Franklin Roosevelt and the Holocaust
* What: The Holocaust, the most notorious and best known genocide in history, carried out by Nazis, fascist Croatians, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and other collaborators. While the Holocaust is very well known to most Americans, the role some American individuals, corporations, and government institutions played in killing Jews and others, or preventing their lives from being saved, is far less well known.
* The Body Count: Six million Jews and six million other victims including Romany (Gypsies), Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally and physically handicapped, political prisoners, and criminals.
* Who Also Gets the Blame:
* Obviously Hitler, the Nazi Party, the SS units, and collaborators who carried out the killings deserve the greatest blame.
* The US State Department, filled with senior officials from old money wealthy Protestant anti Semites who delayed, denied, and hid information from the general public. The State Department also blocked rescue efforts from both Jewish and gentile aid groups, barring Jewish refugees from entering not only the US but other countries, leading directly to many victims going to their deaths in concentration camps.
* American generals who did not want to divert resources from the war and greatly exaggerated the difficulties in at least partially stopping the Holocaust or aiding its victims.
* Henry Ford, who did more to spread anti-Semitism than any other American in all of US history. Ford’s Dearborn Independent was the best-selling newspaper in the country, fourteen times as much as the nearest competitor, with a subscription included for most customers who bought a Ford car. For many rural Americans who had never met anyone Jewish, the newspaper was the only source of information on Jews.
* Ford and the Independent blamed Jews for wars, economic problems, and moral decline, spreading the conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax forged by Russian Tsarist secret police. Both the Klan and Nazis such as Heinrich Himmler and even Hitler himself admired Ford. Ford Auto Company was a haven for Nazis in the US, with theirs and other extreme right views promoted on company grounds. Ford even received a special award from Hitler, the Nazis' highest civilian honor.
* An anti-Semitic American public. In the 1930s and 40s, some universities still tried to bar Jews, and employers posted signs reading, “If you don't come in on Friday night, don't bother coming in on Monday morning.” A reference to Jewish temple on Friday night, it was another way of saying, “No Jews hired.”
* Today, when Jews are for the most part widely accepted and anti-Semitism is believed by a much smaller share of the American public, even often used as a dubious charge to discredit anyone who criticizes Israel, it is harder to conceive just how widespread anti-Jewish hatred once was. Anti-Semitism went into sharp decline directly as a result of first the threat of Nazism to the US in wartime and then later with the full horrors of the Holocaust being revealed. Even anti-Semitism among Christian fundamentalists, once among the most anti-Jewish segments of American society, sharply declined in the 1980s as many conservatives turned to anti-Muslim hatred and strongly supported Israel as both a bulwark against Arab Muslim nations in the Mideast and beliefs that Israel plays a part in Christian prophecies about the end of the world.
* International Business Machines or IBM contributed technology that enabled the Nazis to track and kill several hundred thousand more Jews. IBM punch cards, an early version of computer data tracking, were used by the Third Reich to organize birth and other records. Highly assimilated German Jews who had long quit practicing, or even did not realize they had Jewish ancestors, suddenly found themselves in death camps. The most detailed study on the topic is Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust.
* General Motors, who manufactured German military vehicles. When one watches old footage of the invasion of Poland in 1939, the trucks used to transport German troops are often General Motors made.
* Ford Motors. In addition to Henry Ford's role and the company being a haven for Nazi sympathizers, the Ford Motor Company used forced Eastern European labor in its factories in Nazi occupied territory.
* Chase Manhattan, who fired Jews and seized Jewish accounts at the Nazis' request in both Germany and occupied Europe. Chase kept its branches open in Nazi-occupied Europe for the duration of the war. The bank also worked with Nazi controlled banks in Latin America. Chase's relationship with the Nazis allowed Germany to receive US dollars at a discount.
* Standard Oil, today known as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, was the largest stockholder in IG Farben. Farben manufactured Zyklon B, the notorious gas used to kill millions in the camps. Farben also built most of the bigger and more infamous death camps.
* Contrary to the claims of gun lobbying groups, gun control played no real role in genocide. Gun control began when Germany was a democracy, the Weimar Republic. (It also, contrary to guns rights dogma, was somewhat successful gun control. It helped head off an overthrow by extremists on either the left or right in the chaotic aftermath of World War I.) Contrary to the frequent lies or distortions by gun lobbyists, gun control was not begun by the Nazis. Just the opposite, Nazi Germany loosened laws on gun ownership, getting the traditionally elitist upper class gun clubs to open their membership to middle and working class Germans.
* Also contrary to the claim of gun lobbyists, the Jewish population in Nazi Germany was not disarmed. Jews in Germany under the Nazis possessed over 200,000 guns and were still unable to stop the Holocaust. There were about half a million Jews in Nazi Germany in 1933, so this is a ratio of one gun for every two and a half German Jews. Compare this to the United States, where one third of the population owns guns. Many more Jews in other occupied parts of Europe also possessed guns. Clearly, genocide should be blamed on the ones carrying it out, not a mythical lack of guns on the part of Jews.
* What could the US government have done to stop the Holocaust? Contrary to apologists for Franklin Roosevelt, there were many options, military, political, and humanitarian:
* Military: Send Allied bombers to bomb the railroads, especially railroad bridges and depots. This would have made it far more difficult to ship victims to the death camps. The Third Reich would instead have to either ship victims by trucks, which would take up vehicles needed for military use, or by forced march. Either method would take far more soldiers to guard. It is still possible German units would turn to simple mass executions on the spot, something mobile SS units actually did in the Soviet Union. All these alternate methods of the Nazis were far less easy to organize and take up more enemy resources.
* Bombing the camps themselves would be far riskier. As discussed later, precision bombing has always been a fantasy believed in largely by those with little understanding of air power. One might try to destroy the gas chambers and easily kill many camp prisoners instead. Even if bombing the rail lines only prevented or delayed one-tenth of the deaths, that is still 600,000 Jews and an equal number of other groups. Most would argue saving over a million lives was certainly worthy of Allied efforts.
* Political: Send a clear diplomatic message, perhaps publicly, to the Third Reich and all collaborators that they will face prosecution and possible death sentences for war crimes at war's end. While some may scoff at any in the Third Reich acting ethically, this is not what this option calls for. Instead it relies on individual self interest, and we do know that in some cases such an approach did work. Legendary humanitarian hero Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, at one point told Nazi officials directly to their face they would face prosecution for war crimes. Wallenberg's warning worked. Much of the Jewish ghetto population of Budapest, perhaps as many as 100,000, were saved from extermination.
* Humanitarian: Offer sanctuary to Jewish and other refugees. This was the easiest option for Roosevelt, and his failure to offer sufficient sanctuary is his most grievous failure. Roosevelt's timidness in confronting or curbing the anti-Semitic zeal of his own State Department are part of that failure.
* One of the lesser known aspects of the Holocaust is that Hitler and the Third Reich considered simply expelling all Jews from Germany and occupied territories. The Nazis turned instead to mass extermination because most countries barred large numbers of Jewish refugees.
* The argument has often been made that Roosevelt's indifference is understandable given widespread anti-Semitism of the time. But other nations did offer refuge. The Dominican Republic and Bolivia both permanently accepted large numbers of Jewish refugees, many tens of thousands each. Even fascist Spain accepted hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees temporarily, though most went on to Portugal or elsewhere.
* At other times the argument has been the Great Depression prevented Roosevelt from acting. How could FDR argue to bring in many Jewish refugees when so many Americans were out of work? Indeed, the federal government did deport millions of Mexican-Americans from the US, not just immigrants but citizens, often living in America since before it even became the US. Roosevelt knew this was going on, and ended federal deportations. But instead, state and local governments continued deporting Mexican-Americans, and Roosevelt made no effort to stop this. FDR was extraordinarily popular, the most beloved president the US has ever had, elected four times by landslides. But except for economic issues, he was unwilling to risk that popularity, even on literal life and death issues.
* It is fairly bizarre to argue that one injustice excuses another. In fact, there were still many immigrants coming into the US during the Great Depression, both legally and illegally. Many Jews were highly skilled and educated and thus have may been more welcome than other immigrants. Especially since Roosevelt courted and won the support of Jewish voters, it is not asking too much to expect aid in the gravest humanitarian crisis in generations.
* Both then and to this day, FDR remains enormously popular among both Jewish Americans and those left of center politically who think of themselves, rightly, as strongly supporting humanitarian causes. Roosevelt did so much else was laudable, from the New Deal to leading the defeat of fascism, that it is difficult to reconcile his actions about the Holocaust, and as later discussed, his targeting of civilians. His guilt in the case of the Holocaust is not evil, but it certainly is a grievous failure to do all he could to confront or limit evil.
* For other Americans whose actions worsened the Holocaust. Henry Ford and Ford Motors, IBM, Exxon, and the State Department, one hopes that in the case of corporations they at least pay reparations for their actions. Today, most Holocaust survivors have passed away or are very elderly. Their cases are being pursued by their children and grandchildren. That begs the question: if the descendants of Holocaust victims are morally right to pursue these cases, why are reparations for the descendants of slaves so strongly opposed?