The Mission Was to Shut Them Up

In 1981, a group of American Jews set out to investigate what had long been the elephant in the room: The failure of American Jewish leaders to stop Hitler's extermination of the Jews during World War II. Among the questions they researched were did the leaders press for America to enact a rescue plan; did they lobby Washington to bomb the German death camps; could the Allies have stopped or at least slow down the Final Solution?

Even nearly 40 years after the war, these questions alarmed the American Jewish establishment. First, several of the leaders during World War II were still alive; second cooperating with such a probe would mean opening up their archives, which contained a trove of documents and correspondence.

The most damaging correspondence would be that with the Zionist leadership, who fought any attempt to press the U.S. government to save the Jews of Europe. Hovering over the probe was Peter Bergson, the man who had lobbied Congress and the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in face of virulent opposition by the American and Zionist leadership.

What the American Jewish organizations needed was support from Israel's Yad Vashem and particularly its longtime research director, regarded as a leading historian on the Holocaust. That man, Yehuda Bauer, owed his international career to the U.S. organizations, particularly the Joint Distribution Committee. Bauer's mission was to win an invitation to join the investigation panel and then sabotage it.

Bauer was successful. But he never managed to stop the questions.

From the book:

In Jewish Blood: The Zionist Alliance with Germany, 1933-1963

From the chapter "Opening the Archives"

Page 588

It took nearly 40 years for American Jews to seriously address the failure of rescue. In 1981, a commission was formed to investigate the behavior of American Jewish leaders during the Final Solution. The panel was headed by Arthur Goldberg, a former Supreme Court justice and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The project was financed by Jack Eisner, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto revolt. The focus of research was the spring of 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary. Goldberg and his staff wanted to determine whether Washington could have stopped the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews. Could Auschwitz or the rail lines have been destroyed by Allied air strikes? Was Himmler’s Jews-for-goods offer genuine or a ruse to divide the Allies?

From the start, the commission was seen as a threat to the American Jewish leadership as well as Israel. Many of the leaders during World War II were still alive. The archives of major organizations contained sensitive correspondence with the Zionist leadership. The groups pressured to boycott the commission. Several Jewish historians who had defended Roosevelt’s wartime behavior declined to work with Goldberg. Yehuda Bauer was the exception: He said he would join the commission if Goldberg would purge its 26 members.

Bauer’s main target was Samuel Merlin, an adviser to Goldberg who in the 1940s worked with Bergson. Merlin argued that the dominant element in the American Jewish community during the war had been the Zionist movement. The major organizations, he said, were merely “front groups” for the Zionists. When Goldberg refused to fire Merlin, Bauer vilified the commission and its interim report.

“The author [Merlin] appears to accept the conspiratorial theory of history, and agree with our anti-Semitic contemporaries that the Jews are really very powerful. He will not prove it. It just happens to be his premise. Do I have to say that it is not mine?… My very strong advice would be, that if this is what it looks like, it will be a historically useless, erroneous, vindictive indictment which no serious or private body would have anything to do with."

The Jewish leadership increased pressure on Goldberg to disband the panel. In the summer of 1982, nine months after it was announced, the commission was dissolved. Eisner said Goldberg had capitulated. Goldberg denied this. Finally, in April 1984, Goldberg released a revised report that was far from complimentary: The American Jewish leadership had failed to act from Hitler’s ascendancy in 1933 to America’s entry in the war in 1941. The leadership knew of the Final Solution by the fall of 1942, when Roosevelt allowed Wise to announce the Nazi extermination. But the report asserted that the leadership feared growing anti-Semitism. Wise, himself, blocked calls from within his group to organize rallies to save the Jews. Instead, there were efforts behind the scenes, but they failed to move Roosevelt or his administration.

“Jewish organizations and their respective leaders were emotionally as well as ideologically so absorbed with their internecine struggles, rivalries and efforts to achieve hegemony in the Jewish community that the perception of the urgency of the rescue was, if not ignored, at least greatly diminished.”

There were smaller groups that did make serious efforts, the panel concluded. The report cited Orthodox Jewish organizations, said to have helped save thousands of Jews through bribes and forged documents. These tactics, the report said, might have stopped or delayed deportations from such countries as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania.

In 1985, a leading American historian supported the commission’s findings. David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews concluded that Roosevelt did nothing to help European Jews until he came under political pressure in 1944 and established the War Refugee Board. He said Britain had rejected rescue proposals because the Jews might have ended up in Palestine. His book was followed by several films and plays and led to a revision of the thesis that nobody could help.

During the early 1980s, Marie Syrkin, a leading American Jewish historian, branded Bergson and his group “terrorists.” She argued that those who sought accountability for the failure to rescue were engaged in “necrophilia.” Years later, Syrkin withdrew her judgment and admitted that American Jews were simply too scared to help their European brethren.

“The evidence is that the Jews of America did not act. They just did not. We felt that we were good American citizens and we had to do what the American government wanted us to do, and the last thing the American government wanted was disturbance, uproar, change in immigration quotas, anything they thought would impede the war effort. We did nothing to rock the boat.”

The findings of the Goldberg commission eventually became part of the official American narrative. In April 2018, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened an exhibition that explored how Americans saw Nazism and Hitler. The exhibition addressed uncomfortable questions, including why Roosevelt had never made Jewish rescue a priority. Unlike the Zionist narrative, the museum concluded that Americans knew plenty about the Holocaust early in World War II, but that anti-Semitism played a role in Washington’s policy of preventing rescue. “Visitors will be surprised at how much Americans knew about Nazism and the Holocaust and how early they knew it,” exhibition curator Daniel Greene said.

Below: Arthur Goldberg