by Jay Winik
Yalta was initially hailed as a triumphant success and a signal that the Allies’ collaboration would remain possible in the postwar world. Roosevelt and the delegation left tired, but buoyed by thoughts of the future.
ON THE WAY HOME, the president stopped for a meeting with the kings of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the emperor of Ethiopia. Wearing a flowing black cape, Roosevelt received each one on the gun deck of the USS Quincy. The Egyptian and the Ethiopian were the first to arrive for their consultations. Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia came last, on the second day. An American destroyer, Murphy, had been sent to collect him, and it was, from the moment of its departure from Jeddah, a stunning sight—an “Arab Court in Miniature,” wrote the New York Times. Thick carpets covered the destroyer’s deck and a royal tent had been raised alongside the forward gun turret. When he came into view, the king was seated regally on a great gilt chair, surrounded by more carpets and guarded by barefoot Nubian soldiers, their sabers drawn. Along with the rugs, sheep, tents, charcoal cooking buckets, and holy water, Ibn Saud arrived with an entourage of relatives, guards, valets, and food tasters, as well as the royal astrologer and a ceremonial coffee server. In addition, there were “nine miscellaneous slaves, cooks, porters, and scullions.” It was the first time that the Saudi king had left his desert homeland. Some of his traveling party had never seen the ocean, most had never been aboard a ship, and all balked at going belowdecks. The Saudis refused to eat anything from the ship’s mess, instead slaughtering their own sheep, which were traveling in a specially built pen on the ship’s fantail. Even more “eye-popping” to the ship’s officers and crew was the sight of the Saudis brewing their coffee in braziers, which they had unknowingly set up next to the ready-ammunition hoist.
At seventy years old, Saud, like Roosevelt, was feeling his age. He walked slowly, with a limp, and relied on a stick for balance. The king took a plush seat next to Roosevelt on the breezy deck, and the two men sat elbow to elbow, King Saud’s voluminous robes billowing along with Roosevelt’s hefty cape. A low table for coffee had been set out, and in deference to the king, the deck of the Quincy was also covered in overlapping brightly woven rugs. Women were not permitted in the king’s presence, so the president’s daughter, Anna, who had accompanied him throughout the Yalta trip, had already been dispatched belowdecks.
After the initial pleasantries, gifts, and discussion of topics such as oil and reforestation, Roosevelt, having failed to deliver the Jews from Auschwitz, at least sought to help some of the survivors. His goal on behalf of a ravaged Jewry desperately in need of a homeland was not insignificant. He steered the conversation toward his main objective: asking Ibn Saud to permit ten thousand additional Jews to enter Palestine. Confident as always of his own charm and his own powers of persuasion, Roosevelt suggested that this number was a very small percentage of the total population of the Arab world. But what he received in return was an unequivocal no. Recalcitrant from the start, Ibn Saud then launched into a speech, denouncing Jews for using money from American and British capitalists to make the Arab countryside “bloom,” accusing Jews of fighting Arabs rather than Germans (actually, the grand mufti sided with Hitler, and the Jews fought against the Germans), and vowing that the Arabs would take up arms themselves rather than give way to more Jewish emigration. “Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to Jews,” was his tart reply. Roosevelt tried a couple of other tactics, downplaying pro-Zionist sentiment in the United States and adding that he, and not Congress, formed his own foreign policy. Still, as Roosevelt made each point, the king grew more adamant. Ibn Saud left the Quincy with the gift of an airplane, but without having given an inch on the question of Jewish refugees. Actually, Roosevelt’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, was dismayed, worrying that the president, due to ill health, capitulated far too quickly on his pro-Zionist positions.
There was no other business to transact, except for a family lunch with Winston Churchill in the shadows of the fabled Egyptian city of Alexandria. Soon to be on his own deathbed, Harry Hopkins was there, and like Roosevelt ailing (Hopkins died in 1946). Meanwhile, the president’s daughter joined Churchill and his children, Randolph and Sarah. Churchill later described Roosevelt as placid but frail, retaining only a slender contact with life. The American envoy to Saudi Arabia was even more blunt, describing Roosevelt’s face as “ashen in color,” and adding, “The lines were deep; the eyes would fade in helpless fatigue. He was living on nerve.”
The trip turned stormy almost as soon as the Quincy steamed westward through the Mediterranean. The French general Charles de Gaulle, whom Roosevelt and Churchill had persuaded Stalin to include in the postwar architecture, disdainfully refused to meet with the president in Algiers, while a worn-out Harry Hopkins opted to fly home rather than spend more than a week at sea. Two days later, Roosevelt’s longtime faithful aide, Pa Watson, died of congestive heart failure and a brain hemorrhage in the ship’s surgery.
The president now stayed in bed in the mornings. He spent the afternoons on deck with his daughter, gazing off over the water, smoking, and from time to time flipping through the pages of whatever reading matter lay in front of him. Drinks and dinner brought back vestiges of the Roosevelt of old, although when the voyage concluded on February 27, Roosevelt wanted nothing else but to take the train straight to Washington. There, in two days, he would face Congress, for what would be the last time.
THROUGHOUT FEBRUARY AND INTO March, the removal of the Jews deeper into Germany continued. They walked for miles, in the biting cold. Those who heard the Soviets’ artillery fire may have taken heart; however, they were likely to be put on trains that took them farther away from the front lines, and from liberation. Water was given every other day. Food barely at all. On one sealed train in March, of the thousand women who had left a Nazi camp east of Berlin in January, only two hundred remained alive.
The thousands who still walked—Jews who had survived the selections and evaded the gas chambers, starvation, and disease—were now being taken to notorious death mills in the heart of Germany and Austria. When they passed through German towns, the SS men told the residents not to offer them bits of food, saying, “It’s Jews they are.” Children picked up stones from along the road and hurled them at the stumbling columns. Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück and their sweeping tentacles of subcamps were the final repositories for the remnants of the Final Solution. The Nazis, more deluded than ever, believed that the Jews and the others from the evacuated camps would provide a fresh source of slave labor as the front lines drew closer to Berlin: In this warped vision, these prisoners would be the ones to repair roads, rail lines, and bridges; to set tank traps to blunt the Allies’ advance; and to dig clusters of underground bunkers in the Sudeten mountains or the Alps, from where Hitler and the Wehrmacht could fancifully continue to direct the battle, an imaginary guerrilla war of attrition. The reality was very different.
At Bergen-Belsen, Jews lay on the floors, without blankets or food. As at Auschwitz, lice thrived, and typhus and cholera were rampant. Outside, the dead were left in piles that had begun slowly decomposing. Among those who had reached this camp was Anne Frank.
She and her sister, Margot, were two of the first to leave Auschwitz in October 1944 and be transported west. They had already proved themselves capable of heavy labor, moving rocks in Auschwitz. They were selected to be among the new workers sent west, while their father and mother stayed behind. One survivor remembers Anne at Bergen-Belsen, her round eyes and ready smile gone, poignantly begging for a bit of extra cereal. For the children and teenagers, starvation and typhus were common. Margot Frank was the first to fall ill. Her dreams of rescue dashed, Anne followed.
Meanwhile, the Allies, coming in their direction, were still miles away.
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES TO JOINT sessions of Congress are a tradition dating back to the days of George Washington, when the capital was first in New York and later in Philadelphia. In Washing
ton, D.C., under the great dome, the legislators gathered to hear the chief executive in the chamber of the House of Representatives. The Senate occupies a more intimate space, with small mahogany desks on which members have carved their names and initials over the years. But the House chamber, dating from 1857, is a sprawling place, with rows of unassigned seats and a large, semicircular gallery. It was bustling on March 1 when Franklin Roosevelt arrived.
For the members of Congress, it was a jarring sight. The man who appeared before them now at the end of the war was very different from the one who had addressed them at its beginning. He did not walk confidently, wearing his braces and balancing on an aide’s arm, as he had done for his address after Pearl Harbor. Instead, for the first time, he was gently wheeled into the chamber’s well and transferred to a plush crimson velvet chair at a little table. Nevertheless, the reaction to his arrival was thunderous applause. Roosevelt began by making an unusual reference to the “ten pounds of steel” that he typically carried on his lower legs, and jokingly asked to be pardoned for sitting down. And much else about the speech was different too.
His partisans relished the speech, but most could not see the Roosevelt of old. As historians note, the president traced the text with his trembling finger, yet still he stammered over phrases and garbled his words. He ad-libbed; he wandered and digressed; his speech was halting and unmoored, the words drifting along. “I did not think it was a particularly good speech,” Hassett confided to his diary: “Too long to begin with, and the President ad-libbed at length, a wretched practice which weakens even a better effort.” Roosevelt mentioned in passing his meeting with Ibn Saud after Yalta, adding that he had learned much about the Muslim-Jewish problem from this meeting. Only occasionally did the president raise his voice for emphasis; mostly, the delivery was in a flat monotone. Dean Acheson, the famed future secretary of state, noted that it was the voice not of a commanding head of state, but of an invalid. And those assembled could not help noticing the president’s hand quiver and tremble as he sipped his water.
Only at the end, after nearly an hour, when he spoke of his beloved United Nations and the coming meeting in San Francisco, did he display conviction. He spoke of how America had failed its fighting men at the end of World War I, adding, “We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.” He said that Yalta, the Crimea Conference, had brought an end to centuries of unilateral action, exclusive alliances, spheres of influence, and balances of power—means that “have always failed.” Instead, those outdated habits would give way to a universal organization “in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”
The president, having all but won the war and paved the way for the peace, left to another wild ovation. It was to be his final significant public appearance.
On March 3, Roosevelt left Washington for Hyde Park. He planned on returning to Hyde Park again in late March, before setting out for two weeks at Warm Springs. Then, on April 20, he was scheduled to depart on his train for the opening of the United Nations conference in San Francisco. In the White House there was a growing number of guests, including the Canadian prime minister, the king of Iraq, and members of the New York Democratic Committee, who overstayed their time, making the president late to lunch with Admiral Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet. Then, on March 17, the Roosevelts celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary with friends and family. After cocktails in the Red Room, dinner, and a movie, the president went to bed and announced that he would sleep until noon. He had begun to lose the ability to taste his food.
Frequently at the White House, Charles Bohlen noted the persistent shaking in Roosevelt’s hands, which made it difficult for him even to hold a telegram. The president could rouse himself for meetings with public figures and politicians, but to Bohlen it was clear that his “powers of concentration were slipping.” Yet Bohlen added, “The thought did not occur to me that he was near death.”
On March 30, Good Friday, Franklin Roosevelt arrived in Warm Springs to recuperate. He drove himself to his “Little White House,” and then remained inside. William Hassett, who was traveling with the president, pulled the ever-vigilant Dr. Howard Bruenn aside and whispered, “He is slipping away from us and no earthly power can keep him here.” Hassett recorded that Bruenn at first “demurred,” but as the exchange progressed, Bruenn conceded that Roosevelt had merely been maintaining a “bluff,” adding, “I am convinced that there is no help for him.” Hassett poured out his concerns: about Roosevelt’s indifference before the start of the election; about how he had begun to stop chatting; about his weariness and his increasingly feeble signature—“the old boldness of stroke and liberal use of ink gone, signature often ending in a fade-out.”
Bruenn, now attached to his patient more than ever, countered that Roosevelt’s condition was precarious, but not hopeless. However, to Hassett, “this talk confirmed my conviction that the Boss is leaving us.”
Uncharacteristically, Roosevelt confided to Hassett that he had lost twenty-five pounds. “Shocked at his appearance—worn, weary, exhausted . . . no strength, no appetite, tires so easily,” Hassett jotted in his diary on the last day of March. It was now a question no longer of if, but of when.
IN EUROPE, THE AMERICAN armies, having miraculously crossed the bridge at Remagen, kept coming. Yet even as Nuremberg, the city where Hitler held his great Nazi rallies, lay in ruins, the Nazi death marches continued. Some of the captives had not only to walk but to pull heavy loads of the SS men’s loot for miles. Other captives were put on trains; one woman, Aliza Besser, recalled the conditions after three days and nights in a sealed cattle car: “No water. They die of thirst. Lips are parched. . . . There are only a few cups in every truck, and everyone wants to drink. Commotion breaks out, and the German guards pour away the water in front of us all.” Jewish prisoners who had been forced to repair Vienna’s railway station were then marched away from the advancing Soviet forces. Their only food was what they could scavenge from the early spring fields. Those who moved too slowly were shot. Nearly half died on their way to Germany.
On April 3, the U.S. Seventh Army liberated six thousand Allied POWs, a day of indescribable joy. But April 4, though “a very quiet day all around” at Warm Springs, was an altogether different matter in Germany. Under a bright sunny sky, American forces were advancing across the countryside. Suddenly, German mortar shells rained down. The road signs and maps indicated that the Americans were outside a town named Ohrdruf, best known as the place where Johann Sebastian Bach composed several of his works. It was almost by accident that a patrol from the 354th Infantry Regiment found a camp. Not unlike Robert E. Lee’s army searching for shoes in an obscure place called Gettysburg, these men were simply exploring, looking for stray Germans, and happened to walk up a small rise in the land. On the other side, they saw a gate. And they began to walk down. An escaped prisoner may have led them, or they may have come to the place on their own.
The camp sat in the middle of a forest, framed by tall pine trees that filtered out the sun, and there was nothing about it to indicate that anything special had ever happened here. Stretching out from the swinging gate was a high barbed-wire fence, and above the entrance was a wooden sign strangely emblazoned with three words: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” The body of a lone guard lay motionless across the opening. Inside, however, nothing was at all ordinary. Behind the fences, some ten thousand prisoners had been crowded into the grounds and commanded to dig tunnels in a nearby mountain for a planned Nazi underground headquarters. At least four thousand inmates had died or been murdered since late 1944. The last several hundred had been shot just before the American forces arrived. The dead included Jews and also Polish and Russian prisoners of war. The fleeing Germans had left piles of dead, emaciated bodies behind. These victims were clad in striped uniforms, under which their bodies were all but fleshless, and bullet holes had pierced their skulls.
Charles Payne, a great-uncle of President Barack Obama, reac
hed Ohrdruf on April 6. He remembered, “Almost a circle of people had been killed and were lying on the ground, holding their tin cups, as if they had been expecting food and were instead killed. You could see where the machine gun had been set up behind some bushes.” They had apparently been too weak to begin the forced march to another camp, so they were gunned down where they stood.
“The smell was so horrible,” recalled another American GI, twenty-year-old Bruce Nikols. He described an overwhelming odor of quicklime, dirty clothing, human feces, and urine. But the stench came from far more than the sixty or so bodies strewn about the parade ground.
Just off the open area, near the green-painted barracks, was a woodshed, which lay open on one side. Nikols recalled, “Bodies were stacked in alternate directions as one would stack cordwood.” The shed had been used for punishment where inmates were beaten on their backs and heads with a shovel. There was also a gallows for hanging others. And there was a large pit for burning the remains.