Prelude to Catastrophe:
FDR’s Jews and the Menace of Nazism
By Robert Shogan
Ivan R. Dee, 312 pages
American Jewry will never cease to be haunted by the question: Could we have done more to rescue the victims of the Nazi Holocaust? It’s a question that has gained new resonance in our time, as the rulers of Iran race to complete a nuclear weapon. And it’s the question that occupies center place in a new book by the veteran reporter Robert Shogan. Prelude to Catastrophe offers a series of profiles of Jews who held positions of special political influence during the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Before 1933, the idea of Jews exerting wide influence in a U.?S. presidential administration would have seemed outlandish, if not improper. There might be a lone Oscar Straus or Bernard Baruch. But now, suddenly, there were many leading figures: Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, presidential adviser Felix Frankfurter, treasury secretary Hans Morgenthau, presidential speechwriter and confidant Sam Rosenman (coiner of the phrase “New Deal”), master legislative draftsman Ben Cohen, and so on.
By terrible and torturing coincidence, Jews arrived as participants in American public life at exactly the moment that Adolf Hitler arrived in power in Germany. “FDR’s Jews” (as Shogan terms them) one and all wrestled with the hard question of what they could and should do for the Jews of Europe. In Shogan’s assessment, all fell short, but not equally short.
The man who emerges by far the worst from Shogan’s pages is Felix Frankfurter, so consumed with maintaining his access to the president that he never puts that access to any use. In letters to friends, Frankfurter expresses his wishes that he weren’t Jewish, so that he could speak up without being accused of undue partiality to his own people—but of course, he is Jewish, and so he cannot. It’s not an appetizing performance.
Yet suppose Frankfurter had done differently. Suppose the whole American Jewish community had done differently. How much difference could they have made? This is the part of the story that Shogan does not address. And yet it is worth thinking about, and thinking hard.
Today we know the story of World War II. But the Americans of the 1930s did not know that story. They did not know that Britain and France would remain on the defensive and leave Poland to face Germany alone. They did not know that the Polish army of 30 divisions (an army that had defeated the Soviet Union in 1920) would be destroyed in just three weeks. They did not know that France would collapse. They did not know that Hitler would invade the Soviet Union and reach all the way to Moscow. In almost every measurable way, Germany was weaker in 1939 than in 1914. Its army was smaller, its resources more straitened, its allies weaker, its enemies stronger. Who would have imagined in 1938 that the Jews of Paris, Lvov, Salonika, Zagreb, and Vilnius stood as desperately in danger as the Jews of Berlin and Vienna?
Instead, what American Jewry grappled with through the 1930s was the fate of the million-plus Jews in the German-speaking lands. About half those people would find refuge; about half would perish. But even had the American Jewish community been brilliantly successful in obtaining refuge for all of them, it would have achieved pitifully little in comparison with the impending catastrophe.
Once the German army burst through the borders and the killing began, refuge was no longer the thing needed. Something else had to be done. Historians of the Holocaust have agonized over what that “something” might have been. Bombing the gas chambers at Auschwitz? Ransom deals? A public warning to individual German leaders that they would be held to account after the war was over?
Shogan mentions bombing Auschwitz and paying ransom, and chides Roosevelt’s Jews for not pushing for these policies. What if American Jews had followed the passionate example of Ben Hecht, tirelessly trumpeting news of the slaughter of the Jews of Europe? Might they not have saved, if not millions, then at least some?
As ever, the possibility is a tormenting one, so tormenting that the mind stops at the threshold of the question. But with the Iran terror uppermost in mind, perhaps our eyes should follow forward from Shogan’s accusing finger. “Roosevelt’s Jews” held their tongues for one or more of four main reasons:
1. They refused to believe the worst.
2. They were concerned to preserve their relationship with a president for whom the Jewish Holocaust was not a high priority.
3. They feared an anti-Semitic backlash if Jewish concerns were advanced too forcefully.
4. They believed that the only hope for the Jews was a speedy Allied victory and so subsumed Jewish concerns into the larger Allied cause.
Shogan makes justifiable short work of excuses Nos. 1 and 2, especially 2. He treats No. 3 as self-evidently ridiculous and dismisses No. 4 altogether. Yet Franklin Roosevelt certainly believed both Nos. 3 and 4 to be true, and if we are to condemn him and those around him, we need some kind of proof that Nos. 3 and 4 were false. That proof is missing from the pages of Prelude to Catastrophe.
We’re all painfully familiar with the generation of postwar internal Jewish arguments about the Holocaust. Zionists blamed the Orthodox for passivity. The Orthodox accused the Zionists of favoring their own. The guilt of the genuinely guilty receded as the mourners turned their rage and grief upon each other. So as Jews together prepare to defeat the mullahs’ plans for a second Holocaust, we need to draw the right lessons from the first.
In his history of D-Day and afterward, Max Hastings tells a story: In preparation for the invasion, an American colonel is lecturing Allied officers on the techniques of modern war. He has some especially tough things to say about the performance of the French and Polish armies in 1939 and 1940. After the lecture, a battle-scarred Polish officer approaches the unbloodied American.
“You have omitted the most important lesson of all.”
“What’s that?”
“Be the stronger.”
The British closed the doors of Palestine to escaping Jews after 1936 because they needed Arab oil to fight the impending war. They assessed the relative power of the two contending communities and decided that the Arabs were the stronger.
Heading into the election of 1940, President Roosevelt weighed the risks of offending isolationists and interventionists and concluded that the isolationists were the stronger.
In 1941 and 1942, the Jews of the Yishuv escaped the massacre planned for them because, in the North African theater, the Allied forces arrayed against Rommel proved the stronger.
Now we are reading reports of an extraordinary Western success in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program with an ultra-sophisticated computer worm. Some are calling it the first weaponized computer virus. Early reports suggested that the worm had been made in Israel. Later accounts offer an even more amazing story. The worm would have required so many programming hours to construct—and was so perfectly targeted against Iran’s Siemens equipment—that it was more likely the work of a consortium of Western intelligence agencies, including Germany’s.
If that account is true, a question: Why did those agencies do it? Were they seized by compassion? Inspired by the vow “never again”? Tell that to the people of Darfur. As Anne Applebaum observes in the introduction to her history of the Gulag, we study genocide not to ensure that it will never happen again but precisely because it will happen again.
No, if the accounts of the computer worm are true, the Western powers invested enormous time and money to disable the Iranian nuclear program without violence principally because Israel was able credibly to threaten an airstrike against Iran that would have done serious damage to Western interests in the region. The reality of Israeli power forced the Western countries to deploy their greater power to avert an unacceptable use of that Israeli power. Protests, placards, sit-ins availed little. It was power that concentrated the mind and activated the conscience.
There is much to condemn and lament in the unwillingness and inability of “Roosevelt’s Jews” to beg and prod and shame the president they served into some more forceful statement or action on behalf of the Jews of Europe. But the lesson to take away is that the true path to safety for history’s most targeted people is to leave behind the days when begging, prodding, and shaming were their only hope to save the lives of 6 million human beings.
