The U. S. Army and the DP’s
Eisenhower and the Jews.
by Judah Nadich.
Twayne. 263 pp. $4.00.

This book is serious history despite its irrelevant introduction and deceptive title—for both of which, we hope, the publisher alone was responsible. Such unabashed exploitation of the President’s name is all the more reprehensible because almost wholly unjustified by the book’s main subject: the evolution of American policy towards the displaced Jews in Germany and Austria in the months immediately after the war.

Rabbi Nadich lists the many Americans then engaged in creating and executing, or else aborting and circumventing, that policy. Mr. Eisenhower figures prominently throughout the book, but whatever real justification there is for the title is provided in the introductory chapter, an apparent afterthought that, in the words of the blurb, “brings the story up to date, treating of the continuing relations between Eisenhower and the Jews as they revealed themselves particularly during his campaign for the Republican nomination and for the Presidency and since his inauguration until the summer of 1953.”

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Statements issued in the course of an electoral campaign can be disregarded by serious students of history. Mr. Eisenhower’s non-campaign statements on the Jews include a Rosh Hashanah message, and an acceptance speech on receiving an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. These contain the expected. Why any special effort should be made to link Eisenhower—or any other eminent American—with the Jews, either by way of soliciting his views, or approval, of them, escapes me. Indeed, it is in poor taste, and Rabbi Nadich’s statement that “in the annals of Jewish history the name of General. Eisenhower will always be venerated as one of the great saviors in the history of the Jewish people” is more of the same. It suggests a spirit of ma yafeet wholly inconsistent with the dignity which belongs to American Jewry.

True, similar studies have been produced on Washington and the Jews, and on Lincoln and the Jews, but these deal with periods in our history when Jews were still few in America, new to their civic equality, and inclined to regard their citizenship as more a privilege than a right. To imply that any present American policy affecting Jews could be the work of a single individual is to give a very erroneous notion of contemporary American society. Neither Presidents nor Commanders-in-Chief have that power; and, more important, American Jews are not that helpless.

The true prime mover of American policy on the Jewish DP’s was public opinion in the United States, which demanded preferential treatment for Hitler’s first victims. And it was President Truman, Secretary of State Stimson, and General Marshall who responded to this demand. It was the report of Earl G. Harrison, the President’s special emissary to Germany, that aroused White House indignation, which in turn exerted pressure upon Generals Eisenhower and Clark in Europe. Rabbi Nadich’s own presentation of the facts distributes the credit this way, despite the title of his book and his own editorializing, which weigh the credit too much in Eisenhower’s direction. Appreciably less would have been done for the displaced Jews, as is again evident from the author’s own presentation, if General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, had felt less moral indignation and acted with less administrative vigor in putting into effect his chief’s interpretation of Washington’s directives.

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No One is better qualified to tell about all this than Rabbi Nadich. An army chaplain, he was General Eisenhower’s first adviser on

Jewish affairs, and his contribution to the implementation of American policy was a very significant one, although he himself modestly understates it. Prior to this book, we knew the story only in fragmentary, sensational fashion, and with little accuracy, as related by amateur journalist-social workers who rushed books into print ascribing to themselves wholly fictitious roles in the rescue of the surviving Jews of Europe.

Other parts of the story have been told by members of the intergovernmental committees who, immediately upon completing their official reports on the condition of the Jewish DP’s, entrusted their private diaries to the care of facile literary ghosts. Rabbi Nadich’s account, it is evident, has not received the same doubtful benefits. He tells his story sincerely, and well, and completely. He shows how the commanders in the field cooperated with Washington, and how they refused to cooperate; how they resented the goading from Washington, and how they failed to understand the principles behind the policy which gave preferential treatment to the Jewish DP; and how they were reluctant to assume the additional responsibilities and to follow the procedures, alien to army tradition, which were made necessary by these responsibilities.

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Even General Eisenhower was reluctant, for sound reasons, to accept the recommendations that he appoint an adviser on Jewish affairs, separate Jewish from other DP’s, and gather them together in all-Jewish camps. Nothing in his previous experience as an American had prepared him to understand a policy which seemed to discriminate against the Jew rather than favor him. These recommendations were based, however, on the grim realities of past experience in Eastern Europe, where the Jew had too often been treated, not as a fellow citizen, but as an enemy alien. Never had this been truer than under Nazi occupation, when many of his fellow citizens in Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, and elsewhere collaborated in his extermination. In 1945 some of these latter had gone underground in the DP camps in order to escape retribution, and had they been allowed to mingle with the Jewish survivors they would have succeeded in this effort all the more easily.

Nor was the demand that a Jewish adviser be attached to General Eisenhower altogether unprecedented. Napoleon had convened a spurious Sanhedrin to ratify his proposals for reforming Jewry. The Czars, for similar reasons, had likewise appointed committees on Jewish affairs—but often made up of more Gentiles than Jews. It was ironic that American Jewry should have had to ask their government to re-create, for the nonce, this unhappy Old World institution. But in this case the term “adviser on Jewish affairs” came to acquire unprecedented dignity and to be associated with great humanitarian ends.

And the issue of preferential treatment for the Jews had also been raised before—from time to time in the French Revolutionary Assembly, in the crucial years between 1789 and 1791. Even the most liberal Frenchmen had not been able to reconcile the Jewish demand for equality with the simultaneous request that the Assembly reaffirm the autonomy of the Jewish kehillot, which were a product of the old ghetto regime. What the French Jews in the 18th century were concerned with, however, was the preservation of their collective identity, just as the Jewish DP’s of our day were primarily concerned with physical survival. Unless they were separated from non-Jewish DP’s, given extra rations, and treated by Jewish doctors, not by Nazi ones pressed into service for the emergency, they could not hope to return truly from the dead.

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Rabbi Nadich reveals for the first time the whole shocking story of the late General Pat-ton’s willful circumvention and distortion of General Eisenhower’s directives on the treatment of Jewish DP’s. Not since Grant’s notorious order early in the Civil War, expelling Jewish traders from the areas under his command, had an American officer been guilty of such patent anti-Semitism. Grant was to apologize for the rest of his life for an order whose inspiration has never been properly explained. Patton continued to sabotage General Eisenhower’s directives until transferred to another command; and many of his aides followed his lead.

This book refutes, quite inadvertently, a number of anti-Semitic slanders. The lunatic fringe in this country has been alleging the predominantly “Jewish” composition and “leftist” political coloration of UNRRA. Rabbi Nadich, without making a blanket indictment, reveals some shocking anti-Semitic conduct by field representatives of UNRRA. From his account, we also learn that Jewish DP’s had asked to be allowed to go to Palestine before they ever saw any of the emissaries of the Palestinian Zionists, and that if the Palestine Jewish Brigade and the Jewish Agency people had not taken the initiative in starting educational projects, DP morale would have faced the American military with grave problems, embarrassed Jewry everywhere, and prolonged the agony of the DP’s themselves.

One would have liked more details about the people, high and low, with whom Rabbi Nadich came in contact in the course of his assignment. One is curious also about the identity of the American general who, when Soviet border guards were turning back Jews trying to escape from Eastern Europe via Austria, “casually pointed to the large map on the wall of his office and indicated several other safe crossings of the border where he knew no Russian guards were stationed.” This reviewer’s guess is that he was Brigadier-General Home, since deceased, “a mild-mannered and soft-spoken gentleman . . . [who] spoke at length about Moses as a military leader.” One would also have liked fuller portraits of such men as Sergeant Gottfried Neuberger, who managed to secure for the DP’s in his area not only clothes and more calories, but kosher food; and Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner, who became, with Rabbi Nadich’s laudable “connivance,” a true DP chaplain, unattached to any unit and operating wholly among Jewish DP’s. (Sergeant Neuberger recounted some of his wartime experiences in an article in COMMENTARY, March 1949.)

Rabbi Nadich also treats us to some lighter stories. The Palestine Jewish Brigade, he tells us, chalked on its jeeps an ingenious paraphrase of a Nazi slogan by adding a “k” to the German word ein—”Kein Volk, Kein Reich, Kein Fuehrer. Achtwng, die Juden kommen!“ Incidentally, he reports on talks he had with Ben Gurion during the latter’s visit to the German DP camps: the future Prime Minister of Israel, we learn, was even then unhappy about American Zionist leadership.

This book belongs, importantly, in the scant library of American Jewish history. Formerly the United States had acted as only a diplomatic intercessor on behalf of persecuted Jewries. In 1945, however, our government, and our military, had for the first time to deal directly with persecuted Jewries. It was a perilous moment for all concerned, but America proved triumphantly the sincerity of her humanitarian faith.

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