Saving the Jews; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust

New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxxiii, [1], 654 pages. Map. Foreword by Gerhard L. Weinberg. List of Illustrations. List of Abbreviations. Afterword by Alan M. Dershowitz. Time line. Bibliography. Notes. Index. DJ has rear flap crease. Robert N. Rosen is a writer, historian, lecturer, and attorney. Called to the bar of South Carolina, 1973. City of Charleston, SC, assistant corporation counsel, 1976-85, general counsel, housing authority, 1984-2003; Charleston County School District, general counsel, 1982-2003; attorney in private practice, 2003-. Member of the board of the South Carolina Historical Society and the Historic Charleston Foundation. His published works include: A Short History of Charleston, Lexikos (San Francisco, CA), 1982, 2nd edition, Peninsula Press (Charleston, SC), 1992. Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City and the People during the Civil War, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1994. The Jewish Confederates, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 2000. (With Solomon Breibart and Jack Bass) Explorations in Charleston's Jewish History, The History Press (Charleston, SC), 2005. Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, foreword by Gerhard Weinberg, afterword by Alan M. Dershowitz, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2006. Rosen approaches Jewish history in its darker period in Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust. Rosen seeks to rebut the conventional wisdom that Roosevelt and his administration had no concern for the fate of Jews in Europe, and that their attitudes were fueled by simple politics or actual anti-Semitism. "Rosen has written a passionate, well-researched, and convincing response" to this inaccurate historical bromide, commented Jay Freeman in Booklist. Rosen notes that Jews occupied prominent positions in the Roosevelt administration, nullifying accusations that the president and his staff were anti-Semites. Roosevelt himself had been a vocal critic of the persecution of European Jews since the late 1930s, Rosen states. Roosevelt vowed to hold Nazi leaders responsible for their participation in the death camps. Rosen also covers some of Roosevelt's more controversial decisions, including his refusal to bomb Auschwitz because it would have led to the deaths of hundreds of innocents. Freeman concluded that Rosen's work will not end the debate over the controversies of the Roosevelt administration, but it "will help balance the scales." Derived from a Publishers Weekly review: Was FDR an indifferent or possibly anti-Semitic president who abandoned European Jews, or was he a pragmatic leader who understood that the key to saving the Jews was winning WWII as swiftly as possible? This work concludes that he should be "honored for [his] actions during World War II, not defamed." According to Rosen, FDR surrounded himself with Jewish friends and advisers like Henry Morgenthau Jr. FDR didn't have the political clout to change American immigration laws, and two-thirds of the refugees on the SS St. Louis, who were refused entry to the U.S. in 1939, are believed to have survived the war. Roosevelt probably didn't know about requests by various Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz, an action that, Rosen says would have killed Anne Frank and other innocents. Derived from the Holocaust Encyclopedia: After the State Department confirmed in November 1942 that the Germans planned to annihilate Europe's Jews, eleven Allied governments, including the United States, issued a declaration condemning the atrocities and vowing postwar punishment of the perpetrators. In December 1942, Roosevelt met with prominent figures in the Jewish community, who expressed their horror at the news and provided him with a report on mass murder in specific countries, but the president did not promise any new rescue action. As the American people received more information about mass killing, public pressure led the United States and Great Britain to hold a conference in Bermuda in April 1943 to discuss rescue and relief. However, the Bermuda Conference did not lead to action, which increased the anger and frustration of American Jews and other interested members of the public. Jan Karski, a Polish resistance worker, met with Roosevelt in July 1943 and described what he had witnessed in the Warsaw ghetto. Roosevelt again did not commit to any specific action other than winning the war, but arranged for Karski to meet with other prominent government officials to share his story. FDR issued an executive order on January 22, 1944, establishing a War Refugee Board (WRB), an independent agency tasked with carrying out a new American policy to rescue and provide relief for Jews and other groups being persecuted by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborators.