Reviews
“Wallance tells quite a story and masterfully documents the well-deserved indictment of the World War II-era U.S. State Department.” (review by Michael Berenbaum, former Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Research Institute and Professor of Jewish Studies at American Jewish University.)
– The Jewish Journal
“An important contribution to the debate surrounding the Roosevelt Administration and the politics of rescue. Reads like a thriller.” (review by Jack Fischel, Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville University of Pennsylvania and author of The Holocaust and Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust.)
– Jewish Book Council
“Superbly researched and beautifully written, America’s Soul in the Balance casts a bright, highly disturbing spotlight on the moral bankruptcy of U.S. State Department bureaucrats who sabotaged any attempt to come to the assistance of European Jews, or to publicize their dire fate, during the Holocaust. It should be required reading not only for scholars and other students of history, but for anyone in or entering public service.”
– Menachem Z. Rosensaft, Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants and General Counsel, World Jewish Congress
“Wallance has written the ultimate Washington thriller by focusing on the government’s moral failure during the war. It is said that history repeats itself; this book offers a valuable and timely warning as to how government should respond in times of moral crisis. Required reading.”
– Kenneth R. Feinberg, 9/11 Victim Compensation and BP Oil Funds Special Master and Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation
“An extraordinary and painful book.”
– Hector Timerman, Foreign Minister of Argentina
“Wallance’s book makes for absorbing reading and offers a picture of America’s dismal failure to intervene to save European Jewry.”
– Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (Ariel Hurwitz, edit of Morashet, an academic journal for the study of the Holocaust and author of “Jews Without Power: American Jews During the Holocaust”).
Media Coverage
Kissinger And Human Rights: Why Is Israel Honoring Him?
Originally published in The Jewish Week on Tuesday, June 12, 2012.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Human rights “are the birthright of all people,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in a speech before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Dec. 6, 2011. “It does not matter what country we live in, who our leaders are, or even who we are. Because we are human, we therefore have rights. And because we have rights, governments are bound to protect them.”
Along the same lines, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on March 31, 2003, that “where human rights and freedoms flourish, terrorists and tyrants do not thrive, and conflict and chaos do not reign. America’s democratic values, our national interest and our obligations to the international community demand that the defense and promotion of human rights are an integral and active part of our foreign policy.”
In sharp contrast, other stewards of American foreign policy did not make the safeguarding of human rights a priority. Two 20th- century secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and Cordell Hull, both of whom were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, belong in this latter category.
Kissinger earned permanent notoriety with his inexplicable 1973 observation to President Nixon that “the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
In his superb recently published book, “America’s Soul in the Balance, The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy,” Gregory J. Wallance chronicles the conscious and often nefarious maneuverings by Hull’s State Department bureaucrats to thwart efforts to come to the aid of European Jewry for the longest time. Wallance also gives due credit to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and members of his staff for attempting to chart a radically different course.
Wallance tells us that throughout his tenure as secretary of state, Hull, whose wife was the daughter of a Christian mother and a Jewish father, “generally shunned Jewish issues such as the plight of refugees from Nazi Germany,” and describes how, after Gerhard Riegner, the director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, had sent a telegram through U.S. diplomatic channels in Switzerland in January 1943 reporting on the slaughter of Jews in Poland and Romania, Hull instructed the American legation in Bern not to accept such “private messages” in the future.
On Jan. 16, 1944, Morgenthau and two other senior Treasury Department officials personally delivered a report to President Roosevelt in which they warned in no uncertain terms that, “there is a growing number of responsible people and organizations today who have ceased to view our failure [to save European Jews] as the product of simple incompetence on the part of those officials in the State Department charged with handling this problem. They see plain anti-Semitism motivating the actions of these State Department officials . . ..” The report concluded with a devastating indictment: the “matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent, callous, and perhaps even hostile.”
My thoughts turned to Hull when I was invited to take part in the fourth Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, an annual event that brings together hundreds of Jewish leaders and activists from around the world. During the opening plenary session on June 19, the e-mailed invitation read, President Shimon Peres “will present the ‘President’s Award’ to Dr. Henry Kissinger.”
Come again? Imagine the outrage from the Jewish community if the President of Israel had announced that he would posthumously honor Cordell Hull, a man whose considerable accomplishments have been forever tarnished by what many consider to be his abandonment of European Jewry. Kissinger’s record is likewise flawed, even if he eventually did apologize for his “if they put Jews into gas chambers” statement, calling it “a kind of shorthand that, when read 37 years later, is undoubtedly offensive.”
Actually, Kissinger’s words were just as “offensive” in 1973, but so was his asking, “Why is it our business how they govern themselves?” when confronted in 1971 with a suggestion that the Nixon Administration should support domestic reforms in Pakistan. And Kissinger never expressed any remorse for his role in the killings of hundreds of thousands in East Timor or in the violent overthrow of the Allende government in Chile.
This week, President Obama is presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our government’s highest civilian honor, to Shimon Peres, who richly deserves it.
I recently was at the White House when President Obama also awarded the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Jan Karski, the Polish underground resistance fighter who “was among the first to relate accounts of the Holocaust to the world,” and presented the Medal to, among others, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for advancing “human rights around the world”; the legendary civil rights giant John Doar who, as assistant attorney general in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, “fought to protect the core values of liberty, equality, and democracy;” labor organizer Dolores Huerta who “fought to secure basic rights for migrant workers and their families;” and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens for “applying our Constitution with fidelity and independence.”
Would that President Peres had found an individual of similar caliber and moral fiber to honor, rather than a man whose attitude toward human rights has always been “indifferent, callous, and perhaps even hostile.”
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He teaches about the law of genocide and World War II war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse universities.
Exploiting the Memory of Child Holocaust Victims Is Obscene
By Menachen Rosensaft
Originally published in JTA – Jewish & Israel News on 1/18/2012 and reprinted in the Huffington Post on01/26/2012 9:03 am.
It is virtually impossible to imagine anything more reprehensible than the recent spectacle of haredi, that is ultra-Orthodox, Jewish boys wearing yellow stars of David and simulated striped black-and-white concentration camp uniforms at a demonstration in Jerusalem. Offended by the Israeli authorities’ efforts to curtail the verbal and physical abuse of women and girls in haredi neighborhoods, the demonstrators knowingly and intentionally desecrated the memory of the more than 1.5 million Jewish children whose collective suffering and death will be remembered on Jan. 27 at the United Nations’ annual Holocaust commemoration.
“This protest,” said one of the rally’s organizers, “reflects the Zionists’ persecution of the haredi public, which we see as worse than what the Nazis did.”
The image of one particular boy at the demonstration raising his hands in mock surrender to re-enact the famous photograph of a terrified Jewish child being rounded up by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto struck a very personal chord within me. Sixty-nine years ago, another little Jewish boy named Benjamin was living with his parents in the city of Sosnowiec in southern Poland. The previous month he had celebrated his fifth birthday. He was a smart, good-hearted, totally innocent child who had never done any harm to anyone. Only he had already been sentenced to death.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the other Allied leaders knew full well that Benjamin and virtually every other Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Europe were about to be brutally and systematically murdered. On Dec. 17, 1942, the United States, Great Britain and the USSR had condemned the German government’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of Jews in Nazi-occupied or -controlled Europe. Yet Benjamin’s fate and that of other Jewish children like him was not a priority for any government official anywhere.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” said Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark. “Forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” This fundamental Christian imperative was ignored by the U.S. State Department bureaucrats who deliberately frustrated any attempt to come to the rescue of European Jewry. Even in the midst of World War II, if the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and other Western democracies had announced a willingness to give refuge to Jewish children, Benjamin might still have had a chance.
Instead, as Gregory Wallance chronicles in his forthcoming book, America’s Soul in the Balance, The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy (Greenleaf Book Group Press), after Gerhard Riegner, the director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, had sent a telegram through U.S. diplomatic channels in Switzerland in January 1943 reporting that 6,000 Jews “are killed daily” at one location in Poland, and Romanian Jews are similarly being murdered under dire circumstances, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the American legation in Bern not to accept similar “private messages” in the future.
On the night of Aug. 3-4, 1943, Benjamin arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp with his parents and grandparents. In her posthumously published memoirs, his mother, our mother, recalled her final moments with my brother:
We were guarded by SS men and women. One SS man was standing in front of the people and he started the selection. With a single movement of his finger, he was sending some people to the right and some to the left. … Men were separated from women. People with children were sent to one side, and young people were separated from older looking ones. No one was allowed to go from one group to the other. Our 5 1/2-year-old son went with his father. Something that will haunt me to the end of my days occurred during those first moments. As we were separated, our son turned to me and asked, “Mommy, are we going to live or die?” I didn’t answer this question.
Benjamin, his father and my grandparents were murdered that night in one of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Since my mother’s death in 1997, he has existed inside of me. I see his face in my mind, try to imagine his voice, his fear as the gas chamber doors slammed shut, his final tears. If I were to forget him, he would disappear.
Tragically, the hundreds of thousands of children who were killed in the subsequent 20th century genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere fared no better. The 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was supposed to protect them. So was the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Rwanda, Serbia and the Sudan are all parties, which affirmed that “every child has the inherent right to life.” The mutilated corpses of children and infants hacked by machetes in Rwanda or buried in mass graves in Bosnia epitomize the international community’s failure to live up to this most fundamental of all aspirations.
My brother and every other child murdered in any genocide deserve to be remembered as fragile flames extinguished in tsunamis of hatred, intolerance and bigotry. Exploiting their memory to score cheap political points is obscene.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, the son of two survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, is general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He teaches about the law of genocide at Cornell Law School, Columbia Law School and Syracuse University College of Law.