Guest columnist Rafael Medoff: What FDR could have done to save Jews

In the Gazette’s Sept. 17 interview with Ken Burns about his new Holocaust film (“Uncomfortable echoes”), the filmmaker excused President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failure to aid Jewish refugees on the grounds that “He’s not a king or absolute dictator — he can’t by fiat rescue Jews and admit them to the United States.”

But President Roosevelt did not need to be a king or dictator in order to help the Jews. There were a number of steps he could have taken that would have involved minimal political risk to him and would not have undermined the war effort. For example:

■America’s quota for immigrants from Germany was filled in only one of Roosevelt’s 12 years as president, and in most of those years it was less than 25% filled. Over 190,000 quota places sat empty during those years. The quota could have been filled without any impact on the war effort.

■The president could have admitted refugees temporarily, either to the United States or to U.S. territories such as the Virgin Islands. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, the governor and legislative assembly of the Virgin Islands offered to open their doors to Jewish refugees; yet FDR rejected the proposal. An April 1944 Gallup poll found 70% of Americans supported giving “temporary protection and refuge” to Jews fleeing Hitler; yet the president admitted just one such group of 982 refugees.

Thousands of U.S. cargo ships, known as Liberty ships, brought supplies to Allied forces in Europe and North Africa, but when they were ready to return to the U.S., they were sometimes too light to sail, so they had to be filled with ballast — rocks and chunks of concrete — to give them added weight. Jewish refugees could have served the same purpose.

Beginning in June 1944, the Allies could have bombed the railway lines and bridges leading to Auschwitz or the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz. Damaging the railways, and especially the bridges, would have interrupted the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. At a time when 12,000 Jews were being gassed to death daily in Auschwitz, any interruption could have saved lives.

How do we know such bombings were feasible? Because during the summer and autumn of 1944, American planes repeatedly bombed German oil factories in the industrial zone of Auschwitz, less than 5 miles from the gas chambers. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was one of the pilots who bombed those oil targets. In a postwar interview, he said: “There is no question we should have attempted … to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”

McGovern added: “Franklin Roosevelt was a great man and he was my political hero,” he said in the interview. “But I think he made two great mistakes in World War II.” One was the internment of Japanese Americans; the other was the decision “not to go after Auschwitz … God forgive us for that tragic miscalculation.”

These proposals are not just hindsight — they were all requested by Jewish organizations or other rescue advocates at the time. Yet President Roosevelt chose to turn away from history’s most compelling moral challenge. The problem was not that rescuing the Jews was too difficult; the problem was that FDR was not seriously interested in taking even minimal steps to rescue them.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C.