By Michael Beschloss Newsweek October 14, 2002

For six decades, historians have debated the Allied
reaction to Adolf Hitler’s “final solution.” Amid the complexities of
war and the fog of battle, could Washington and London have done more
to save Europe’s Jews? Why not try to save Jewish lives by bombing the
death camps and rail lines to Auschwitz.

REVERED IN MEMORY as a great war president, Franklin Roosevelt has
always been at the center of the mystery. For generations historians
have had no firsthand evidence that FDR was directly involved in the
decision not to attack Auschwitz. Here, in an exclusive book excerpt
from “The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of
Hitler’s Germany 1941-1945″ (Simon & Schuster), Michael Beschloss
provides a surprising new account of what the president actually knew
and what he said and did.

By the summer of 1944, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had murdered
millions of Jews. Jewish leaders implored Winston Churchill and
Franklin Roosevelt to try to slow the killing by bombing the death
complex at Auschwitz and the railroad lines that supplied it.

For almost two years, Churchill and FDR had
been quietly receiving evidence of Hitler’s ghastly effort to remove
an entire people from the face of the earth. Churchill appeared
interested in a military strike against the camps. He told his Foreign
secretary, Anthony Eden, that Hitler’s war against the Jews was
“probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the
whole history of the world,” adding: “Get everything out of the Air
Force you can, and invoke me, if necessary.” In July 1944 Churchill
was told that U.S. bomber pilots could do the job best, but that it
would be “costly and hazardous.”

But America was the senior partner in the alliance. Washington
would have to make the call. Today FDR’s most stalwart defenders
insist that the best way to save Jews was to win the European war as
quickly as possible. Some argue that bombing might have only briefly
stopped the slaughter, before the Nazis rebuilt the camps or used
other swift and brutal means of killing Jews–and that it would have
killed Jewish inmates. But the eloquent Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel
wishes that the Americans had bombed Auschwitz, noting that he and his
fellow inmates “were no longer afraid of death–at any rate, not of
that death.”

In Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was
heartsick over what he was discovering about the murder of the Jews of
Europe. A Hudson Valley neighbor of FDR’s, Morgenthau was Roosevelt’s
closest friend in the government and only the second Jew in U.S.
history to be in a president’s Cabinet. He was, however, so
unobservant a Jew that he had never attended a Passover Seder.

Morgenthau had long refrained from jeopardizing his friendship
with Roosevelt–which he called the “most important thing” in his
life–by special pleading on Jewish matters. After World War II began,
FDR had privately said to Morgenthau and a Catholic appointee, Leo
Crowley, “You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and
Jews are here under sufferance.” He bluntly told them it was “up to
you” to “go along with anything I want.”

But the Holocaust had radicalized Morgenthau. Even if it meant
antagonizing Roosevelt, the Treasury secretary was bent on trying to
slow the killing and also crush postwar Germany with a plan to make
the conquered country “stew in its own juice.” When Secretary of War
Henry Stimson told Morgenthau that his plan was too harsh on the
Germans, Morgenthau replied that it was “not nearly as bad” as sending
people “to gas chambers.”

Morgenthau consented to have his former aide John Pehle,
director of the War Refugee Board, cautiously explore whether bombing
Auschwitz and/or the rail lines might save a serious number of Jewish
lives. The matter was referred to Assistant Secretary of War John
McCloy, who had so exasperated Morgenthau by refusing to let the U.S.
military help save Jewish refugees that Morgenthau had privately
denounced McCloy as an “oppressor of the Jews.” (McCloy had vehemently
denied the charge.)

McCloy saw the Auschwitz bombing proposal as a flagrant
violation of FDR’s demand that U.S. military resources be used only
for direct efforts to win the war. Flatly and repeatedly, McCloy said
no.

Much of the modern indignation at the American failure to bomb
Auschwitz has been centered on John McCloy. At best McCloy has been
excoriated for his bullheaded concentration on traditional military
targets; at worst he has been attacked for callous indifference to the
murder of the Jews.

Didn’t McCloy discuss such an important matter with the
president? For decades after World War II, when interviewed about the
subject, McCloy insisted that he did not. He told Washington Post
reporter Morton Mintz in 1983 that he “never talked” with FDR about
bombing Auschwitz. In a 2000 book, “The Bombing of Auschwitz,” scholar
Richard Levy concluded: “If McCloy is to be faulted, his fault must
lie in having failed to go to the President himself.”

But new information suggests that the man who made the
ultimate decision not to bomb Auschwitz may not have been John McCloy
but Franklin Roosevelt himself. In 1986, three years before his death,
McCloy had a taped private conversation–unpublished before now–with
Morgenthau’s son Henry III, who was researching a family memoir. Frail
but articulate and alert throughout the conversation, the 91-year-old
McCloy told Morgenthau that of course he had personally raised with
FDR the possibility of bombing Auschwitz. McCloy said, “I remember
talking one time with Mr. Roosevelt about it, and he was irate. He
said, `Why, the idea!… They’ll only move it down the road a little
way.’ ” (This referred to the prospect that the Nazis would have built
other death mills to continue the killing.) McCloy recalled that the
president “made it very clear” to him that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t
have done any good.”

According to McCloy, Roosevelt told him that bombing Auschwitz
would be “provocative” to the Nazis and he wouldn’t “have anything to
do” with the idea. McCloy said that FDR warned him that Americans
would be accused of “bombing these innocent people” at Auschwitz,
adding, “We’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business!”

In his 1986 conversation with Morgenthau’s son, McCloy went on
to say, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz… It seemed to be a bunch of
fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an
indication of lack of venom against Hitler. Whereas the president had
the idea that that would be more provocative and ineffective. And he
took a very strong stand.”

If we presume that the old man’s memory was sound and that he
was telling the truth, McCloy had concealed FDR’s personal refusal to
bomb Auschwitz for forty-two years. (McCloy’s private papers offer no
account of his remembered conversation with FDR; nor do they document
every exchange he had on sensitive wartime issues.) Perhaps McCloy had
been motivated by his old-fashioned notion of public service, which
demanded protecting the secrecy of presidential conversations and
deflecting criticism from the boss.

Why did McCloy change his story in 1986? Smarting from public
criticism over Auschwitz, he may have grown tired of bearing the sole
burden of what had become the most hotly debated decision of the
Roosevelt presidency–especially among American Jews who had once
hailed FDR as their hero. But there might also have been another
reason. It could not be wholly coincidental that the outsider to whom
McCloy insisted that Franklin Roosevelt, not he, was cardinally
responsible for the failure to bomb Auschwitz was the son of the
Jewish Treasury secretary who had once accused McCloy of being an
“oppressor of the Jews.”

John McCloy was a man so respected that he was once called the
“chairman” of the American Establishment. His firsthand testimony is
the first serious evidence we have that it was Franklin Roosevelt who
made one of history’s most crucial decisions–and of the president’s
rationale in making it. Based on McCloy’s account, FDR made his
decision on Auschwitz after little or no consultation with his key
advisers. Historians will probably argue until the end of time whether
or not Auschwitz should have been bombed. But as the United States
contemplates war against Iraq, the story of FDR’s choice not to bomb
shows us how a wartime president may issue a swift and quiet ruling
which, though it may not seem pivotal at the time, could prove to be
one of the decisions for which history most remembers him.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 12th, 2002 and is filed under history.