I wanted to share with you a new book that might be of interest, America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of An American Aristocracy by  Gregory J. Wallance, a partner at the law firm of Kaye Scholer in New York City; a former federal prosecutor; and the author of Two Men Before the Storm and Papa’s Game. Gregory was a producer of the HBO movie “Sakharov,” which was an outgrowth of a 1979 human rights mission to the Soviet Union in which he participated to represent families of refuseniks – Jews punished for attempting to emigrate to Israel – and personally presented legal petitions on their behalf to Soviet authorities.

Why was America’s soul in the balance?

As we all know, the greatest genocidal crime in human history was the Nazi government’s murder of six million Jews during World War II. At the height of the war, highly educated, patrician diplomats in the State Department tried to cover up the Nazi extermination scheme and block efforts to rescue Jews in the few places where rescue was possible. Had they ultimately succeeded, it would have made the United States an accomplice to the Nazi genocide.

Why on earth did the State Department do that?

Anti-Semitism played a role. Many in the State Department bureaucracy were virulently anti-Semitic; some actually put Nazi collaborators into positions of power in newly liberated countries. Just to give you a flavor: the head of the Division of European Affairs in 1942 was a diplomat named Ray Atherton, who arranged for an anti-Semitic, French Nazi collaborationist to become a governor-general in liberated North Africa (where he maintained Nazi laws that discriminated against Jews). Atherton and his colleagues then blocked the reports from Europe of the exterminations. Loy Henderson, who worked in the State Department on East European and Soviet issues in the 1940s, blamed “international Jewry” for support of the Soviet Union and, after a visit to New York City, commented of the inhabitants jostling him in the street that “They seemed to have little in common with me.” William Phillips, an undersecretary of state, in the 1930s, described Atlantic City as “infested with Jews.” William Bullitt, an ambassador to the Soviet Union during FDR’s first term, and later Ambassador to France at the war’s outbreak, called an official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry a “wretched little kike.” Breckinridge Long, a wartime assistant secretary of state, who played a decisive role in blocking Jews from reaching the United States, regarded Mein Kampf  as “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos.”

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long in the 1930s

But it would be a mistake to regard anti-Semitism as the only factor. The response of the State Department’s diplomats can be traced to a unique cultural and social context. These wartime diplomats were part of a now all-but-vanished American aristocracy that existed outside the experience or even awareness of most of their fellow Americans. Sheltered from mainstream America in a hermetically sealed aristocratic archipelago, they went from elite Northeast boarding schools to Ivy League educations to diplomatic postings. Imbued with a sense of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism and convinced that America needed them more than they needed America, they developed a heartless indifference to the sufferings of human beings from different ancestries, religions or economic backgrounds. For example, in 1940, the head of the Division of European Affairs was Jay Pierrepont Moffat. As a young diplomat in Warsaw shortly after the end of World War I, Moffat had watched desperate refugees flee oncoming Soviet armies: “They sounded like so many cackling geese and generally behaved in a manner that made us pray like the pharisee, ‘Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men’.” It was as though whatever nerves that transmit ordinary human compassion and empathy had been amputated.

At one point in your book, you describe an incident involving water boarding.

A number of important State Department officials graduated from Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts, which educated the sons of the wealthiest men in America. The school was founded to promote “manly, Christian character,” but it also put a high value on conformity. For example, if a student failed to cheer at a football game, or wore the wrong clothes, or was just cheeky, and didn’t change his behavior, he was water boarded by other students (except they called it “water pumping”). It was a combination of the Spanish Inquisition and Lord of the Flies. With the approval of the school’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, the bigger students forced the errant student under a faucet, held his mouth open, and turned on the spigot long enough to partly drown him. That “don’t rock the boat mentality” also accounts for the State Department’s behavior.

Why did the State Department think it could cover up the murder of millions of people?

Most of Europe, of course, was occupied by Nazi Germany, which cut off the flow of information, but not Switzerland, where the United States had a legation. Jewish groups in Switzerland were able to use the legation to transmit the initial reports of the mass murders to the State Department in Washington, where Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was one of the few department officials sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, gave the reports to Jewish American groups.

Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State

These groups then mounted publicity campaigns to pressure the Roosevelt administration to take measures to stop the massacres and mount rescue efforts. To stop the pressure, the Division of European Affairs sent a cable to the legation in Switzerland instructing the mission to cease sending reports of the exterminations. And then Welles, the only high level official sympathetic to the plight of European Jewry, was forced to resign.

Because he was sympathetic to the Jews?

Actually – no.  In one of the most remarkable twists in the story Welles got himself into a sex scandal – and his enemies, which included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, used the scandal to destroy him.

Where was FDR in all of this?

He was managing a world war fought on six continents.  That said, he lost control of his State Department.  And he was inconsistent – on the one hand, he approved one of the biggest Jewish rescue missions of the war. On the other hand, he never used his great powers of communication to personally condemn the Nazi extermination plan to the world. He missed the opportunity to save lives and establish a great moral legacy.

How was the State Department’s conduct discovered?

In early 1943, an opportunity arose to rescue 70,000 Romanian Jews who had been deported to the nightmarish place known as Transnistria where they were expected to die from the cold, disease or starvation – and this was the rescue effort that Roosevelt approved. But, the rescue effort required, in effect, paying bribes to the Romanian government. Financial transactions like that required a Treasury Department license – which young Christian Treasury lawyers from middle class backgrounds instantly granted. And then – nothing happened for months because the State Department refused to transmit the license to Jewish groups in Switzerland involved in the rescue. The Treasury lawyers, at first baffled and then angry, began an investigation. Using, in effect, a “mole” in the State Department, they got their hands on the cable sent by Atherton to shut off the Swiss mission as a conduit for reports (it was the World War II equivalent of Wikileaks). They told Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, that he had to persuade FDR to take refugee and rescue away from the State Department. Morgenthau was Jewish and somewhat fearful that if he confronted the State Department on a Jewish issue, he and FDR would be attacked. But in the end, he persuaded Roosevelt to act.

Roosevelt and Morgenthau in 1933

Did this save lives?

Not as many as could or should have been saved.  But, FDR did take refugee and rescue away from the State Department and established the War Refugee Board, which is credited with rescuing 200,000 Jews.

What lessons does the book have for today?

Well, I think there are two. The first is the hazards posed by powerful elite groups cut off from society’s mainstream. The second is the one from the Talmud, “To save one life is as if you have saved the world.” And, while the United States cannot prevent every act of genocidal madness, we should never forget that saying – or the behavior of the wartime State Department that not only disgraced itself but came close to blackening the good name of the United States of America for all time.

Why did you decide to write this book?

A few years ago, I read about the discovery of letters written by Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, in an effort to get visas for his family to emigrate to the United States. Those efforts were unsuccessful – and we all know what happened to that family – but one of the reasons was the bureaucratic obstacles erected by the State Department to Jewish refugees. I then read the literature on the American response, and concluded that the role of the State Department hadn’t been sufficiently examined. It’s not so much that the State Department’s conduct has been ignored, but rather, it has been submerged in the American collective guilt approach that underpins many historical assessments. Consider the State Department’s treatment in the arguably most influential book of the past twenty-five years, The Abandonment of the Jews, by David Wyman, an exhaustive scholarly study of the American response. The 29-page summation chapter titled “Responsibility” (“America’s response to the Holocaust was the result of action and inaction on the part of many people”) devotes less than a page to the State Department, while three full pages are spent on the wartime rivalries of American Jewish groups. The book also contends that “direct proof of anti-Semitism in the department is limited” and that “plain bureaucratic inefficiency” was one explanation for the State Department’s behavior. America’s Soul in the Balance has a different perspective.

What is your view of the State Deptartment’s efforts today to address the rights of Holocaust survivors?

In light of the State Department’s conduct during the Holocaust, I think they have a special obligation to the Holocaust survivors. I am not in the best position to judge whether they are fulfilling that obligation, but it certainly is one way for the State Department to atone for what happened during the Holocaust.

In your research for the book, did you interview survivors who now live in the U.S.?  What are their feelings on this chapter of American history?

An important figure in my book is Ruth Glasberg Gold, who at age 11 watched her family die in Transnistria and then somehow managed to survive a brutal environment.

 Ruth’s own book, Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir, is one of the best personal accounts of the Romanian Holocaust. She gave me a great deal of help while I was writing my book, even though it required her to resurrect searingly painful memories. But, I don’t think the account of what was going on in the State Department while she was trying to stay alive as a child was as disturbing to her, perhaps, as much as it might be to others. After all, for those who have experienced the Holocaust firsthand, I am not certain that anything about human behavior would be surprising.