-Caveat Lector-
FDR's Auschwitz Secret
In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, historian Michael Beschloss
reveals the untold story of how Franklin Roosevelt decided against
bombing the Nazi death camp
By Michael Beschloss
NEWSWEEK
Oct. 14 issue For six decades, historians have debated the Allied
reaction to Adolf Hitler's "final solution." Amid the complexities of
war
and the fog of battle, could Washington and London have done more to
save
Europe's Jews? Why not try to save Jewish lives by bombing the death
camps and rail lines to Auschwitz.
REVERED IN MEMORY as a great war president,
Franklin Roosevelt has
always been at the center of the mystery. For generations historians
have
had no firsthand evidence that FDR was directly involved in the
decision
not to attack Auschwitz. Here, in an exclusive book excerpt from "The
Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany
1941-1945" (Simon & Schuster), Michael Beschloss provides a surprising
new account of what the president actually knew and what he said and
did.
By the summer of 1944, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had murdered
millions of Jews. Jewish leaders implored Winston Churchill and
Franklin
Roosevelt to try to slow the killing by bombing the death complex at
Auschwitz and the railroad lines that supplied it.
For almost two years, Churchill and FDR had been quietly
receiving
evidence of Hitler's ghastly effort to remove an entire people from
the
face of the earth. Churchill appeared interested in a military strike
against the camps. He told his Foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, that
Hitler's war against the Jews was "probably the greatest and most
horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,"
adding:
"Get everything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me, if
necessary." In July 1944 Churchill was told that U.S. bomber pilots
could
do the job best, but that it would be "costly and hazardous."
But America was the senior partner in the alliance. Washington
would have to make the call. Today FDR's most stalwart defenders
insist
that the best way to save Jews was to win the European war as quickly
as
possible. Some argue that bombing might have only briefly stopped the
slaughter, before the Nazis rebuilt the camps or used other swift and
brutal means of killing Jews -- and that it would have killed Jewish
inmates. But the eloquent Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel wishes that
the
Americans had bombed Auschwitz, noting that he and his fellow inmates
"were no longer afraid of death -- at any rate, not of that death."
In Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry
Morgenthau, Jr., was
heartsick over what he was discovering about the murder of the Jews of
Europe. A Hudson Valley neighbor of FDR's, Morgenthau was Roosevelt's
closest friend in the government and only the second Jew in U.S.
history
to be in a president's Cabinet. He was, however, so unobservant a Jew
that he had never attended a Passover Seder.
Morgenthau had long refrained from jeopardizing his friendship
with Roosevelt -- which he called the "most important thing" in his
life -- by
special pleading on Jewish matters. After World War II began, FDR had
privately said to Morgenthau and a Catholic appointee, Leo Crowley,
"You
know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here
under sufferance." He bluntly told them it was "up to you" to "go
along
with anything I want."
But the Holocaust had radicalized Morgenthau. Even if it meant
antagonizing Roosevelt, the Treasury secretary was bent on trying to
slow
the killing and also crush postwar Germany with a plan to make the
conquered country "stew in its own juice." When Secretary of War Henry
Stimson told Morgenthau that his plan was too harsh on the Germans,
Morgenthau replied that it was "not nearly as bad" as sending people
"to
gas chambers."
Morgenthau consented to have his former aide John Pehle, director of
the
War Refugee Board, cautiously explore whether bombing Auschwitz and/or
the rail lines might save a serious number of Jewish lives. The matter
was referred to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, who had so
exasperated Morgenthau by refusing to let the U.S. military help save
Jewish refugees that Morgenthau had privately denounced McCloy as an
"oppressor of the Jews." (McCloy had vehemently denied the charge.)
McCloy saw the Auschwitz bombing proposal as a flagrant violation of
FDR's demand that U.S. military resources be used only for direct
efforts
to win the war. Flatly and repeatedly, McCloy said no.
Much of the modern indignation at the American failure to bomb
Auschwitz has been centered on John McCloy. At best McCloy has been
excoriated for his bullheaded concentration on traditional military
targets; at worst he has been attacked for callous indifference to the
murder of the Jews.
Didn't McCloy discuss such an important matter with the
president? For decades after World War II, when interviewed about the
subject, McCloy insisted that he did not. He told Washington Post
reporter Morton Mintz in 1983 that he "never talked" with FDR about
bombing Auschwitz. In a 2000 book, "The Bombing of Auschwitz," scholar
Richard Levy concluded: "If McCloy is to be faulted, his fault must
lie
in having failed to go to the President himself."
But new information suggests that the man who made the
ultimate
decision not to bomb Auschwitz may not have been John McCloy but
Franklin
Roosevelt himself. In 1986, three years before his death, McCloy had a
taped private conversation -- unpublished before now --with
Morgenthau's son
Henry III, who was researching a family memoir. Frail but articulate
and
alert throughout the conversation, the 91-year-old McCloy told
Morgenthau
that of course he had personally raised with FDR the possibility of
bombing Auschwitz. McCloy said, +IBw-I remember talking one time with
Mr.
Roosevelt about it, and he was irate. He said, "Why, the idea!...
They'll
only move it down the road a little way." (This referred to the
prospect that the Nazis would have built other death mills to continue
the killing.) McCloy recalled that the president "made it very clear"
to
him that bombing Auschwitz "wouldn't have done any good."
According to McCloy, Roosevelt told him that bombing Auschwitz
would be "provocative" to the Nazis and he wouldn't "have anything to
do"
with the idea. McCloy said that FDR warned him that Americans would be
accused of "bombing these innocent people" at Auschwitz, adding,
"We'll
be accused of participating in this horrible business!"
In his 1986 conversation with Morgenthau's son, McCloy went on to say,
"I
didn't want to bomb Auschwitz... It seemed to be a bunch of fanatic
Jews
who seemed to think that if you didn't bomb, it was an indication of
lack
of venom against Hitler. Whereas the president had the idea that that
would be more provocative and ineffective. And he took a very strong
stand."
If we presume that the old man's memory was sound and that he
was
telling the truth, McCloy had concealed FDR's personal refusal to bomb
Auschwitz for forty-two years. (McCloy's private papers offer no
account
of his remembered conversation with FDR; nor do they document every
exchange he had on sensitive wartime issues.) Perhaps McCloy had been
motivated by his old-fashioned notion of public service, which
demanded
protecting the secrecy of presidential conversations and deflecting
criticism from the boss.
Why did McCloy change his story in 1986? Smarting from public
criticism
over Auschwitz, he may have grown tired of bearing the sole burden of
what had become the most hotly debated decision of the Roosevelt
presidency -- especially among American Jews who had once hailed FDR
as
their hero. But there might also have been another reason. It could
not
be wholly coincidental that the outsider to whom McCloy insisted that
Franklin Roosevelt, not he, was cardinally responsible for the failure
to
bomb Auschwitz was the son of the Jewish Treasury secretary who had
once
accused McCloy of being an "oppressor of the Jews."
John McCloy was a man so respected that he was once called the
"chairman" of the American Establishment. His firsthand testimony is
the
first serious evidence we have that it was Franklin Roosevelt who made
one of history's most crucial decisions -- and of the president+IBk-s
rationale
in making it. Based on McCloy's account, FDR made his decision on
Auschwitz after little or no consultation with his key advisers.
Historians will probably argue until the end of time whether or not
Auschwitz should have been bombed. But as the United States
contemplates
war against Iraq, the story of FDR's choice not to bomb shows us how a
wartime president may issue a swift and quiet ruling which, though it
may
not seem pivotal at the time, could prove to be one of the decisions
for
which history most remembers him.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
>From "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss. C. 2002 by Michael
Beschloss.
To be published by Simon & Schuster.
C. 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/817172.asp
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