A Soft Spot for Hitler

By Steve Rodan

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has long been hailed as one of the greatest presidents of the United States, a humanitarian, a friend of the little guy, particularly the Jew. He appointed more Jews in his Cabinet than any of his predecessors. He was friendly with numerous Jews, more than a few of whom helped him ascend to the presidency in 1933.

"The Jews revered FDR," Allan Lichtman, co-author of FDR and the Jews, said. "They voted for him more strongly than any other ethnic, religious or economic group in the United States." [1]

But behind FDR's bonhomie was a racist and anti-Semite with a soft spot for Hitler. Decades before World War II, Roosevelt saw the Jews, Japanese and others as unfit to live in the United States. His solution was that they be restricted, incarcerated and eventually expelled. The Japanese and other non-Europeans could be returned to their native countries. The Jews, without a homeland, would be sent to remote areas where they could not be seen or heard.

[This is] “the best way to settle the Jewish question," Roosevelt told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945. [2]

To understand FDR is to examine the American elite in the first half of the 20th Century. Many if not most of the elite saw America as lily white in which Jews were to be restricted at all levels. Whether in government, business or universities, the elite looked to Germany and later Hitler as a model of racial domination that would be translated into public policy.

FDR's fondness for Hitler was seen in his steadfast refusal to take any measures against Germany's persecution of the Jews. Despite his promises, particularly to diplomat William E. Dodd, Jr., the president allowed Hitler to beat, rob, imprison and kill Jews with impunity. During the hundreds of news conferences he gave in the 1930s and 1940s, FDR would keep mum on anything to do with what turned out to be the Final Solution. Once he said this was the responsibility of his secretary of state.

Even the president's most ardent Jewish supporters were stunned. Publicly, Stephen Wise, the president of the American Jewish Congress, touted FDR as the great friend of the Jews. Privately, Wise understood that FDR cared nothing about Jewish suffering.

"We have had nothing but indifference and unconcern [from the White House] up to this time," Wise wrote in a letter on Oct. 15, 1933.

Even as millions of Americans fought Germany during World War II, FDR defended Hitler's policy. In 1943, Roosevelt asserted that German complaints of alleged Jewish domination were "understandable" because Jews were overrepresented in such professions as law and medicine. In 1938, the president had used the same explanation for the rise in anti-Semitism in Poland.

The narrative used to defend FDR is that America was overwhelmingly isolationist and would oppose intervention in Europe, let alone helping rescue the Jews from Hitler. The record, however, is quite different. Public opinion in the United States -- which jumped from 30 percent to 60 percent in 1940 -- favored military aid to Great Britain in its war with Germany. Most of the Cabinet urged the president to help Churchill and fight Germany.

But FDR refused, even at the cost of numerous American lives. In October 1941, a German U-boat attack killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in the Atlantic Ocean. The president did nothing and maintained relations with Berlin. [3]

From his first term, Roosevelt refused to allow German and then other Jewish refugees into the United States. He warned of anti-Semitic backlash, and that many of the refugees were actually Nazi spies. But the president allowed Nazis to conduct hostile activities in the United States until it entered World War II in December 1941. Those activities included espionage, sabotage and fomenting anti-Semitism.

In January 1941, Roosevelt approved Lend Lease, meant to supply ships and other combat platforms to London. The program proceeded at a snail's pace, and in that year comprised one percent of all British weaponry. In exchange, the president, who repeatedly went back on his word, demanded basing rights in Canada and the Bahamas as well as free trade with the Commonwealth. When the Wehrmacht swept through North Africa toward Palestine in 1942, FDR, who despised Churchill and preferred Stalin, refused to help. The aim of the German offensive was to annihilate the 500,000 Jews in their homeland.

The White House treatment of German-Americans contrasted with that of Japanese immigrants On Feb. 19, 1942, more than two months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned 112,000 Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent in 10 camps until the end of the war.

The reason FDR has escaped critical examination stemmed from his personality and work habits. Even to his closest members of Cabinet, Roosevelt was always elusive, telling one secretary one thing and another the exact opposite. The rule was that nothing he said could be taken at face value.

FDR was also extremely wary of records. He refused to make transcripts of his remarks or meetings. He even tried to conceal his disability from polio from the American people. Indeed, he appeared to have no one he could trust. The last person he confided in was Marguerite LeHand, FDR's personal and political partner for 20 years until her stroke and nervous breakdown in June 1941. A month earlier, the president suffered his own psychological crisis and took to his bed for a month. Nobody dared to ask questions. [4]

But there was one record that escaped the president's attention and explained what he really wanted. FDR sought to achieve what Hitler had publicly called for --the expulsion of the Jews.

In November 1938, around the time of Kristallnacht, Roosevelt approved a project that would solve the Jewish problem around the world. The Jews would first be kicked out of Europe and sent to such remote regions as South America and Africa. The president assigned Henry Field and John Franklin Carter to find locations for the Jews and other undesirables. FDR swore the 10 fulltime staffers to secrecy and threatened they would be executed if word leaked out on this secret initiative, called "M Project."

"In due course, he [FDR] asked Henry Field, an anthropologist whom he knew, to make a special study of this problem. Field had previously been detailed to familiarize himself with questions of population and resources in the Middle East, in which F.D.R. had a particular interest, and the extension of the idea to cover the whole world, with particular reference to migrants, gradually evolved." [5]

M Project produced more than 600 reports, which totaled 20,000 pages, for FDR. Roosevelt did not let World War II distract him, and in July 1942 he ordered Carter and Field to include American Jews in the forced resettlement plan. The staffers came up with additional locations, such as Australia, Manchukuo and Nigeria. The president hoped to begin the deportations after the war.

Roosevelt shared his plan with both Churchill and Stalin. In January 1943, he said the plan would "further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc, in Germany, were Jews." [6]

Roosevelt was never given the chance to implement M. He died on April 12, 1945, 18 days before Hitler's suicide. FDR's successor, Harry Truman, quietly shelved the project. The records of "M" were declassified in 1960 but historians took no notice until the 21st Century.

Despite FDR's best efforts, America's Jews were saved. The six million in Europe were not as lucky.

Notes

1. Lichtman interview with National Public Radio. March 18, 2013. https://www.npr.org/2013/03/18/174125891/fdr-and-the-jews-puts-roosevelts-compromises-in-context

2. The Truth about FDR and the Jews." Rafael Medoff. https://brandeiscenter.com/the-truth-about-fdr-and-the-jews/]

3. Churchill and Roosevelt: Gentlemen's Agreement/Warlords/Timeline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRzmpCE96kU&ab_channel=Timeline-WorldHistoryDocumentaries]

4. "Broken Circle: The Isolation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II." Frank Costigliola. Diplomatic History, November 2008. Vol. 32. No. 5. Oxford University Press

5."On the M Project" Review in the Eugenics Review, June 1965, of Field, Henry. "M" Project for FDR: Studies on Migration and Settlement. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1962. Lithographed. Pp. viii+421. Published by the author.

6. Roosevelt meeting on Jan. 17, 1943, Casablanca. Quoted in Foreign Relations of the United States and cited in "The Truth about FDR and the Jews."

Below: FDR with the National Jewish Welfare Board, Nov. 8, 1943.