The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  Everything was saved. Everything was catalogued in a place that was called Canada, because Canada was deemed a rich country, and everything was to be used and to be disseminated throughout other parts of the Third Reich to help out the German people.

  DR: Why were the Germans so obsessed with hiding the bodies? Why were they so obsessed with making sure that the Allies didn’t know that they were doing this?

  JW: I think it’s safe to say that there were two reasons. The first reason is that they didn’t want the Jews to fight back. That was reason number one. The second reason is Hitler understood that the German people were willing to follow him in almost everything, but he thought perhaps they were still too cultured to countenance this.

  The West was uncertain in the beginning about what was taking place, but as time went on, very quickly there were those in the West who pieced together what was happening.

  DR: How many Jews were killed in the gas chambers?

  JW: Nobody has an exact figure, but the best figure is six million.

  DR: The Germans also exterminated others who were not Jewish.

  JW: That’s right. What was unique about the targeting of the Jews is it was a systematic attempt to exterminate an entire race. That’s what separated them [from the Nazis’ other victims].

  DR: Did anybody ever escape from Auschwitz?

  JW: That’s a great question. It’s worthy of a Hollywood movie. I actually have an agent who’s trying to make one from my book.

  There were two men, Rudi Vrba and Fred Wetzler, who were young and healthy, and they weren’t gassed. They were rare people in Auschwitz because they were administrators, and they knew everything that was taking place.

  When they saw that there was going to be the worst mass murder in history, the killing of 750,000 to a million Jews from Hungary [and Poland, among other origin countries of Auschwitz’s prisoners], they were determined to tell the truth to the world and especially to Roosevelt. They hid in a woodpile for three days, and they waited to be discovered.

  They never were. Eventually while there was darkness, they turned around, they pushed the top of the woodpile open, and they looked toward Auschwitz, and they saw these flames going high into the sky, because the gas chambers were still going.

  Then they ran like hell for seventeen days, escaping the SS, escaping German soldiers, escaping anti-Semites. Eventually they got to Slovakia, where they told a few remaining Jewish elders everything that was taking place. They had a photographic memory, these two men, and so there was unimpeachable evidence about what was taking place.

  It would eventually wind its way to Washington and land on FDR’s desk. But still nothing was done.

  DR: That’s the fifth subject I wanted to cover, the American and Allied response. Once these two men escaped from Auschwitz and people began to know what was actually happening—people weren’t sure what was happening before—when Roosevelt found out, why did he not say, “Let’s do something to prevent this”?

  JW: This is one of the great puzzles in history. Roosevelt was considered one of the great humanitarians. He’s the man who uplifted hearts with his fireside chats on the radio, who pulled us out of the Great Depression. And if he was such a great humanitarian, why, in the face of this, would he not want to do something?

  Churchill, interestingly enough, when he got word of what was taking place in Auschwitz, he said, “This is the greatest crime in all of human history.” And he told his air force, “Bomb Auschwitz. Use my name. Get everything you can out of it.” Roosevelt did only the minimal amount of what he could do.

  DR: Roosevelt had a secretary of the treasury who was a lifelong friend, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was Jewish. Did Morgenthau lobby Roosevelt on this issue?

  JW: For Morgenthau, Roosevelt was his best friend, they had a weekly luncheon meeting, and he owed everything to Roosevelt—for him to take on Roosevelt was not an easy thing. But he was so aghast at the failure of the American Allies to do anything to help out the Jews that eventually he had his department write a thirty-page memo.

  This memo had to be the hardest-hitting memo ever given to a president—and not just any president, to the humanitarian Franklin Roosevelt. It was first titled Report [to the Secretary] on This Government’s Acquiescence in the Murder of the Jews. [Written by Morgenthau’s assistant Josiah E. DuBois Jr. and dated January 1944, the report was retitled Personal Report to the President.]

  When Roosevelt got this, even though he was sick and ailing and not feeling well, he immediately called Morgenthau into a meeting in the second-floor Oval Office and he said, “What do you want?” It was at that point they set up the War Refugee Board, whose sole intent was to do nothing but save the Jews. But it was too little and way too late.

  DR: The Pentagon’s view was that if we divert efforts from the war, it might slow down victory. What was their reasoning?

  JW: The man who was running point from the Pentagon was John J. McCloy, one of the great wise men and statesmen of American foreign policy. He came up with reason after reason as to why they couldn’t bomb Auschwitz.

  He said that we didn’t have enough planes, when we actually did have enough planes. He said they couldn’t fly that distance, when in fact American planes had been flying around Auschwitz—three, four, or five miles away—for months, as part of the oil war to degrade the Nazi war machine. [Allied planes bombed oil refineries and a synthetic oil plant in the vicinity of the Auschwitz complex.]

  Reason after reason was given, and the irony is that, in the end, Auschwitz was bombed, but it was bombed by mistake.

  The great humanitarian and now departed conscience of mankind Elie Wiesel was in Auschwitz as a boy at that time, and he said, “We may have feared death, but we did not fear that kind of death.” When they bombed Auschwitz by mistake, the inmates, who could barely stand, barely walk, barely talk, they rose up on their feet and they cheered.

  DR: What about the State Department? What was their attitude about doing something?

  JW: The State Department mirrored, in many ways, the Pentagon. A man named Breckinridge Long was the head of the visa policy section. At this point, when Jews were cramming American consulates to get visas, because it meant life and death for them, Long sent out a really dastardly memo in which he said to all the consulates, “By various administrative devices, we can postpone and postpone and postpone the giving of visas to the Jews.” He said it not once but three times.

  All he had to do was say yes, and two hundred thousand people would have been saved. That’s two Super Bowls’ worth of people. And it never happened.

  DR: There was a refugee ship that came and tried to dock in Miami. What happened to that ship?

  JW: That was the ship St. Louis. It had a couple hundred Jews on board, and they were escaping Nazi Germany.

  They came so close to Miami that they could actually see the shores and the buildings. They had people coming out in little dinghies and little ships waving to them and giving them food. And yet, when they sent a telegram to Roosevelt—“Help us”—all they got was a nonreply. [The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where many of its passengers died in the Holocaust.]

  DR: When the war was very much near the end, did the Nazis abandon the concentration camps, or did they still try to kill the Jews even though they knew they were going to lose the war?

  JW: The very tragic thing, the pathos in all of this, is that even as the war machine was winding down because the Germans were clearly losing the war, the empire of death, the killing of the Jews by any means possible, continued.

  The Germans were afraid the Soviets would find out what they did at Auschwitz, so they tried to cover up their crimes as quickly as they could. They took the remaining Jews—there were some fifty thousand of them still in the camps—on a death march during which if anyone strayed, they shot them. If anyone halted, they shot them. And these were the remnants of the Jews. There were six million dead.

  DR: When the war was over, the American g
enerals and military went to see the remains of the concentration camps. What was the reaction, for example, of General Patton?

  JW: Patton, who had seen more than his share of war and bloodshed, was so horrified by what he saw that he couldn’t walk into the camp itself. From what he did see, he vomited.

  DR: What about Eisenhower? What was his reaction?

  JW: Eisenhower was infuriated. He mirrored Churchill in thinking this was one of the greatest crimes ever committed.

  As one of the troops around him said, “Now, finally, more than anything else, we know what we’ve been fighting for.” Eisenhower made sure that as many people as he could get—he got every congressman he knew to come to Germany and see what happened.

  DR: If you had to summarize the main reason the American government didn’t do more to solve the problem—to let refugees in and/or keep them from being exterminated—what would you say?

  JW: I think it was the attitude of Franklin Roosevelt, who, despite his humanitarian impulses, was hardheaded and tough-nosed, and he didn’t want anything to compromise the winning of the war. There was never a moment like Abraham Lincoln had with the Emancipation Proclamation.

  In Lincoln’s case, he made the war about the Union, about keeping the Union together, until the Battle of Antietam. And then he promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation and made the war a great humanitarian gesture as well. Roosevelt never gave World War II that higher sense of purpose.

  DR: Who is the hero of your book 1944—or heroes?

  Photographed here during an impromptu meeting at an airfield in Germany with three top Allied generals—George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Courtney Hodges—General Dwight D. Eisenhower was among the military officers appalled by the Nazis’ crimes against humanity.

  JW: The heroes are those who escaped from Auschwitz. I certainly think Henry Morgenthau was a hero. There’s a German named Eduard Schulte who was horrified by what was taking place and, at great risk to his own life, he got word out about the Final Solution. There were people who put their lives or their careers on the line, who had a moment where they said, “Enough is enough. We have to do something.”

  DR: What was Adolf Eichmann’s role in the Final Solution?

  JW: Eichmann was just dastardly. He oversaw the complete extermination of the Jews. Later, of course, he was captured by the Israelis. [Israeli agents caught Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and brought him to stand trial in Israel, where he was convicted of war crimes and executed in 1962.]

  Hannah Arendt talked about the “banality of evil,” and she saw in him a soulless bureaucrat. But I don’t buy that they were soulless bureaucrats who were carrying out the Final Solution. I think they knew what they were doing, and I think they did it with hate in their hearts.

  10 JEAN EDWARD SMITH

  on Dwight D. Eisenhower

  “Eisenhower was always able to make the decisions that you expected a commander to make. He never waffled. He was never hesitant.”

  BOOK DISCUSSED:

  Eisenhower in War and Peace (Random House, 2012)

  Jean Edward Smith has an interesting twist on what has been the conventional wisdom about Dwight D. Eisenhower: gifted and experienced general, and not a gifted or successful president.

  Eisenhower has been seen as an extraordinary military leader who was the mastermind of D-Day, which led to the Allies ultimately defeating Germany. And there is no doubt that Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in charge of the invasion.

  But Smith points out that Eisenhower had missed combat in World War I; spent much of his military career in office or staff positions (he was a longtime aide to Douglas MacArthur); was much less qualified to lead a large combat mission than Omar Bradley, George Patton, or George Marshall, who had long been expected to lead the invasion of Europe; and late in his career was given combat military leadership positions in Italy and in Africa, in large part to give him the experience he would need to later lead the D-Day invasion.

  Eisenhower’s strength, Smith notes in the interview, was not combat experience as much as the ability to get along with political leaders. Churchill really liked him, as did FDR, who ultimately made the decision on D-Day leadership.

  Interestingly, Eisenhower was not sure that the D-Day plan would work, and prepared communications acknowledging defeat and accepting responsibility for a failed invasion. And it might well have failed. Smith points out that Hitler’s best panzer troops were available to repel the invading Allies, and probably could have done so. But Hitler had to give the orders to use those troops, and no one dared wake him while he slept during the initial hours of D-Day.

  As the Supreme Allied Commander who devised the successful D-Day invasion of Europe, which ultimately led to the demise of the Nazi regime, Dwight Eisenhower was a living legend, admired by all Americans. Not surprisingly, both the Democratic and Republican Parties wanted Eisenhower as their presidential nominee. Seven years after World War II, Eisenhower revealed that he was a Republican, accepted the party’s nomination, and was easily elected in 1952 and reelected in 1956.

  As president, Eisenhower was seen as passive or even dull, and the period of his presidency was considered relatively tranquil, certainly when compared to the period of the 1960s with the civil rights movement, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Vietnam War, the student protests, and the musical and sexual revolutions brought about by, respectively, the Beatles and the pill.

  The result was a view that the Eisenhower presidency, occurring during quiet times, did not accomplish all that much. Many scholars and historians considered that it made less of an impact on history than his war service did.

  In recent years, the relative tranquility, not to mention the peace and prosperity, of the Eisenhower years has had scholars reassessing this presidency. That is perhaps because of the challenging presidencies that followed Eisenhower’s, and also because his low-key, steady-as-she-goes leadership style is now much better appreciated.

  Jean Edward Smith is among the scholars leading this reassessment of the Eisenhower presidency. A political science and history professor, Smith has also written very well-regarded biographies of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, General Ulysses S. Grant, and General Lucius Clay, the American military governor of occupied Germany after World War II.

  According to the conventional wisdom, Eisenhower was not very strong or effective as a government leader, and he left behind a record of little presidential accomplishment. But Smith points out that this traditional view has not been very accurate or very fair.

  Smith notes that President Eisenhower kept the peace for eight years (no American soldier was killed in combat during his presidency); ended the military conflict in Korea; thwarted the rise of McCarthyism; proposed and built the Interstate Highway System, without impacting the federal budget; enforced the law on desegregation of public schools in the South by sending federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas; and, with Canada, built the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

  Smith’s exhaustive research also led him to confirm some interesting facts about Eisenhower:

  He did seek permission during World War II from his senior military leader, George Marshall, to divorce Mamie Eisenhower in order to marry his “driver,” Kay Summersby. Permission was strongly denied, and that seemed to end the subject.

  He selected Richard Nixon as his running mate without even talking to him. (He had met Nixon once.) Eisenhower relied completely on his political advisors, who surprised him by saying the vice-presidential selection was actually his choice and not the Republican Convention’s.

  He wanted Nixon to remove himself from the ticket in 1952 after a controversy arose about the political fund Nixon used to pay his expenses. Eisenhower also wanted Nixon to take another position, such as secretary of defense, during a presumed second term. In both situations, Nixon resisted strongly, and Eisenhower simply did not use his authority to force his preferences. He apparently felt more comfortable exercising the military power he once held than the p
olitical power he later came to hold.

  How would history have changed if Eisenhower had been allowed to divorce his wife, or if Nixon was forced from the ticket in 1952 or in 1956? We will never know.

  Our conversation made me appreciate the extraordinary depth of Professor Smith’s research and storytelling abilities, and I made certain to read his other biographies shortly afterward. Professor Jean Edward Smith passed away in the summer of 2019. I am grateful for his devoted and singular contributions to the study of American history.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Let me start with this question. To be honest, many people do not rate Dwight Eisenhower as one of our greatest presidents. If you ask great historians to rank presidents, they wouldn’t say he was one of the best. Yet at the beginning of your book, you say that, with the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was the most successful president of the twentieth century. How would you explain that?

  MR. JEAN EDWARD SMITH (JES): I might even place him ahead of Franklin Roosevelt. If you consider international relations, Eisenhower immediately, after taking office, made peace in Korea. Truman had not been able to do that. Eisenhower did it. Not one American was killed in combat for the remaining eight years of his term.

  Eisenhower also thawed the Cold War. At the Geneva Summit of 1955, he was friendly with the Soviet premier and defense minister Nikolai Bulganin and with Nikita Khrushchev. [Khrushchev was then first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, later Soviet premier. The 1955 summit brought together Eisenhower, Bulganin, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France.]