David Shribman writes about new evidence that recasts President Roosevelt’s stance on the Jews during World War II:
For decades historians have suggested that Franklin Roosevelt was aware but not much moved by the danger that Jews faced in a Europe that eventually would be overrun by the Nazis and their ideology of anti-Semitism. The president has been celebrated for his masterly prosecution of the war, but in the verdict of history there always has been an asterisk for his callousness toward the Jews and his willingness to intern Japanese Americans in camps in the western United States.
[…]These newly discovered documents are not exculpatory—they do not relieve Roosevelt of the historical burden of answering why he did not do more—but they show an American president more interested, more horrified and ultimately more involved in these issues in the period leading to the war than previously believed. These documents, assembled this spring in “Refugees and Rescue” (Indiana University Press), change our view of FDR, though not as dramatically as his thoughts about the Jews in the late 1930s might have changed their tragic destiny.
They show Roosevelt in anguish over the agony in Europe, struggling to find a solution, thinking out loud about what steps might be taken to rescue Jews from Europe before they were engulfed by the fires that would come to be known as the Holocaust. They show FDR, who had presided over a huge increase in the role of government in his New Deal response to the Great Depression, speaking in the most ambitious terms of rescuing the Jews. His plan was no less dramatic than to sweep every Jew out of Europe to safety abroad.
Read the full article here.