by Herman Wouk
The proceedings of the conference haven’t yet been published. The Department is now frenziedly pleading a need for secrecy “to protect the measures to aid political refugees.” What Messrs. Hull and Long really hope is that interest in the conference will die out, and they’ll never have to come clean. But it will not. The pressure for disclosure will build, and there is going to be a hell of an explosion when the truth is uncovered.
My memorandum will give you an inkling of what really happened at Bermuda. You remember that horrible document I received in the Bern movie theatre, describing the Wannsee Conference? I could not authenticate it, but events have since done so with a vengeance. Unless President Roosevelt acts quickly, history will say that the Jews of Europe were destroyed between the hammer of the Wannsee Conference and the anvil of the Bermuda Conference. The American people under Roosevelt will be blamed, equally with the Germans under Hitler, for the massacre! That is a cruel distortion, but it is exactly what Breck Long is bringing about.
You know President Roosevelt well. I send you this memorandum, to do with what you will. It is a clear and true warning of what impends after Bermuda, not only for the European Jews, but for the historical reputation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and certainly for the postwar moral position of America in the world. Please read it carefully, and consider whether — in any form you choose to revise or amplify it — it should go to the President.
Hurricanes never find people prepared, Bill, and by the time improvised safety measures are taken, the storm has wreaked its worst. The German massacre of the Jews is a hurricane. There has never been anything like it. It is going on behind the smokescreen of a world war, in a rogue nation cut off from civilized society. It could not be happening otherwise. Recognition of it has been slow, measures to deal with it laggard. But all these mitigating facts will be lost in later years. Seen in retrospect, the Bermuda Conference will be perceived as a ruthless, heartless farce, perpetrated by America and England to avoid taking any action while millions of innocent people were being slaughtered.
So long as the responsibility is not taken from Breck Long this distortion will deepen and harden, yet the final disgrace will not rest with him, for he will be a forgotten small man. If the Bermuda Conference remains the Allies’ last word on the Nazi barbarity, Franklin Roosevelt will go down as the great American President who led his country out of depression and into world triumph; but who, with full knowledge of this horrendous massacre, failed the Jews. Don’t let it happen, Bill. Warn the President.
For the sake of my own sanity, with this memorandum I sever my accidental involvement in the most terrible crime in the history of the world. The burden was never mine, except in the sense that it is every man’s. The world so far refuses to shoulder it. I have tried and failed, because I am nobody and powerless. This memorandum written in blood — the Jews’, and mine — is my legacy of the experience.
Sincerely,
Leslie Slote
William Tuttle could readily see in the enclosed memorandum, scrawled on legal-length yellow sheets, the exasperated outpouring of a subordinate quitting his job in anger. The style was hurried, the tone intemperate. That this careful and timorous man had taken a job involving parachutist training sufficiently showed how shaken up he was.
Nevertheless, the memorandum disturbed Tuttle. He had been wondering about the Bermuda Conference. He did not sleep well for a couple of nights, wondering what to do about all this. Breck Long had always seemed to him a sound enough person; a polished self-assured gentleman, very much an insider, a good judge of horseflesh, and all in all anything but a villain.
But Tuttle still resented the recent orders that had come from the State Department to stop transmitting through Department codes the Jewish reports out of Geneva about the exterminations; and he was well aware that all the information he had sent to the Division of European Affairs had vanished into silence. He himself did not like to dwell on the Jewish horror, and he had let the lack of response pass as bureaucratic delay and inattention. But if Long was at the bottom of it, and doing it purposefully, the President perhaps ought to know. How to tell him?
In the end he heavily cut Slote’s memorandum, toning down the bitter diatribes against Breckinridge Long. He sent the typed revision to Washington via the Swiss pouch, with a handwritten covering letter marked Personal and Urgent, for the President.
August 5, 1943
Dear Mr. President:
The author of the enclosed document served at the Bermuda Conference and resigned from the Foreign Service in protest. He is a Rhodes Scholar who worked with me here in Bern. I found him a man of rare intelligence, always thoroughly reliable.
I hesitate to add to your grave burdens, but a twofold concern compels me to do so: firstly, for the terrible fate of the European Jews; secondly, for your own place in history. This report may help fill in for you a true picture of what happened at the Bermuda Conference, behind the official reports. I am afraid I tend to believe Leslie Slote. With deepest respect and admiration,
Sincerely,
Bill
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM
The Bermuda Conference: American and British Complicity in the Extermination of the European Jews
1. Historical Background
Since early 1941 the German government has been engaged in a secret systematic operation to murder Europe’s Jews. This stark fact goes so far beyond all previous human experience that no social machinery exists to cope with it.
Because of the war the German government is an international outlaw, answerable only to the German people. By police state terror the Nazi regime has reduced them to docile compliance in its savage acts. Yet the sad truth is, popular resistance to the Nazi policy against Jewry has been minimal since Hitler took power.
The roots of the massacre lie in a broad and deep German cultural strain, a sort of desperate romantic nationalism, an extreme reaction to the humane liberalism of the West. This body of thought extols a brutish self-glorification of warlike German “Kultur,” and implies, where it does not openly express, virulent anti-Semitism. This is a complex and dark subject. The philosopher Croce traces this uncivilized strain to an event in Roman times, the victory of Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest, which cut off the German tribes from the meliorating influence of Roman law and manners. Whatever the origin, Adolf Hitler’s rise and popularity indicate how that strain persists.
2. Embarrassments of the Allies
The Bermuda Conference took place because the secret of the massacre leaked out. On December 17, 1942, the governments of the United Nations publicly and jointly warned that its perpetrators would be punished. This official disclosure sparked a strong public demand in the United States and Great Britain for action
Unfortunately, in his Jewish policy Adolf Hitler struck at the Achilles’ heel of Western liberalism.
Quite aside from the Jews, the call for action has come from press, church, progressive politicians, intellectuals, and the like. But other forces, glacially silent and immovable, have prevented action.
What the Jews want from England is the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration, an obvious step to relieve the Nazi pressure. But the British Foreign Office believes it cannot risk Arab opposition, at this stage of the war, to such a step. An equally obvious move for the United States would be emergency legislation to admit the threatened victims of Hitler. But our drastic restrictive laws are the will of Congress, which is against changing the “racial composition” of our country.
If Allied liberalism were government policy, rather than something between an ideal and a myth, these steps would be taken. As realities stand, Adolf Hitler has put the Allies on the spot.
Hence, the Bermuda Conference. It was launched with fanfare as the Allied response to the Nazi horrors. The Conference produced an appearance of action, to placate the demand; and the fact of inaction, to conform to policy. It was a mockery. The diplomatic menials went through the motions with very bad
consciences, to which they adjusted with bravado, mendacity, or ulcers.
In all this there was not so much villainy as a pathetic inability to come to grips with history’s most monstrous villainy.
That is the heart of the matter. The Nazi massacre of the Jews is still farfetched newspaper talk to most people, obscured by big battle stories. The German action is so savage, so incomprehensible, so far from the mild dislike of Jews which is an old story everywhere, that public opinion shuts it out of mind. The glare of war makes that easy.
3. The Conference
The agreed purpose of the Conference was “to deal with the problem of political refugees.” Great emphasis was placed on the avoidance of the word “Jews” in the agenda. Moreover, the only “political refugees” that could be discussed were those in neutral countries; that is, people whose lives were already safe! These rules were secret. No word of them ever got out to the press.
Someday the minutes will have to come to light. They will show nothing but a dreary sham, a repulsive exercise in diplomatic dodging, shadowboxing, and double-talking. Every attempt to expand the agenda is beaten down; every suggestion for real action — even to relieve the pileup of refugees in neutral countries — is frustrated. There are no funds; or there is no shipping; or there is no place to send people; or they pose too great a security problem, because of possible spies and saboteurs among them; or the action in question might “interfere with the war effort.”
A game of buck-passing goes on and on. The Americans push for North Africa and the Near East as a place to dump refugees. The British insist on an opening up of the western hemisphere. In the end they cordially agree on negative conclusions; and to produce the illusion of action, they agree to revive the moribund Committee on Refugees established by the Evian Conference, a similar fiasco perpetrated in 1938.
It is easy to condemn the delegates who had to go through this contemptible charade. But they were puppets, acting out the policies of their governments, and ultimately the public will of their nations.
4. The Need for Further Steps
After the disaster of the Conference, what can still be done?
At best, very little can be done. The Germans are bent on their savage deed. They have most of Europe’s Jews in their grip. Only Allied victory can prevent their carrying out their purpose. But if we will but do with vigor what little we can do, we will be absolved of complicity in the Nazi crime. As things stand now, the Bermuda Conference has made the United States government a passive bystander at murder.
Some sixteen months from now, there will be a presidential election. The massacre of the European Jews may by then be almost an accomplished fact. The American people will have had another year and a half to overcome their lag in awareness of this incredible horror. Evidence will have mounted to a flood. Conceivably Europe will have been invaded, and some murder camps captured. The American public is a humane one. Though today it does not want to “admit all those Jews,” by the end of 1944 it will be looking for somebody to blame for letting the thing happen. The blame will fall squarely on those in power now.
The author of this memorandum knows the President to be a true humanitarian, who would like to help the Jews. But in this vast global war, the problem is a low-priority one. Since so little can be done, and since the subject is so ghastly, Mr. Roosevelt can hardly be blamed for attending to other things.
The agitation to open Palestine or to change the immigration laws seems hopeless. Extravagant mass ransom schemes, and proposals to bomb nonmilitary targets like concentration camps, run afoul of major war-making policies. Still, some things can be done, and must be done.
5. Short-term Steps
The single most urgent and useful thing that President Roosevelt can do at once is to take the entire refugee problem out of the State Department, and above all away from Mr. Breckinridge Long.
He is now in charge of this problem, and be is a disaster. This unfortunate man, forced out on a limb of negativism, is resolved to do as little as possible; to prevent anybody else from doing any more; and to move heaven and earth to prove that he is right and has always been right, and that nobody could be a better friend of the Jews. At heart he still seems to think that talk of the Nazi massacre is mostly a clever trick to get around the immigration laws.
State personnel have had this viewpoint drummed into them. Too many share his rigid restrictionist convictions. The Department’s morale, and its capacity to perform in humanitarian matters, are low. An executive agency must be created, empowered to explore any possibility to save Jewish lives, and to act with speed. Commonsense adjustment of visa rules in itself can at once rescue a larger number of Jews eligible to enter the United States under existing quotas. They will be no financial burden. Relief funds in almost any magnitude will be procurable from the Jewish community.
Latin America’s restrictionism is based on our own. Once the new agency projects to Latin American countries the changed attitude of the United States, some of those countries will follow suit.
The new agency should at once move as many refugees as possible from the four neutral European havens — Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal — to relieve the strain on them, and change their present attitude of “the lifeboat is full” to one of welcome to those hunted Jews who can still reach their borders.
The new agency should work on congressional leaders for the temporary admission of perhaps twenty thousand refugees. If ten other countries around the world will follow such a lead, this will be a loud and clear signal to the slaughterers themselves, and to the satellite governments which have not yet handed over their Jewish citizens to the Germans, that the Allies mean business.
For as the tide of war shifts, the murders are bound to slow, and at last stop. Sooner or later, the murderers and their accomplices will take fright. That turning point can come when ninety-nine percent of the Jews are gone, or when sixty or seventy percent are gone. No better figure can probably be hoped for; but even that much would be a historic achievement.
Leslie Slote
William Tuttle received no acknowledgment of his letter to the President, and never found out whether it had reached him. As a matter of history, the public reaction gradually swelled to a roar during 1943, as the facts of the Bermuda Conference came out. On January 22, 1944, an Executive Order from the White House took the refugee problem out of the State Department’s hands. It created the War Refugee Board, an executive agency empowered to deal with “Nazi plans to exterminate all the Jews.” A new policy of forceful American rescue action began. By then the hurricane had long been blowing its worst.
65
THE Swiss diplomat who walked into the hospital alongside Jastrow’s wheelchair brought a letter from the German ambassador to the director, Comte Aldebert de Chambrun. “You know, of course,” said the Swiss casually, “Monsieur’s masterpiece, Le Jésu dun Juif.”
Comte de Chambrun was a retired general, a financier, an old-line aristocrat, and an in-law of Premier Laval, all of which made him fairly imperturbable, even in these disordered times. He nodded as he glanced over the letter, which called for the finest possible treatment for the “distinguished author.” Since the abrupt departure of most of the staff after Pearl Harbor, the comte had taken on the directorship of the American Hospital. The few Americans left in Paris came there for treatment, but Jastrow was the first from the Baden-Baden group. The comte did not keep up with current American literature and wasn’t sure he had ever heard of Jastrow. A Jew’s Jesus! Strange letter, in the circumstances.
“You will note,” went on the Swiss, as though reading his mind, “that the occupying authority considers racial origin irrelevant.”
“Just so,” replied the comte. “Prejudice cannot pass the doorway of a hospital.”
The Swiss received this sentiment with a face twitch, and left. Within the hour the German embassy telephoned to inquire about Jastrow’s condition and accommodations. That settled it. When Jastrow began to mend, a
fter difficult two-stage surgery and a few bad days, the director placed him in a sunny room and had him nursed around the clock.
Comte de Chambrun discussed this odd German solicitude for Jastrow with his wife, a very positive American woman with a quick answer for everything. The comtesse was a grande dame: a Longworth, related by marriage to the Roosevelts, sister of the former Speaker of the House. She was whiling away the war by managing the American Library, and pursuing her Shakespearean studies. Their son was married to the daughter of Pierre Laval. The comtesse had long since taken on French citizenship, but in talk and manner she remained pungently American, with a patina of rabid French old-nobility snobbishness; a walking anomaly of seventy, begging for the pen of a Proust.
There was nothing in the least odd about the thing, the comtesse briskly told her husband. She had read A Jew’s Jesus, and didn’t think much of it, but the man did have a name. He would soon be going home. What he had to say about his treatment would be widely quoted in American newspapers and magazines. Here was a chance for the Boches to counter the unfavorable propaganda about their Jewish policy; she was surprised only at the good sense they were showing, for she regarded the Germans as a coarse and thickheaded lot.