The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Lack of shipping was not the reason these concentration-camp survivors could not be rescued. At that very moment, the army was transporting thousands of non-Jewish refugees from Italy to Egypt. McCloy himself reported that plenty of shipping was available in the Mediterranean to transport these refugees.17 The real motive for refusing to rescue the Rab Jews in November 1943 was the fear among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the rescue of the Rab refugees “might create a precedent which would lead to other demands and an influx of additional refugees.”18

  From the beginning, McCloy was personally skeptical of using combat troops to rescue concentration-camp internees. In late January 1944, Pehle had suggested to him that a message should be cabled to all theater commanders ordering them to undertake whatever refugee rescue operations they thought consistent with the war effort. Before passing on Pehle’s proposal to Marshall’s office, McCloy scribbled on it, “I am very chary of getting the Army involved in this while the war is on.”19 Marshall and his people were disinclined to divert combat troops from conventional military targets; higher civilian authorities would have to persuade them that extraordinary political and humanitarian factors existed to justify such a diversion of military resources. As Stimson’s liaison to the War Refugee Board, McCloy was in a unique position to initiate any serious consideration of military operations designed to rescue Jews. He and perhaps Harvey Bundy were the only civilians in the War Department who had both the sufficient authority and knowledge to set such a policy in motion. But War Department records make it clear that, from the very beginning, neither McCloy nor any other official believed there was cause to challenge the military’s initial rejection of the idea.

  Like many other people both in and out of government, McCloy had read the published accounts of Hitler’s extermination policies with some skepticism. He regarded the Germans as a particularly cruel enemy; even as a young man, he had felt a near-visceral hatred of Prussian militarism. But as a veteran of World War I, he also distrusted atrocity stories. On top of this, the reports coming out of Europe were just too horrible to be entirely credible. Not only were the sources of these reports largely Jewish, and thus perhaps self-serving, but the American Jewish community itself appeared divided over just how serious was the catastrophe that had befallen European Jewry.

  One of those who doubted the horrific reports was McCloy’s Georgetown neighbor Justice Felix Frankfurter. In the summer of 1943, Frankfurter had listened to a detailed briefing by a Polish-underground courier named Jan Karski on what was happening inside the Polish extermination camps. Disguised as an Estonian prison-guard, Karski had been smuggled into the death camp at Belzec. In the autumn of 1942, he had made his way to London and Washington, carrying with him a report of what he had seen in Belzec. Karski’s written report had the full endorsement of the Polish government-in-exile; he was specifically ordered to request Allied intervention to stop the killing machine. His report described the entire process, from the roundups in the ghettos to the “mass exterminations” conducted in gas chambers. “Wherever the trains arrive,” Karski wrote, “half the people arrive dead. Those surviving are sent to special camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. Once there, the so-called ‘settlers’ are mass murdered.”20

  By the time Karski, a Polish Catholic, was ushered in to see Justice Frankfurter in the late summer of 1943, he had already personally briefed President Roosevelt, Secretary Stimson, and OSS Chief William Donovan.21 None of these men seemed shaken by what he said, and their questions all focused on the military capabilities of the Polish underground or, in the case of the president, on political matters affecting postwar Poland.

  Karski hoped to elicit a more profound reaction from Frankfurter, who after all was a prominent Jewish figure and an active Zionist. When the justice arrived at the Polish Embassy in Washington and was introduced to Karski, he immediately came to the point. “What is happening,” he asked, “to the Jews in your country? There are many conflicting reports.”

  For the next twenty-five minutes or more, he listened in silence as Karski graphically described what he had seen inside Belzec. At the end of the lecture, the justice paced back and forth in silence for another ten minutes and finally said, “A man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So, I say that I am unable to believe you.”

  Startled, the Polish ambassador, a personal friend, exclaimed, “Felix, you cannot tell this man to his face that he is lying. The authority of my government is behind him.”

  “Mr. Ambassador, I did not say that this young man is lying. I said that I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.” At that, Frankfurter extended both his arms and waving his hands, murmured, “No, no.” He then turned around and walked out.22

  Frankfurter was not the only Jewish friend of McCloy’s who could not bring himself to believe the news. Karski also briefed Walter Lippmann, but, unlike other columnists who heard Karski’s story, he—the only Jew among them—decided not to write about it. Such disbelief on the part of two men whom McCloy respected and trusted certainly influenced his own opinion. As late as December 1944, long after there could be no doubt whatsoever about what had happened in the Polish death camps, McCloy still could not shake his disbelief. That month he told A. Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress, “We are alone. Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that all those horrible things happened?” Years later, Kubowitzki commented, “His sources of information, needless to say, were better than mine. But he could not grasp the terrible destruction.”23

  Such disbelief explains McCloy’s inaction in dealing with this issue over the next several months. But at least one source of his disbelief came from within, specifically from his own attitude toward Jews. He was not an anti-Semite, nor did he harbor the nativist sentiments of a Breckinridge Long. But he shared some of the same prejudices as were held by many men of his generation and social standing. Until 1933, social discrimination against Jews—the exclusion of Jews from clubs, hotels, and summer resorts—was much more in evidence in the United States than in Germany.24 Nearly all the Ivy League schools observed quotas limiting the number of Jewish students. The Wall Street legal profession was itself highly segregated; if you were a Jew, even a Harvard-educated Jew, you would not find yourself offered a partnership at Cravath or most of the other “downtown” firms.

  A genteel, upper-class anti-Semitism pervaded much of the social scene to which the McCloys belonged in the prewar years. Most, if not all, of his clubs barred Jews. His own father-in-law refused to do business with Jews as a matter of principle.25 By all accounts, McCloy generally took people as they were and paid far less attention to such strictures than most men in the Wall Street crowd. He had long-standing friendships with men like Benny Buttenwieser, Frederick Warburg, Eric Warburg, and other Jews. But these were invariably highly assimilated Jews, or Jews who, like Lippmann, made a point of distancing themselves from their heritage. And despite such friendships, McCloy sometimes went out of his way to observe the social proprieties concerning Jews. Once, during the war years, a young Jewish lawyer working on Wall Street was told by a friend that McCloy had asked him to invite a few eligible bachelors to a coming-out party for a Washington debutante but had specified that no Jews should be brought along.26

  It is unclear how much, if at all, such petty social discrimination helps to explain McCloy’s initial chariness to use combat troops for rescue operations. Stimson, for one, tended to consider any publicity about Jewish affairs or Zionism an unfortunate breach of etiquette.27 Such personal instincts were only reinforced by the confusion and disarray displayed by American Jewish leaders. If Rabbi Stephen Wise, Peter Bergson, and other Jewish leaders had presented a common front, if the leading newspapers in the country had given the Holocaust reports the coverage they deserved, if such political factors had so coalesced as to make rescue operations a political priority, McCloy might easily have played a positive role. If Frankfurter had been moved to action by Karski’s eyewitness testimony, McCl
oy might well have become an advocate of aggressive rescue operations. In the scheme of things, he was not wedded to his position. In his view, the matter was simply not important compared with such problems as helping Eisenhower establish contact with the French resistance.

  Indeed, almost from the very beginning of his involvement with the War Refugee Board, it quickly became apparent that his position would be one of benign obstruction. The rescue of European Jewry could not be allowed to interfere with winning the war; there were any number of war-winning measures that had to take priority over the plight of the Jews. One such issue was whether the British should be pressured to open their immigration doors into Palestine.

  In January 1944, the mainstream American Zionist organizations persuaded a number of legislators to introduce a sense-of-Congress resolution urging the United States to ensure “that the doors of Palestine shall be opened for free entry of Jews into the country. . . so that the Jewish people may ultimately reconstitute Palestine as a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”28 The resolution quickly garnered wide support, and observers thought its passage was assured. Though purely advisory, such a resolution might have saved some lives. Thousands of Jews in Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary possessed exit visas issued by their respective Nazi puppet governments. But these could be used only by those who were guaranteed a port of disembarkation. Too often no such guarantee had been made. Nevertheless, the British, the State Department, and the War Department all had serious reservations.

  After seeing a copy of the measure, McCloy undertook a quick study of the issue. He read the language of a similar resolution introduced in 1922, talked with Middle East experts in army intelligence, and read over a number of reports on the Palestine problem. This exercise only confirmed the impressions he had picked up during his short visit to Jerusalem three months earlier: unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine was sure to exacerbate tensions in the region. In addition, he had since become aware of negotiations pending with Saudi Arabia to lay a new oil pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He felt certain that passage of the Zionist resolution would cause the Saudis to reject the pipeline project, and thereby deny U.S. Armed Forces a ready reserve of one billion gallons of oil. With Stimson’s concurrence, McCloy therefore decided to testify against the resolution in executive session before the House Foreign Relations Committee. Stimson thought the whole idea had been planted by Drew Pearson, “who has as usual inferred a huge conspiracy against the Jews. . . .”29

  After clearing his draft testimony with Marshall and others in the War Department, McCloy went up to Capitol Hill in mid-March and forcefully explained why the resolution would endanger the war effort. He reminded the congressmen that “there is a high degree of tension in Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews and that each side have substantial quantities of arms.” After referring to the numerous attacks by Arabs on Jewish settlements, aimed at discouraging Jewish emigration, he warned, “We are dependent not only upon peace in the area but our lines of communication throughout Africa are to an important degree dependent upon the cooperation and goodwill of the Arab.” He stated that one of the critical Persian Gulf supply routes to the Soviet Union ran through territory inhabited by Muslims. Even more important, he told the congressmen, was the threat of losing Middle Eastern oil: “The Abadan refinery at the head of the Gulf is the only Allied source of aviation gasoline outside the Western Hemisphere.. . . It would require a substantial number of troops to protect them in the event of disorders.”30

  McCloy was not opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state at some time in the future. But as he told Marshall, he believed it best to “postpone without prejudice to either side [Arab or Jewish] this issue for determination after the war when military considerations will be less acute.”31 He and other War Department officials might well have tolerated a resolution that simply urged the British to open up temporary emergency camps in Palestine from which Jewish refugees could be repatriated elsewhere after the war. Peter Bergson’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe urged Congress that spring to adopt just such a resolution. But such a compromise measure was harshly attacked by Rabbi Stephen Wise and other members of the American Jewish establishment since it might set a precedent for the expulsion of Jewish immigrants in Palestine after the war. When it became clear that McCloy’s testimony made passage of the Palestine resolution unlikely, a number of congressmen suggested to the American Zionists that the language endorsing a Jewish commonwealth should be cut, leaving only the appeal for open immigration into Palestine. Tragically, even this compromise was rejected by Rabbi Wise. As the historian David S. Wyman later wrote, “The unavoidable conclusion is that during the Holocaust the leadership of American Zionism concentrated its major force on the drive for a future Jewish state in Palestine. It consigned rescue to a distinctly secondary position.”32

  We know today that Hitler had made the complete extermination of European Jewry a major war-aim; even while on the defensive in 1944, the Nazis diverted substantial troops, supplies, and vital railroad facilities to carry out the Final Solution. Not comprehending this fact, McCloy and others in the War Department failed to take any extraordinary measures to thwart this Nazi war-aim.

  As long as the War Refugee Board’s activities did not interfere with military priorities, McCloy supported Pehle. He backed the WRB chief when Pehle proposed that the Spanish government be officially asked to open its borders to refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied France.

  McCloy also supported Pehle’s efforts to have the president issue to the Nazis another set of warnings that their crimes against the Jews and other civilians would be punished. Throughout the spring of 1944, he received weekly summaries of the WRB’s activities, and he must have felt that whatever could be done for the Jews was being done. In Turkey, the WRB representative persuaded the government to permit two hundred Jews every ten days to transit Istanbul on their way to Palestine. That spring, the Rumanian government agreed to evacuate forty-eight thousand Jews from Transnistria to the Rumanian interior, where they would not be in the path of retreating German troops. But for this intervention, these Jews would not have survived the war.33 The Irish government was persuaded to take in five hundred Jewish refugee children, and Pehle reported similar small steps toward aiding refugees in Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden.34

  In late March, Pehle proposed that the president announce that the United States would temporarily accept “all oppressed peoples escaping from Hitler.” In a memo prepared for Roosevelt, he argued that no rescue program could be effective unless escaping refugees could be assured a haven, at least until the end of the war. He hastened to add that, though few Jews would actually have to come to the United States, Washington had to set an example before other countries would open their borders. All the president had to do, suggested Pehle, was to issue an executive order allowing refugees to enter the United States on a temporary basis, without going through immigration procedures. This proposal had the strong support of Morgenthau. But Stimson believed that Roosevelt ought not throw open America’s borders without first consulting Congress: “I fear that Congress will feel that it is the opening wedge to a violation of our immigration laws.”35

  On the morning of March 31, 1944, Stimson called McCloy into his office to debate the issue. Since Congress was very unlikely to approve any formal loosening of U.S. immigration restrictions, was the situation urgent enough to justify unilateral presidential action? According to Stimson’s diary, McCloy urged caution, even though on other occasions, when it involved national-security matters, he had advised the president to circumvent Congress. The Jewish-refugee problem, however, was not a matter of national security. As a result, later in the day Stimson called in Pehle and rejected his draft; eventually, Roosevelt accepted a compromise whereby temporary haven was offered to one thousand refugees, largely Jews from southern Italy.

  This was a pittance, and McCloy knew it. He was not completely callous toward the sufferi
ng of these refugees, but, like many of his peers, he had worried throughout the war about army morale and feared doing anything that might awaken nativist, isolationist sentiments. He felt that buried in the back of the minds of a good majority of American soldiers was the “unbelievable” thought that this war might have been started by “Jewish capitalists.” Anti-Semitism and racial prejudice were so deep-rooted that, if “the men come into the Army with these prejudices, it is going to be hard to eradicate them.”36 It was prudent, therefore, to do nothing that could suggest to the troops or the American public that the war was being fought in behalf of the Jews.

  This attitude paralyzed McCloy when it came to dealing with any issue associated with Jewish interests. The initiative and courage he routinely displayed when dealing with equally controversial issues—such as the matter of racial discrimination in the army, or whether to offer army commissions to veterans of the Lincoln Brigade—was missing when it came to dealing with the War Refugee Board. In the summer of 1944, his lack of interest became a critical, even decisive factor in the fate of some four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. In mid-June, an official of the Agudath Israel World Organization, a group representing ultra-orthodox American Jews, wrote a series of letters to various high-ranking officials in Washington, pleading with them to do something to impede the deportation of Hungary’s Jews. The letters, written by Jacob Rosenheim, were forwarded to John Pehle at the War Refugee Board. Rosenheim asserted that hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews were being transported by rail to Polish death camps. Unlike previous vague appeals to rescue such victims or find a safe haven for them, this time Rosenheim requested that the Allies bomb the rail junctions of Košice and Prešov. This action, he argued, would at least slow the extermination process. But he warned that “the bombing has to be made at once, because day after day less people [sic] could be saved and it would be very soon too late for the rescue.”37