How two officials defied systemic indifference to help save Jews in Nazi Europe.

By Michel Levine

During the Second World War, two senior American officials worked together to help the Jews of Europe who were victims of Nazism. Their goal was to push a reluctant President Roosevelt to intervene, and grant asylum and protection to the millions of men and women in mortal danger — even if it meant altering his foreign policy. The story of this difficult effort deserves to be known.

THE POLITICS OF INDIFFERENCE

In the 1930s, like most major European powers, the United States practiced a policy of strict indifference toward Nazi Germany, while also working to bar entry into its territory to refugees from that country. Jews in particular. Successive presidents, Hoover and Roosevelt, pursued the “America First” doctrine, which restricted immigration, because immigrants were seen as a potential burden on the country or as likely to provoke backlash amid the high unemployment that had persisted since the Great Depression.

From the very start of the war, the America First doctrine intensified. Within President Roosevelt’s circle, it was well known that he peppered private conversations with disparaging remarks about Jews — too many at this or that university, too influential in this or that profession. His administration included numerous antisemites, not to mention Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which waged a fierce hunt for “subversives” (foreigners, Jews, liberals, supposed or real communists). The result of this foreign policy speaks for itself: 90% of the immigration quotas available to nationals of countries under Nazi control went unused until the end of the war.

A RESPECTFUL JEW

Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891–1967) served as Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt administration from 1934 to 1945. The two men were very close. They were neighbors, both passionate about agriculture, and their respective wives, Eleanor Roosevelt and Elinor Morgenthau, were also very close friends. When Roosevelt became Governor of New York in 1928, he brought in Morgenthau to handle agricultural matters. Once elected president in 1932, he continued to entrust him with these responsibilities, and in 1934 named him Secretary of the Treasury. Morgenthau then played a central role in financing the New Deal, and later in financing his country’s war effort.

He was also one of the few Jews to hold a top-level position in the federal administration — and the only one to sit in the president’s cabinet. A symbol of assimilation, deeply Americanized, not very observant, and opposed to Zionism, this sensitive and discreet man was reluctant to draw attention to himself as a Jew in public life. And although he suffered deeply from his country’s isolationist policy, out of intellectual integrity he refused to exploit his long friendship with the President to try to change his attitude toward his fellow Jews.

Fortunately, one of his colleagues had no such reservations…

AN IRREVERANT GENTILE

Josiah E. DuBois Jr. was not Jewish, but he was outraged by the fate befalling the Jews, and by their abandonment by the nations at war. Indeed, he was by nature an indignant man. A lawyer trained at the prestigious Penn Law School, he began working in the 1930s as chief legal counsel for the Treasury Department’s Division of Foreign Funds Control, under Morgenthau’s authority.

Once war broke out, Morgenthau learned that the World Jewish Congress, wishing to send funds to Europe to help Jewish refugees in France and Romania, had requested special authorization from the government. But the State Department’s response was slow in coming, and replies to official reminders were evasive. Morgenthau therefore asked his young colleague (twenty years his junior) to intervene. DuBois assembled a team of Treasury lawyers (John Pehle, Randolph Paul, Ansel Luxford) who set to work energetically gathering evidence of the obstruction. The evidence was unequivocal: senior State Department officials had not only deliberately obstructed opportunities for financial aid to Europe’s Jewish communities, but had also sent telegrams ordering consular authorities to prevent information about the Holocaust from reaching the Treasury — or American public opinion. He also discovered that Breckinridge Long, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of immigration and refugee matters, was an avowed xenophobe, an avowed antisemite, and a great admirer of Hitler. It was he who was working behind the scenes to block, virtually indefinitely, the entry of refugees into the United States.

AN EXPLOSIVE REPORT

On Christmas Day 1943, DuBois wrote a report in his own style, whose title alone was deliberately brutal:

“Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”

The document laid out, point by point, the deliberately delayed attempts to obtain funds for Romanian and French refugees, the immigration quotas left deliberately underfilled, and the censoring of information about the Nazi massacres, concluding bluntly with this accusation:

Certain officials were guilty not only of gross procrastination and deliberate failure to act, but even of deliberate attempts to prevent measures being taken to save Hitler’s Jews, and unless drastic corrective measures were taken immediately to prevent the complete extermination of the Jews, this government would forever share responsibility for that extermination.

The document explicitly named Breckinridge Long as the organizer of the effort to abandon the Jews to their fate.

STORM IN THE OVAL OFFICE

DuBois handed this explosive report to Morgenthau on January 13, 1944, accompanied by an implicit ultimatum: if the Secretary of the Treasury did not immediately bring the matter before Roosevelt, DuBois himself would resign and call a press conference to publicly denounce the federal authorities’ conduct.

On January 16, 1944, Morgenthau went to the Oval Office and presented President Roosevelt with an abridged version of the report, deliberately toned down in its most explosive language and retitled “Personal Report to the President” — accompanied by a draft executive order establishing a new agency, the War Refugee Board. This time, he spoke openly of his Jewishness and the feelings it stirred in him, also invoking the memory of his own father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., who as ambassador to Turkey during the Armenian genocide had fought to alert international opinion. He told Roosevelt that if the President did not act to save the Jews of Europe, he himself would ask Congress to act. According to the account of this meeting that Morgenthau later gave DuBois, President Roosevelt appeared “as shocked as he was” upon reading the report. One might see this as a touching attempt to burnish his friend Roosevelt’s image in the eyes of his impetuous aide — though more likely, the President simply yielded to fear of scandal in an election year.

A BITTER VICTORY

On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417 creating the War Refugee Board (WRB). Officially, the agency was placed under the joint leadership of Morgenthau, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson. In reality, however, it would be run by Morgenthau, with DuBois serving as his legal counsel.

The WRB financed numerous rescue initiatives, notably that of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, who managed to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportations organized by Adolf Eichmann. The WRB also helped fund escape routes into Spain for Jews hiding in France. DuBois and his colleagues advanced the cause of rescue through unconventional means, including bribing certain border guards and producing false identity papers to protect refugees. The WRB also helped circulate threats from world leaders against Horthy’s fascist Hungarian government to force an end to the deportations. As a result, some 120,000 Jews survived in Budapest, and the Board organized the movement of 48,000 Jews from Transnistria to safe areas in Romania. In total, historians estimate that the War Refugee Board helped save between 100,000 and 200,000 lives. Most of its efforts were hampered by American bureaucracy — as Morgenthau himself would later put it, officials dodged their responsibilities, stalled when concrete rescue plans were submitted to them, and even suppressed information about atrocities.

As significant as these numbers of lives saved by the WRB may seem, they cannot obscure the terrible reality: by the time the WRB was created, more than five million European Jews had already been murdered. Had American aid been mobilized as early as 1942 instead of waiting until January 1944 — eighteen months lost that Morgenthau himself would later call “terrible” — the number of lives saved would likely have reached at least several hundred thousand.

The WRB also suffered failures. When DuBois tried to persuade Roosevelt to establish temporary shelters for refugees in the United States, the President agreed to create only one such shelter, which took in a mere 982 refugees at Oswego, near New York. DuBois also repeatedly asked the War Department to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz, and even the gas chambers and crematoria themselves, but these requests were consistently rejected in the name of offensive strategy, which required concentrating bombing on military targets in order to secure victory more quickly — and to outpace Soviet forces, given the looming Cold War.

THE POSTWAR YEARS

After the war, Morgenthau’s relations with the new President, Harry Truman, grew strained, and he was forced to resign in July 1945. Retiring to his farm in Duchess County, New York, he devoted the rest of his life to Jewish philanthropic causes, serving as president of the United Jewish Appeal before his death in 1967.

Josiah DuBois, for his part, was appointed chief prosecutor representing the United States in the case against the chemical firm IG Farben as part of the Nuremberg trials (1946–1949). He secured the conviction of thirteen company executives for their role in producing Zyklon B gas and in the use of forced labor from the camps. He died in 1983, relatively unknown to the general public.

“Too little, too late” is the verdict most historians pass on the WRB’s work. Still, the Morgenthau–DuBois duo managed to drive a wedge into a bureaucratic machine as indifferent as it was powerful. DuBois, without Morgenthau, would have remained an isolated whistleblower, and Morgenthau, without DuBois, would likely never have stepped out of his reserve to confront his old friend the President. Their courageous partnership deserves, for that reason, to be remembered.

“Whoever saves a single life, Scripture considers as if he had saved the entire world,” teaches the Talmud.

About the writer:

Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)

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