Really? Who’s to say how far the murdering SS cowards would have run after their barracks as well as the gas chambers had been bombed? With the destruction of power stations and electrified fences, who knows how far Jews and other inmates could have run?
How many Jews and others might have acquired weapons from dead SS personnel? Would the bombings have killed Jews as well? Of course they would have. But if every death-camp inmate, Jew and non-Jew, had been asked if the Allies should bomb the camps, I’m fairly certain that all would have answered in the affirmative.
I don’t care about the political and social environment in 1940s America; FDR had an obligation to humanity in general and the Jewish victims in particular to do the right thing and bomb the Nazi creatures, but he failed to do so.
Myron Hecker
New City, NY
No ‘Monday Morning Quarterbacking’ In Criticism Of FDR
Albert Goodman claims that criticism of President Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust is all made in “hindsight” by those who have “an axe to grind or an ideological point to make.”
In fact, some of the most significant criticism of FDR was made at the time – not in hindsight – and it was made by prominent supporters of Roosevelt and by the generation’s leading Orthodox rabbis. Neither group can be accused of having an “axe to grind.”
A 1943 editorial in the pro-Roosevelt political weekly The New Republic declared that if the Allies continued to be indifferent to the mass murder of European Jewry, “they will make themselves, morally, partners in Hitler’s unspeakable crimes.… If the Anglo-Saxon nations continue on their present course, we shall have connived with Hitler in one of the most terrible episodes of history…”
Likewise, an editorial in another strongly pro-Roosevelt journal, The Nation, in 1943 asserted that “the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt…. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and we did not lift a hand to do it – or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we lifted just one cautious hand, encased in a tight-fitting glove of quotas and visas and affidavits, and a thick layer of prejudice.”
The leading Orthodox rabbis of the generation rejected the claim that the Roosevelt administration was doing all it could to rescue Jews. Just days before Yom Kippur in 1943, more than 400 rabbis traveled to Washington, D.C. – not an easy trip from New York in those days – to challenge the president’s failure to rescue Jewish refugees. The rabbis demanded that the president establish a special government agency to rescue Jews. They undertook the march despite a warning from a Jewish congressman who was close to the administration, Rep. Sol Bloom, “that it would be very undignified for a group of such un-American looking people to appear in Washington. ”
Among the marchers were Rabbi Eliezer Silver and Rabbi Israel Rosenberg, co-presidents of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis; the Boyaner Rebbe, Rabbi Shlomo Friedman, president of the Union of Grand Rabbis; Rabbi Bernard Dov Leventhal, known as the chief rabbi of Philadelphia; Rabbi Moshe Feinstein; Rabbi Yosef Soloveitchik; Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky (who later founded the South Shore Yeshiva); and Rabbi Levi Horowitz (who later succeeded his father as the Bostoner Rebbe).
Mr. Goodman, in his letter, claims that there is no way to know “whether bombing Auschwitz would have made any significant difference other than killing thousands of Jews,” and bombing the railway lines leading to the camp “would have made relatively little difference.”