The Abandonment Of The Jews: America And The Holocaust, 1941-1945 – David S. Wyman, 1984 ★★★

The Cavalry Took Its Time

On Sunday, August 20, 1944, 127 American heavy bombers flew over Upper Silesia in western Poland, dropping 1,336 500-pound high-explosive bombs on synthetic-oil plants fueling Germany’s war against Russia. They left alone another Nazi operation just five miles away, a murder complex at Auschwitz.

A targeted operation against Auschwitz that day could have saved tens of thousands, including 15-year-old Anne Frank, arrested in Holland earlier that same month and transported to Auschwitz in September. Instead, then and later, Americans ignored the opportunity to strike a blow for humanity, particularly Jews. According to David Wyman, this callousness characterized American strategy throughout World War II.

“Most likely, it would not have been possible to rescue millions,” Wyman notes in The Abandonment Of The Jews: America And The Holocaust, 1941-1945. “But without impeding the war effort, additional tens of thousands – probably hundreds of thousands – could have been saved.”

With a title like that, it was impossible for The Abandonment Of The Jews not to attract controversy in its day, with the Holocaust still living history for so many. Today, it comes across as overtly polemical, especially given the fact Americans were fighting a war against Nazi oppression at the time. But Wyman’s book, however much it strains for effect in places, tells a powerful story which still resonates today.

An aerial view of the Birkenau extermination camp at Auschwitz in September 1944, as American bombs meant for a chemical plant fall nearby. David Wyman argues that the massive crematorium and rail lines made for clear targets from the air; precision strikes could have been made on the gas chambers, too. Image from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Why-wasnt-Auschwitz-bombed-717594.

There were many reasons for American slackness in saving the Jews, Wyman writes, including bureaucracy, lack of clarity about what was going on behind enemy lines, cost concerns, a commitment to total war, infighting amongst Jews themselves, and lack of support from British and Russian allies. But underlying everything else was anti-Semitism.

Sure Americans fought a long and bloody war against the Third Reich. But they stepped over several opportunities along the way to rescue Jews in territory about to be occupied by the Nazis. In addition to not bombing Auschwitz, Americans declined overtures to bribe enemy leaders or lift the barricade on Hitler’s Europe just enough to slip in supplies designated for Jewish prisoners.

Wyman notes how vigorously government leaders blocked attempts at allowing Jewish refugees to emigrate into the United States:

Between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war in Europe, approximately 21,000 refugees, most of them Jewish, entered the United States. That number constituted 10 percent of the quota places legally available to people from Axis-controlled European countries in those years. Thus 90 percent of those quotas – nearly 190,000 openings – went unused while the mass murder of European Jewry ran its course.

David Wyman in 1984. Abandonment Of The Jews was a follow-up to his examination of American handling of Jewish refugees before entering the war, Paper Walls: America And The Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941. A grandson of Protestant ministers, he died in 2018. Image from his March 16 obituary in the Washington Post.

Jew hatred ran deep and strong in some quarters of American life. Suspicions were raised that a president with a Jewish-sounding name like Roosevelt sent others to war so Jews could profit safely at home.

Wyman quotes a parody of the Marines’ Hymn, which he notes enjoyed broad popularity on the home front:

“So it’s onward into battle,

Let us send the Christian slobs.

When the war is done and Victory won,

All us Jews will have their jobs.”

In the U. S. State Department, resistance to lifting the refugee quota and allowing in more Jews was particularly strong. When the U. S. legation in Bern, Switzerland passed on reports of mass murder against the Jews in August 1942, State Department officials kept the report buried through autumn. One high-ranking official, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, brazenly misled Congress about the numbers of Jews refugees taken in and so undercut rescue efforts.

Breckinridge Long. Wyman identifies him as a key roadblock to saving Jews, though Wyman adds it was not clear he did so for anti-Semitic motives. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau did bring it up at a meeting: “Well, Breck, as long as you raise the question, we might be a little frank. The impression is all around that you, particularly, are anti-Semitic!” Photograph by Myron Davis of Life magazine from https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/personal-story/breckinridge-long

“The ugly truth is that anti-Semitism was a definite factor in the bitter opposition to the President’s request for power to suspend immigration laws for the duration,” Newsweek would report in 1942.

Such contemporary reporting about the Jewish refugee situation was, alas, not the norm. Wyman notes how the mainstream media so ignored evidence of mass slaughter underway that when Allied troops began liberating concentration camps within Germany, even the generals were shocked by the carnage they found.

Wyman’s thesis assumes more could have been done to save Jews than simply winning a war. Of course, such a point of view came much easier 40 years after the war had already been won.

When pressed to support rescue efforts for trapped Jews, Eleanor Roosevelt’s reply was typical of American liberals: Let’s focus now on winning the war. “War is a ruthless business,” she wrote in her syndicated column. “It cannot be conducted along humanitarian lines.”

Many but not all of America's advocates for saving Jews came from the left. Some right-wingers, like William Randolph Hearst, were vocal, too. Read one Hearst newspaper editorial: “REMEMBER, Americans, THIS IS NOT A JEWISH PROBLEM. It is a HUMAN PROBLEM.” Image from https://dreamdogsart.typepad.com/art/2012/11/everyday-dogs-a-perpetual-calendar.html.

Not everyone made the Jewish question as low a priority. In Germany, Hitler was full-speed ahead on the subject, redirecting railroad traffic, assigning personnel and resources, and foregoing an acute need for slave labor, all for the sake of killing as many Jews as quickly as possible.

“To kill the Jews, the Nazis were willing to weaken their capacity to fight the war,” Wyman writes. “The United States and its allies, however, were willing to attempt almost nothing to save them.”

There is a shrillness, here and in other places, that I felt undercut Wyman’s case. You feel him pressing at times to justify his book’s inflammatory title. In the main, his book lays out a convincing case, not of abandonment, but of diminished concern at a time of dire need.

Some of the worst examples of Allied callousness involve hypothetical rather than actual situations. For example, there was a fear among several key Allied leaders that Hitler might liberate millions of Jews at once, to hobble logistics and free up German resources. Harold Dodds, who led a 1942 Anglo-American conference on Jewish aid in Bermuda, popped the question: “Suppose he [Hitler] did let 2,000,000 or so Jews out of Europe, what would we do with them?”

After considerable pressure, the U. S. government opened a single camp for 982 predominately Jewish refugees in Oswego, New York in August 1944. Crowded conditions and restrictions on movement outside the camp led to much turmoil, Wyman notes in a chapter entitled "Late and Little." Image from https://www.wrvo.org/post/oswego-played-key-role-another-refugee-debate.

As far as the British were concerned, one thing not to do with them was put them in Palestine. Allowing Jewish resettlement in the ancient Jewish homeland was a no-go zone, and a stumbling block to getting British cooperation in everything else, from dedicating available ships for moving Jewish refugees to facilitating their evacuation from wavering Axis allies like Bulgaria and Hungary when opportunities arose.

“I don’t know how we can blame the Germans for killing them when we are doing this,” Wyman quotes a U. S. Treasury Department official noting. “The law calls [it] para-delicto, of equal guilt…”

The Russians were even worse in this regard, putting their foot down at any attempts made by Americans to negotiate the fates of Jews with German leaders like SS commander Heinrich Himmler. They even captured and executed a Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who had been directing a successful effort, co-managed with members of the U. S. War Refugee Board [WRB], to save Jews in Hungary.

Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest, Hungary in July 1944. He was taken away the following January by Soviet troops and never heard from again. In between, Wyman claims, he was "directly responsible" for saving 20,000 Jewish refugees and "critical" to the survival of many times more. Image from https://rwi.lu.se/about/about-raoul-wallenberg/.

If the Americans weren’t the worst of the foot-draggers on their side of the war, Wyman notes, they did little to raise the bar morally by pressing for greater attention to the Jewish problem.

Not all of Wyman’s book is an attack on American policy. He notes the WRB’s record, while not perfect, was at least significant:

Despite many difficulties and Germany’s determination to exterminate the Jews, the board helped save tens of thousands of lives…Their dedication broke America’s indifference to the destruction of European Jewry, thereby helping to salvage, in some degree, the nation’s conscience.

There was also the Treasury Department, leaders of which took on Breckinridge Long and the State Department and exposed their efforts to soft-pedal the Holocaust. Jewish leaders, and some Christians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Francis Cardinal Spellman, urged more action, too.

Franklin Roosevelt addresses Congress in January, 1944. Wyman criticizes FDR's failure to use his media bullhorn more vigorously to press for rescue actions. "Franklin Roosevelt's indifference to so momentous an historical event as the systemic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency," Wyman writes. Image from https://billmoyers.com/2014/03/07/remembering-franklin-delano-roosevelt-and-the-second-bill-of-rights/

One American conspicuous to Wyman by his lack of action was President Franklin Roosevelt, who avoided pressing matters of Jewish immigration with his cabinet or his allies. He stalled for months before forming the WRB, then gave it little attention. Once, Wyman notes, he even left the White House to avoid meeting a delegation of rabbis on the matter. Enjoying the support of American Jews no matter what he did, FDR did less than he could.

Even when rescue policies were attempted, Wyman notes, American Jewish organizations were often expected to foot the bill. The WRB located Jewish escape routes via neutral countries like Turkey, Sweden, and Spain, but spent only $547,000 in government funds facilitating the exodus. The rest came from Jewish groups like the Joint Distribution Committee [over $15 million], the Orthodox rescue committee Vaad Hahatzala [$1 million], and the World Jewish Congress [over $300,000].

The book is at times a catch-basin of complaint; Wyman notes such small beer as schoolyard taunting and Roosevelt’s failure to single out Jewish victims when denouncing Nazi war crimes as if they bear equal weight to the gamesmanship at the State Department. But the essence of the book is a reasonable, well-laid-out examination of failure to achieve optimal results at a time of gravest crisis. Not a happy read, but a sobering one.