America's Soul In The Balance

America’s Soul in the Balance by Gregory J. Wallance.

At the height of World War II, four lawyers in the U.S. Treasury Department discovered that the highly-educated, patrician diplomats in the State Department had covered up reports of the Nazi extermination scheme–and then blocked the rescue of 70,000 Romanian Jews forcibly marched into Transnistria in the Nazi-conquered Ukraine and left to die of starvation, disease, and sheer exhaustion.   The Treasury lawyers charged the diplomats with being “accomplices of Hitler.”

The outrage of the Treasury lawyers—tough-minded New Dealers from Christian, middle-class backgrounds—at the State Department’s complicity in genocide precipitated a titanic intergovernmental battle. The stakes were nothing less than the fates of countless European Jews (symbolized by an orphaned girl’s struggle for survival in Transnistria), the historical reputation of FDR, and the soul of America itself.

Journey with author Gregory Wallance into this largely untold story from both the perspective of those in American government and from a survivor who bears witness to all that happened in Transnistria.