On August 16, 1944, representatives of all of the major Jewish organizations in the United States met with John Pehle, Director of the War Refugee Board, and agreed that Auschwitz should not be bombed. The reports of the meeting reflect that Pehle was “extremely skeptical that any Jews would be permitted to leave Hungary.” (The Nazis were determined to kill them.) Asked about bombing the camps, “Mr. Pehle said that a proposal to bomb the facilities had been objected to by Jewish organizations because it would result in the extermination of large numbers of Jews there”
For reasons beyond the scope of this essay, it has become fashionable in the academic world to bash America. An articulate and persistent group of historians and activists insists, even in the face of this overwhelming evidence, that Americans were “accomplices of the Nazis,” that we were silent, that we did nothing, that “the American Jew” in the words of Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, “could not stand up proudly his natural posture was bowed and bent.”
They claim that leaders of Jewish groups, on record in writing opposing the bombing, somehow whispered in someone’s ear to bomb the camps. The Jewish Agency Executive, the World Jewish Congress, Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee all knew how to write a letter or send a telegram if they believed it was the right thing to do.
The Jewish boys who fought the Germans at Anzio Beach, at Normandy, and in the Battle of the Bulge were neither “bowed” nor “bent.” Nor were American Jews cowards. Five hundred fifty-thousand American Jewish men and women who proudly served in the United States armed forces helped to defeat the Nazis and end the Holocaust.
Hitler’s goal was not to kill 6 million Jews but to kill every Jew in the world at that time – 18 million of them. He failed, in great part, because of the heroic efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I wrote Saving the Jews to set the record straight.
Robert N. Rosen, author of “Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust” (Thunder’s Mouth press, 2006), is a shareholder in the Rosen Law Firm in Charleston, South Carolina. He received his B.A. degree in history from the University of Virginia in 1969, his M.A. degree in History from Harvard University in 1970 and his J.D. degree from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1973.
