Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505100023
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANK KOFSKY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Initial reaction to evidence of genocide in Europe was denial. By June 1942, the State Department had reliable reports about the Nazis' systematic extermination of the Jews. Yet for another six months, it dismissed these reports as ``war rumors,'' ``fantastic ... allegations'' and the like, refusing to release them until pressure from Jewish organizations forced the administration's hand.
Even then, after learning from the U.S. legation in Switzerland that Nazis were already killing 6,000 Jews per day at one site in Poland alone, the State Department in February 1943 instructed the legation not to transmit any more information of this kind.
When news of Nazi death camps finally became public in late November 1942, civic and religious groups began urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rescue those Jews still alive - but he refused. Why? First, he did not want to bring Jewish refugees to the United States for fear he would lose the votes of Jew-haters and immigration opponents in the 1944 election.
Second, he supported the British government, which, under Winston Churchill, bitterly opposed rescuing Jews. The British were afraid that if Jewish refugees demanded entry into Palestine, it could precipitate an Arab rebellion. Roosevelt agreed.
Third, Roosevelt believed - correctly - that Jews would vote for his re-election despite his failure to approve rescue attempts.
His administration, therefore, chose to handle this issue by pretending to take action so as to placate pro-interventionists, meanwhile rebuffing every concrete proposal to rescue Jews while time permitted.
The Bermuda conference in April 1943 illustrates such pretense. When popular pressures finally compelled Roosevelt to go beyond simply turning down each suggestion for rescue, he reluctantly agreed to a conference with the British, supposedly to find a way of halting the genocide of the Jews.
But the conference, which refused to admit representatives from any of the private Jewish organizations, was a sham. One British delegate, for example, opposed negotiations with the German government to save the Jews on the ground that ``many of the potential refugees are empty mouths for which Hitler has no use. ... It would be relieving Hitler of an obligation to take care of these useless people.''
A U.S. delegate agreed: ``There was no doubt whatever that the Department of State would oppose any negotiations with Germany.''
Predictably, the conference produced not a single specific measure. One rabbi saw through the fraud. The conference's purpose, he explained, ``was not to rescue victims of Nazi terror, but to rescue our State Department and the British Foreign Office. ... The victims are not being rescued because the democracies do not want them.''
Indeed, they did not. Roosevelt, it is fair to say, met the moral challenge of the Holocaust by stalling for time, evading the issue, doing nothing and hoping - hoping that the Germans would solve the problem for him before the force of public opinion compelled him to act.
Because of his unwillingness to intervene, his administration ultimately brought fewer than 1,000 Jewish refugees out of Europe during the war.
Compare that figure to the more than 6,000 Jews saved from the ovens by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul at Kaunas, Lithuania, and his wife Yukiko. Sugihara's humanitarian actions, in defiance of Tokyo's orders, cost him his postwar diplomatic career; Roosevelt emerged with a larger-than-life image as the heroic foe of the Holocaust.
Later generations have scarcely improved on Roosevelt's performance. In case after case of genocide and ``ethnic cleansing'' since World War II, peoples and governments of the West have stood on the sidelines wringing their hands and shedding tears in a show of concern - but, of course, taking pains to ensure that their involvement goes little further.
In that sense, Roosevelt's hypocrisy perfectly embodies our own: Celebrating the comforting fantasy that he fought Nazi Germany to prevent genocide lets us wallow in an orgy of self-congratulation while avoiding the risks of actually doing something. As we bask in the glow of imagined good deeds from a time long past, however, the butchery rages unabated.
Frank Kofsky is a history professor at California State University, Sacramento, and the author of ``Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948.'' He wrote this for the San Francisco Examiner.
- New York Times News Service
by CNB