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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
February 29, 2004
Letters to the Editor The Weekly Standard Dear editor: According to Robert G. Kaufman (March 1), Conrad Black's new biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt "criticizes Roosevelt ... for not doing enough before the war to rescue Jewish victims of Nazism." As for the 1940s, Kaufman asserts that Black "defends with plausibility Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust during the war." While Black is at first somewhat critical of FDR's policy toward German Jews during the 1930s, he then justifies that policy on the grounds that helping the Jews would have "chipped away [at] his broad public support," which he needed for "the ultimate questions of the national interest." (p.450) Black fails to acknowledge steps Roosevelt could have taken without much public controversy, such as pressing England to let more Jewish refugees into Palestine, or quietly permitting German Jewish immigration to the U.S. at the full level allowed by the existing quota (27,370), which was filled in only one year from 1933-1941, and was left more than 50% unfilled in six of those nine years. Black claims that during the Holocaust, FDR acted quickly to help Europe's Jews once he realized the extent of the Nazi mass murder (p.927). In fact, despite learning of the Nazi genocide by late 1942, Roosevelt neither pressed London to open Palestine nor allowed refugee immigration to the U.S. to the full extent of the existing quotas. The quotas from Axis-controlled countries were 90% unfilled during the period from late 1941 through early 1945 --nearly 190,000 quota places that could have saved lives were left unused. Furthermore, the Roosevelt administration refused pleas to bomb Auschwitz, even though U.S. bombers repeatedly struck German oil factories less than five miles from the gas chambers. FDR did not set up the War Refugee Board until 1944--and even then, only because of strong pressure from Congress, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and the rescue activists known as the Bergson group. Black is simply mistaken in his claim that "there wasn't much the Allied leaders could do" to rescue Jews from the Holocaust (p.817), and Kaufman erred in characterizing Black's position as "plausible." Sincerely,
Rafael Medoff, Ph.D.
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Letters: Compassion Fatigue on Darfur? Yes, Let's Be Candid About the Mideast Brandeis and the White Paper Iran and Germany Rescue Was Possible The Jews in Iran The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz Mel Gibson's Critics Jo Davidson: Sculptor and Activist Nazi War Criminals in Arab Countries Israel and Auschwitz William Safire and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Suppressing Holocaust News Betty Friedan and the Nazis Civil Liberties, in Nazi Germany and the U.S. Paul McCloskey and the Deniers Holocaust Denial is Bigotry Not Just "Following Orders" Melvin Lasky and the Holocaust Saudi Arabian Holocaust-Denial Iranian Holocaust Denial Anti-Semitism in Jordan |
