Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1970)
David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: The New Press, 1984)
Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse and New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995)
The Holocaust was an unforgettable episode in the 20th Germany history. During that time, Nazi Germany made up the race cleansing policies towards Jews, relocated them in the concentration camps and killed them cruelly. “Between June and December 1941, the Einsatzgruppen and associated support units murdered some 500,000 Jews in what had been eastern Poland and Russia. A second sweep through the occupied territory, lasting from fall 1941 through 1942, annihilated close to 900,000 more.”[1] Confirmed by the evidence that the Nazis were killing the Jews in Europe in the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt was indifferent to it and was reluctantly to save them firstly. As the World War II went and the Great Massacre of Jews in Nazi Germany was exposed by domestic media, forced by the agitation of Americans, he had to change its own political standpoint to set up the War Refugee Board to deal with issue of the Jewish refugees and try his best to save them. What were the barriers for the Roosevelt government to save European Jews? Why was he so indifferent for 14 months, even if he got the information that the Germany was killing and was going to exterminate the Jews in Germany and other European countries? Why was the American Jewry also not helpful for the Germany Jewish refugees? Why did the Roosevelt government fail to save them?
Concerning the Holocaust study, many scholars have done their research on it, but most of them focused on the perspective of the Germany history and emphasized the terrible deeds of Germany Nazism. Rarely have scholars who attempted to understand it from the perspective of Americans, and no wonder they had considered how Franklin Roosevelt government attempted to save them. While in fact, adopting a perspective of American history rather than narrowly focus on the Germany history, which is also very helpful for us to understand it. In the past years, there were several classics which explained the Holocaust from the perspective of how Roosevelt government responded to the refugee crisis in Europe. In this essay, focusing on Henry L. Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1970), David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: The New Press, 1984) and Henry L. Feingold’s Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse and New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), I am going to discuss how Roosevelt government’s response to it changed and failed to save the Jews from the Holocaust.
Henry L. Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1970) was one of the most important book on refugees and Roosevelt administration in the 1970s. In this book, Feingold examines the refugee-rescue crisis and how Roosevelt government’s response towards it was changed from 1938 to 1945. Then he chronologically traces the critical historical events, refugee policies and conferences around it during that period. Among them, they were the refugee-rescue crisis, the Evian Conference (1938), negotiations with the Reich, the Coordinating Foundation, American refugee policy, the Bermuda Conference, the set up of the War Refugee Board (1944) and so on.
Feingold firstly describes the phenomenon of the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany and explained that American Jewry, Americans and President Roosevelt were all indifferent to it. When Roosevelt became the American President in 1933 and started the New Deal in America, the American Jewry had benefited his New Deal policies a lot and reluctantly “to openly question the credibility of New Deal humanitarianism on the rescue issue contributed notably to the ominous silence which surrounded the destruction of Europe’s Jews.”[2]Moreover, in American domestic, there was a historical tide of anti-Semitism, which greatly distressed the American Jews and made them to be reticent to the Jewish problem. In the late 1930s, the American Jewry, President Roosevelt and ordinary Americans were all indifferent to the “Jewish problem:”
in the United States an Administration bound by the strictures of its immigration laws and inclined to the rhetoric rather than the substance of a humanitarian rescue policy; and a divided American Jewry, traumatized by domestic anti-Semitism, and reluctant to accept responsibility for its European brethren. Only the announcement by Roosevelt of plans to hold an intergovernmental refugee conference permitted some hope that the nations might yet do something for the hapless refugees.[3]
Then he points out, by 1944, most of Americans were still indifferent towards the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany. And it was their passive response that the Roosevelt government failed to rescue the Jews who were under Nazi Germany’s rule. Until 1944, American government recognized that Nazi Germany was extinguishing the Jews and they had the responsibility to save them. Finally Roosevelt government set up the War Refugee Board whose purpose was to save the Jewish refugees. Although the War Refugee Board rescued a lot of Jews during the World War II, a large number of the Jews were already killed and the rescue movement of Roosevelt government was totally in failure.
In discussing how the Roosevelt administration changed its foreign policies and started to rescue the Jews from persecution, Feingold mainly talks about the Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and President Franklin Roosevelt. In his opinion, Long undoubtedly was both unsympathetic to the Jewish plight and not intended to rescue the Germany Jews. As for President Roosevelt, he emerged as a fair-weather humanitarian and casual executive who firstly had not treated it seriously. When he was informed that the Hitler government was killing Jews massively, he “could scarcely believe that such a thing [Krystallnacht] could occur in a twentieth century civilization.”[4] Moreover, he seemed neither knew what his policy was nor how his latest idealistic sentiment could be effectuated. Roosevelt could have mobilized the necessary resources and enthusiasm and done something, but he did not, which was a great pity for the Jews who were put into the concentration camps. In order to understand why the Roosevelt government failed to save the Jews, Feingold assumes that both Long and Roosevelt played very important role in it.
In The Politics of Rescue, Feingold’s great contribution was that he attempts to interpret the response of the Roosevelt administration to the Holocaust from the perspective of the politics of rescue. To understand the politics of rescue, he argues that President Roosevelt’s response to it should be understood from the political expediency of American foreign policy. Before Japan bombing the Pearl Harbor on December 7, Roosevelt government did not want to be involved into the World War II and not interested in rescuing the Jews, although he was informed that the Nazis were killing Jews in Europe. Roosevelt was sympathetic towards the sadly sufferings of the Jews, however, comparing with saving the Jews, he thought the American national interest was much more important. Roosevelt assumed the political risk of rescuing the Jews and he thought that he could not afford the political burden.
Forced by political the pressure of Americans, Roosevelt finally had to rescue the Jews. When the news of exterminating the Jews was reported by American newspapers and ordinary Americans were irrigated, Roosevelt government was forced to consider the Jewish problem and try its best to rescue them. Forced by the pressure of ordinary and realized that the State Department was obstructing Roosevelt government to save the Jews, Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board and started to rescue the Jewish refugees in the Europe. The War Refugee Board was finally established in January, 1944, but it was too late for Hitler’s Jewish victims, especially for the Dutch Jews, French Jews, Polish Jews and other Jews who had been killed by the Hitler government. Due to the strictly immigration policy, the State Department only allowed 21, 000 refugees to enter the United States during the three and one-half years the nation was at war with Germany, which amounted to 10 percent of the number who could have been legally admitted under the immigration quotas during that period. Dedicated work by a relatively small number of people, however, the War Refugee Board only managed to help save approximately 200, 000 Jews and at least 20, 000 non-Jews. While during the World War II, approximately 6 million Jews were cruelly killed.
In the 1970s, Henry L. Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue was a rarely monograph which focused on the Holocaust and reflected the response of Roosevelt government towards it. Once it was published, it immediately became a classic. Feingold’s interpretation of the Holocaust offers European historians a good lens to understand it from another perspective; moreover, Feingold also illuminates those New Deal historians and asks them to rethink American foreign policy and Roosevelt’s humanitarianism during that time. Feingold puts the rescue movement of Roosevelt government into the politics of rescue and explains it from Roosevelt’s consideration of political expediency, which was very provocative and challenging at that time. Although it was a classic, Feingold overlooked some research sources, and ignored original manuscripts of the survivors of the Holocaust. Also, his chronology sometimes was a little hard to follow and his explanation sometime was unclear, which greatly disturbed his readers to accept his ideas.
In 1984, there was another classical monograph on America’s response towards the Holocaust during the World War II published, it was David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. Comparing with Feingold’s book which narrowly discussed the Holocaust in American history, Wyman puts the Holocaust in its historical background. On the one hand, he examines the “Final Solution” of Nazi Germany, which caused a large number of Jews died; on the other hand, he explains the three barriers for Roosevelt government to rescue the Jewish refugees. He points out, “although Congress and the Roosevelt administration had shaped this policy, it grew out of three important aspects of American society in the 1930s: unemployment, nativistic restrictionism, and anti-Semitism.”[5] Due to these reasons, American government hesitated to rescue the European Jews, partly because they were afraid of the potential Nazism, partly because they were worried about the unemployment of American citizens and partly because there was an anti-Semitism tide in American domestic. Given this background, readers were easy to get a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust.
Wyman severely criticized Roosevelt’s indifference towards the Jewish refugees, because he explains that Roosevelt government abandoned them. He points out, in December 1942, Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to talk with Jewish leaders about the recently confirmed news of extermination. Moreover, in the Bermuda Conference, he took almost no interest in saving the refugees. In November 1943, on the eve of Roosevelt’s departure for Cairo and Tehran, stirrings in Congress briefly drew his attention to the rescue question. After he established the War Refugee Board, he took little interest in it and “never acted to strengthen it or provide it with adequate funding. He impeded its initial momentum by delaying the selection of a director and hindered its long-term effectiveness by ruining the plan to appoint a prominent public figure to the post.”[6] During the World War II, when the Nazi Germany was killing the Jews in Europe, they were really helpless. At that time, Wyman argues, America should offer them their help as much as possible, while President Roosevelt abandoned them and discarded their destinies. Therefore, due to Roosevelt’s irresponsibility, he should be criticized for his inaction.
In part three, Wyman mainly discusses the inaction of American government for rescuing the Jewish refugees. In this part, Wyman examines American government’s response towards the Holocaust from the first time when Roosevelt government confirmed the news that Hitler’s plan to annihilate the Jews in November 24, 1942 to the establishment of the War Refugee Board in January 1944. During this long 14 months, American government took part in the Bermuda Conference, changed its Visa policies to European immigrants, held the Emergent Conference to discuss the Jewish problem and finally decided to establish the War Refugee Board to rescue the Jews. But unfortunately, it cost Roosevelt government 14 month to make a final decision that they should establish a special department to deal with the Jewish issues. Wyman calls the 14 months as the “fourteen lost month,” because American government was ineffectively to help the Jews. While during these 14 months, many Jews were killed at that time. When American government finally established the War Refugee Board in 1944, the World War II was almost over, and it was too late to save the European refugees.
Like Feingold, Wyman also assumes that “Roosevelt’s overall response to the Holocaust was deeply affected by political expediency,” however, he thinks that Roosevelt was responsible for the failure of rescuing them in Europe.[7] While in fact, if American government intended to help the Jews, it could do more to help the Jews and prevent many victims from death. He supposes, the War Refugee Board should have been established in 1942, the U. S government, working through neutral governments or the Vatican, could have pressed Germany to release the Jews, the United States could have applied constant pressure on Axis satellites to release their Jews and so on. The real reason for failing to rescue the Jews was not because of the American government’s incapability, but because they lacked of a desire to rescue them. Wyman explains, “it was not a lack of workable plans that stood in the way of saving many thousands more European Jews. Nor was it insufficient shipping, the threat of infiltration by subversive agents, or the possibility that rescue projects would hamper the war effort. The real obstacle was the absence of a strong desire to rescue Jews.”[8] But unfortunately, the Roosevelt government took little interest in rescuing them.
In contrast to Feingold’s book, Wyman’s points of view are much more radical. Wyman harshly criticizes Roosevelt government, because he was indifferent to help the Jews. Like Feingold, he draws the same conclusion that Roosevelt government failed to rescue the European Jews. However, he points out, Roosevelt government was responsible for failing to rescue the Jewish refugees. Roosevelt should have motivated the Americans when he was informed that the Nazis were killing the Jews. The War Refugee Board should have established earlier in 1942 rather than 1944 and Roosevelt government should have done more to help the Jews. Wyman’s views were so radical that I do not agree with most of his evaluation on Roosevelt government. Although Roosevelt could motivate Americans to help them, he was only humanitarianly responsible for rescuing them. After all, he was an American President and had to consider the national interest of the United States firstly. Therefore, we can’t attribute him for failing to rescue the Jews in the World War II.
In 1995, Feingold published his book─Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, which furthered his study on the Holocaust in American history. Unlike Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue and Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews, most of the essays collected in this book had been published in history journals independently. In this book, in order to discuss the witness role of the American government and American Jewry, he divides it into three parts and mainly discusses the historical problem of the Holocaust, America and the Holocaust and America Jewry and the Holocaust. In this book, Feingold writes papers on the three issues above and analyzes them in detail, which was very complementary with Wyman’s book.
In part one, Feingold examines the Holocaust as a historical problem. In this part, he discusses the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the resistance of the Jews and the relationship between allied foreign policy and the Holocaust. He firstly explores the debate over the Holocaust between universalizers and particularists. The particularists emphasized that the Holocaust was unique in human history, because the Jews suffered the special pain during the wartime. While the universalizers believed that the Holocaust was not unique, because there were at least 5,000,000 Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and other members of Europe’s “undesirable” minorities met their death at the Nazi hands. But Feingold thought that the uniqueness of the Holocaust could not be stated openly without triggering accusations of ethnocentrism:
“Even Jews are coming to believe that the current interest in the Holocaust is part of a promotional scheme designed to bring fame and fortune to those who exploit it. There may be some who have misused the event in that way, but most understand that there is little to be gained by the Jewish people from touting the fact that they were the victims rather than the master of history. The world has far greater respect for the latter.”[9]
Although the Jews were the victims of the Holocaust, but if they want to master their own history, the Jews and historians should not emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Then he explored the resistance of the Jews and the allied foreign policy. Concerning the resistance of the Jews during the Holocaust, he assumed that the secularized Jews had broken most sharply with the Jewish tradition, concerned themselves with the question of honor a concept originally related to the martial virtues of Christian feudalism. While for religious Jews, a preoccupation that placed the image of man in the center of the cosmos must seem unfamiliar indeed, even a species of idolatry. Even they suffered a lot, they were reluctant to resistance, because the Jewish thought the gnawing fear made them “search through the corpses of Jewish dead for heroes.”[10] In discussing why the Allied country failed to rescue the Jews, he argues that “much of Allied indifference to the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust can be rationalized under the general rubric, ‘reasons of state’……Anti-Semitism was prevalent among Allied decision makers, as it was in the general population. But oddly enough, it is difficult to link it to a specific policy step. That is so because anti-Semitism rarely existed in a vacuum.”[11] As a result, the Allied put their national interest firstly and hesitated to rescue the Jewish refugees.
In part two, focusing on the American’s effort to save the Jews of Hungary, Roosevelt government’s response to the human crisis and the PBS’s Roosevelt, Feingold talks about the America’s response towards the Holocaust. During the wartime, Roosevelt government was not really indifferent to the Jews, and Feingold argued that it was unfair for indicting Roosevelt government not rescue them. “Of the approximately 745,000 Jews in prewar Hungary, barely 180,000 survived.”[12] In discussing the effort of Roosevelt government to save the Jews of Hungary, “the failure of the Hungarian rescue operation, unlike previous rescue failures, cannot be attributed to the absence of will but rather to the inability to make that will effective on the scene.”[13] Therefore, historians should not attribute the failure of rescuing the Jews for Roosevelt government’s indifference.
Nevertheless, Feingold discusses Roosevelt’s image in the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and disagrees with its interpretation of Roosevelt’s response towards the Holocaust. In 1994, based on David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews, the PBS directed a film named “America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference.” Wyman was the principle “scholar/talking-head,” a role that has become customary in historical documentaries. As a result, the PBS’s Roosevelt is essentially Wyman’s, which made the “documentary was problematical.”[14] Although the movie was not very important, it rekindled the debate about how the Roosevelt administration’s posture during the Holocaust should be viewed. In evaluating this movie, Feingold draws a conclusion: “the producers of this documentary must, at some point, have become aware that the rules that make for good theater can come into conflict with those that make for good history. When that happens, as it does in this documentary, a balance between the demands for truth and for drama has to be searched for and found. PBS’s ‘America and the Holocaust’ fails to do that.”[15]
In part three, Feingold writes essays on the American Jewry and the Holocaust. Feingold assumes that the American Jewry were also indifferent to the Jewish refugees, but consider the situation of the American Jewry in the 1930s, Feingold could understand it from the perspective of their suffering. For most of the American Jewry, they were the second- and third-generation Jewish and they did not have strong Jewish identity. As far as they were concerned, “on the one hand, the traditional sources of unity─religion, a common language and culture, and a common interest and world view─had grown weaker. On the other, ideological and political diversity had grown stronger, so that one generation could barely recognize much less find something in common with its successor.”[16] Meanwhile, in American domestic, there was an anti-Semitism tide in the 1930s, which horrified them and caused themselves have to consider their own safety firstly, which directly caused them overestimated the danger posed by organized anti-Semitism. As a result, when they heard the news of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, they did not bravely stand out and ask Roosevelt government to offer help to the Jews:
“The Jewish perception of anti-Semitism, or perhaps better, the misperception of it, serves as background noise in the environment in which the American Jewish response to the Holocaust was fashioned. The factors directly affecting the quality of that response were the subtle alteration of the mind-set and self-image of second-and third-generation American Jews. These changes gradually deprived them of traditional cohesiveness and self-understanding. In the free atmosphere of America, the divisions that everywhere characterized postemancipation Jewish communities were exacerbated. It was not that secularizing Jews felt less Jewish but that they no longer felt exclusively so. The American Jewish identity was multileveled.”[17]
For a long time, historians criticized the passive action of the American Jewry to their European Jews and they indicted them for their irresponsibility during the World War II, but Feingold disagrees with this opinion. He argues, “the indictment of the witnesses is based on the old assumption that there exists such a spirit of civilization, a sense of humanitarian concern in the world that could have been mobilized to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. It indicts the Roosevelt administration, the Vatican, the British government, and all other witnessing nations and agencies for not acting, for not caring. And it reserves a special indignation for American Jewry failure to mobilize a spirit that did not in fact exist. It is an indictment that cannot produce authentic history. Perhaps that cannot really be written until the pain subsides.”[18] Although they had their own humanitarian obligation to save the European Jews, they could not afford the whole burden of rescuing the Jewish refugees. On the one hand, their own self-interests should be firstly protected, especially during the anti-Semitism period, they had to be quiet in order to protect themselves; on the other hand, “the second-generation American Jew remained recognizably Jewish, but he was now also influenced by behavioral norms and goals that prevailed in the majority culture, which was totally hard for them to devote themselves to rescue the European Jews whole-heartedly.”[19] Meanwhile, they were the second- and third-generation Jews who were loosely organized and did not have strong connection with the European Jews. For them, although they were sympathetic to the suffering of the Jews in Europe, what they could to help them was very limited. Therefore, for historians, in order to give the American Jewry an objective evaluation, they should think from the perspective of the American Jewry rather than impose their own points of view on them. At least, it was unfair for the American Jewry, which prevented our full understanding of the history of the Holocaust.
Generally speaking, both Feingold and Wyman contribute a lot to the study of the Holocaust. Feingold’s first book discusses why Roosevelt government failed to rescue the Jews and attributes it to the political expediency of Roosevelt government. Feingold interprets it from the standpoint of a neutral way, which gives us a lot of reflection on the Holocaust. Unlike Feingold, Wyman has his own political prejudice and criticizes the Roosevelt government and the American Jewry without considering the specific situation they met during that time. He believes that both of them were responsible for the disaster of the Jews, because of their inaction, the European Jews were killed. Although Wyman also does archive research and makes a lot effort to interpret the history of the Holocaust, his conclusions are very confusing. He is a radical historian, which greatly affects him to draw justifiable conclusions. Based on The Politics of Rescue, Feingold’s Bearing Witness furthers his study on the Holocaust, which helps us to know more about the history of American Jewry, the American government and the Holocaust during the World War II. Comparing with Wyman, Feingold is a very prudential scholar and his explanation on the Holocaust was much more convincing.
[1] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), 196, 225, 242, 256, 767, cited from David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: The New Press, 1984), 2.
[2] Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 8.
[3] Feingold, ibid, 21.
[4] New York Times, November 15, 1938, 1, cited from Feingold, 42.
[5] Wyman, ibid, 6.
[6] Wyman, 312.
[7] Wyman, 312.
[8] Wyman, 339.
[9] Feingold, 39.
[10] Feingold, 58.
[11] Feingold, 67-8.
[12] Feingold, 166
[13] Feingold, 166.
[14] Feingold, 183.
[15] Feingold, 201.
[16] Feingold, 214.
[17] Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse and New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 213.
[18] Feingold, 276.
[19] Feingold, 215.
No comments:
Post a Comment