sauvage is in the works; a street in Fry's hometown, in New Jersey, was renamed in his honor; and a campaign is underway to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp.
The latter honor is being pursued in the wake of the issuing, in early 2006, of a postage stamp honoring Fry's "partner in the 'crime' of saving lives," as he dubbed him, the U.S. vice-consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV. The Bingham stamp came about as a result of a years-long nationwide petition campaign, itself indicative of the growing public awareness of the handful of Americans who took part in rescue activity. Nor is Bingham the only one of Fry's collaborators to win belated public recognition. The Reverend Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha in 2006 became the second and third Americans to be named "Righteous Among the Nations." As emissaries of the Unitarian Church, they worked closely with Fry to rescue refugees from the Nazis in France. The forthcoming book by Dr. Susan Sabak will shed important additional light on the Unitarian movement's rescue activity in Europe.
The tragic corollary to the Sharps' extraordinary bravery was the silence and indifference with which most American Christians responded to the news of the annihilation of Europe's Jews. I briefly revisited this topic in the aforementioned issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, in a previously unpublished exchange between Dr. Eugene]. Fisher of the United States Catholic Conference and myself, concerning U.S. Catholic responses to the Holocaust. Further studies of the responses of America's various Christian churches and organizations to the Holocaust are long overdue. While there were some American Christian religious leaders, and some church organizational structures, who did press for U.S. rescue action, they were very few. We need to know more about what happened and why.
Fry and his network were able to bring more than two thousand Jewish and political refugees from Vichy France to the United States on the eve of the Holocaust, hut that was a very small number compared to what was needed. The desperate search for havens for European Jews in the late 1930s was almost always unsuccessful. Still, small rays of hope did shine on some far-flung corners of the globe. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Racelle Weiman, founding director of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the public is learning about how the American governor of the Philippines, Paul McNutt, brought more than one thousand German Jewish refugees to that U.S. territory during 1937 to 1939 over the objections of the State Department.
The pursuit of those elusive havens emerges more deafly when seen through the lens of the U.S. consul officials in Europe prior to 1941. Bat-Ami Zucker's important recent book, In Search of Refuge: Jews and U.S. Consuls in Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2001), chronicles the efforts these gatekeepers made to keep Jewish refugees away from America's shores.
Much additional research needs to be done on many aspects of the U.S. response to the plight of German Jewry in the 1930s. I am pleased to note the significant work undertaken recently by professors Stephen Norwood and Laurel Leff. Norwood's studies of the academic community's response to Nazism break new, albeit painful, ground, as he has uncovered evidence that the leaders of America's elite universities sought to develop good relations with the Hitler regime. His lengthy essay on the relations between Harvard president James Conant and the Nazis, published in American Jewish History, is jarring.
Left's most recent research found that very few U.S. newspaper publishers, and only one of the dozens of American journalism schools, were willing to hire German Jewish refugee journalists-their own professional colleagues-who were seeking positions in the United States in order to escape Hitler. (The school that was the exception hired just one refugee, as a researcher.) In response to Leff's findings, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies mobilized more than eighty journalism school deans and faculty to pressure the Newspaper Association of America to express regret for its predecessor's actions in the 1930s.
Although such expressions of remorse obviously cannot undo the damage done seven decades ago, they constitute an important step in the necessary process of our society coming to grips with the Allies' woeful response to the Holocaust and learning lessons from that dark experience.
Professor Leff has also recently authored the award-winning book, Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a masterful study of how the New York Times covered the Holocaust, and how that coverage affected public knowledge and the Roosevelt administration's response. It is the best book yet written on media coverage of the Holocaust and is likely to remain the gold standard for the topic for a long time to come.
Other U.S. publications of prominence, such as Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, and The Nation, merit scholarly scrutiny as well. Columnists and commentators should also be considered, ranging from Max Lerner, who actively promoted rescue, to Walter Lippmann, who refused to mention the plight of Europe's Jews in his columns.
Much further study of American Jewry's response is needed, including examination of Jewish leaders, organizations, local communities and synagogues, as well as the Jewish press. At the same time, I am glad to note the work that has been done in recent years, including essays in several scholarly journals by Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff and the book he and I coauthored, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America} and the Holocaust (The New Press, 2002).
Other books of note concerning the activities of Bergson's group include Medoff's Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948 (University of Alabama Press, 2002) and Prof. Judith Tydor Baumel's The "Bergson Boys" and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy (Syracuse University Press, 2005). Prof. Joseph Ansell's biography, Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole (Littmann, 2004), helps us understand Szyk's unique dual position as one of the leading artists of his generation and a senior activist with the Bergsonites.
The Bergson group's impressive ability to forge alliances with disparate groups should be more closely examined. Within the Jewish community, the Bergsonites collaborated with the Orthodox rabbinical leadership to bring more than four hundred rabbis to Washington in October 1943 to march for rescue. Already, recent scholarship by Efraim Zuroff, Haskel Lookstein, and David Kranzler has added significantly to the literature on U.S. Orthodox Jewry's response to the Holocaust, including that historic march.
Beyond the Jewish community, Bergson managed to forge important alliances with prominent members of other ethnic groups to bolster his campaigns for U.S. rescue action. The Wyman Institute has undertaken pioneering research on the involvement of prominent African Americans in the Bergson group. Additional scholarly exploration of the topic will help fill the gaps in our understanding of how various segments of American society reacted to the persecution of European Jewry.
Studies are needed of members of Congress who were important to the issue of rescue. They would deal with those who fought for rescue action, especially senators Guy Gillette, Elbert Thomas, and Edwin Johnson, and Congressmen Will Rogers Jr., Emanuel Celler, and others. The governor of Utah's 2005 decision to proclaim a statewide "Elbert Thomas Day" (another Wyman Institute project) to commemorate the senator's Holocaust rescue work is an appropriate honor that needs to be followed by scholarly examination. Those who stalled or blocked rescue action also merit attention. They would include, for example, Congressman Sol Bloom, and such people as Senator Robert R Reynolds and others involved with the adamant and active anti-immigration movement.
The roles of President Franklin Roosevelt, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and FDR's cabinet members and senior advisers also require further exploration and analysis. Prof. Greg Robinson's study of Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese Americans, By Order of the President (Harvard University Press, 2001), revealed significant new information about FDR's racially exclusionist conception of American society. Understanding the role Roosevelt envisioned for Asian Americans, Jews, and blacks in the life and culture of the United States may provide another clue to the mindset that shaped his policy decisions concerning Jewish refugees from Hitler.
The second volume of Prof. Blanche Wiesen Cook's magisterial biography, Eleanor Roosevelt (Viking Penguin, 1999), helped clarify the First Lady's knowledge of the unfolding disaster for German Jewry and the factors affecting her ability and willingness to influence FDR's refugee policy. The forthcoming third and final volume, which will cover the period including the Holocaust, should be even more enlightening.
Dr. Bat-Ami Zucker's recent research on Labor Secretary Frances Perkins sheds light on one of the few cabinet members who actively lobbied for aid to the refugees. The time has also come for full-length studies of the efforts on behalf of rescue by Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., as well as the senior Treasury aides who subsequently staffed the War Refugee Board, such as John Pehle and Josiah E. DuBois Jr. Many years ago, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, my academic home throughout my teaching career, offered me the opportunity to name my chair; I chose to name it after DuBois. More recently, I was pleased to speak about him at a Wyman Institute conference focusing on DuBois's life and work.
The illusory search for havens in the 1930s took on added urgency, indeed desperation, in the 1940s, when being trapped in Europe meant facing near-certain death at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Monty Noam Penkower's Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945 (Frank Cass, 2002) describes how the fate of Palestine, the most feasible of the prospective havens, fell victim to the cold calculations of Allied diplomacy.
No part of Abandonment generated more controversy than my chapter on the Roosevelt administration's rejection of requests to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz and the railroads leading to Auschwitz. Scholarly and popular interest in the topic remains high, more than two decades after I first wrote about it. Public discussion of the issue has benefited greatly from Stuart Erdheim's important documentary film, They Looked Away, and the videotaped interview by Erdheim and Israel Television's Chaim Hecht with George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee who as a young U.S. pilot in 1944 overflew Auschwitz to bomb nearby oil factories. The Wyman Institute showed the interview to a House International Relations Committee task force in 2004. Also notable are Prof. Paul Miller's essays about the bombing issue in several scholarly publications; and Prof. Joseph Bendersky's masterful book, The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (Basic Books, 2000), which documented the racist and anti-Semitic teachings prevalent in U.S. military academies during the interwar era and how they shaped attitudes toward Jews and the Holocaust-and the bombing issue-in the American military.
Slowly but surely, the American public is coming to grips with the tragic fact that our beloved nation failed, and failed dismally, when confronted with one of history's most compelling moral challenges. The public's interest is a heartening development, because learning the lessons from the mistakes of the Hitler years is crucial to preventing them from recurring. They are lessons of paramount importance, because at bottom, they are lessons about tolerance, human values, and justice.
David S. Wyman September 2006
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