Morgenthau and the national self-interest

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Secretary of State Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

Allied complicity in the Holocaust and the lack of a moral compass in the West

Recently I attended a screening of the documentary ”The Honourable Mr Morgenthau” by the American-Israeli filmmaker Hilan Warshaw. It was an absolutely harrowing account of the Holocaust, replete with terrible imagery and accounts from this most horrific of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. But the main take-away from the documentary was unfortunately the role that the USA, and to a certain extent the UK, played in the Holocaust. Much of what I’m discussing in this article is taken from the documentary above and relies upon the documentary as a source of information.

When we think of this dark period of history, the Second World War and the Holocaust, some of the few bright spots are usually represented by the statesmen Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

We rightly think of these statesmen as fighting against the satanic tyranny of the Nazi regime and saving the world from darkness, in a time when too many countries and peoples were either too weak or too unwilling to put up a fight against Nazi Germany. Specifically in the case of the USA, there was a huge sacrifice paid by upwards of half a million American servicemen who perished during the war in two foreign continents to fight against tyranny and to free the oppressed and occupied masses of Europe and Asia.

This account is of course true, but the mistake is that we conflate the staunch opposition to Nazism with a solidarity with the Jewish plight during the Holocaust.

The popular Jewish view of the USA

What informs the positive view of the USA is that we have rightly felt that this is a country which has had a big and thriving Jewish population, bigger and more integrated than in any other place during the long exile, and that this country has extended so much support to our beloved and embattled Jewish state, Israel, in the past and in the present. Another major component in this positive view of the Roosevelt administration was the formation of the War Refugee Board in 1944, which in cahoots with the Swedish diplomat Raul Wallenberg helped save upwards of 200 000 Jews from the Holocaust, mainly in Hungary but not only there. It is this commendable effort by Roosevelt’s administration, together with the unassailable fact that the United States were instrumental in liberating Europe and the world from Nazi and Japanese tyranny, which has largely shaped the positive historical view of Roosevelt in posterity.

The informed Jewish view of the USA

But what happened before 1944, and also after 1945? And how come the Nazis did manage to kill six million Jews during the war? These are painful questions that the film tries to answer.

The documentary follows the career of the Jewish-American politician Henry Morgenthau Jr (henceforth called “Morgenthau”), who served as the only Jewish member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration during the war in the capacity of Treasury Secretary (from 1933 to 1945).

Morgenthau initial stance-so prevalent during this era among American Jews-that one need not stand out as a Jew in the United States, that one should keep a low profile, and that the newly integrated status of American Jews was precious and precarious. Many American Jews did not want “to rock the boat”, as it were, to worsen their status in the USA, and to create “an Anti-Semitic problem”.

As horrific accounts of the Holocaust started to seep in, Morgenthau was increasingly challenged to act, by his Jewish secretary and by his non-Jewish colleagues like Josiah DuBois Jr. They called upon him to act, and his conscience was awakened.

Morgenthau was a secularized and assimilated Jew, by the standards of the time, and did not want it to seem that he wasn’t an American patriot, that he was somehow biased towards the Jews, and not solely in favor of the interests of the USA.

Add to this picture the fact that many prominent Jews in the US, among them the President’s “special advisor on Jewish affairs”-Samuel Rosenman-were actively trying to convince the President not to allow Jewish refugees to flee to America (In the case of Rosenman, I cannot think of any other Jew in history who has caused his kin more suffering than him, he might have the death of millions of his fellow Jews on his conscience, even though it’s hard to quantify a counterfactual event like this).

This chimed in well with the view of hardened Anti-Semites in the State Department, like Breckenridge Long, and Henry L. Stimson. The former expressed an understanding for Hitler’s Anti-Semitic agenda (Long would later resign in protest when Roosevelt did eventually start saving Jews in 1944).

Initially Morgenthau started pushing for payments to be sent to the Jewish refugees who were being killed en masse, on a daily basis. The payments were, among other things, aimed at bribing local officials to let Jews leave (In Romania among other places). The payments did not go through due to stalling tactics and obstruction on the part of the State Department.

Another thing Morgenthau tried was to let the Jews flee temporarily to overseas territories controlled by the USA. This was also rebuffed by Roosevelt.

But most importantly the USA refused to take in Jewish refugees. The following excuses were made: 1. There was a “quota” for overseas refugees which had to be adhered to. 2. There might be Nazi spies masquerading as refugees.

The film clearly rebuffs these two claims: Firstly, there had not been one single case of a Nazi Spy among the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Secondly, the refugee quota to the USA was never filled during the war.

The tragic case of the ship of St Louis which arrived at US ports full of German-Jewish refugees but was refused entry and sent back to Germany is tangible evidence of this policy but was merely one example of a whole policy.

The latently held Anti-Semitic views of the Allies and most importantly their refusal to accept any Jewish refugees from Germany and other places in Europe, was interpreted by the Nazis as a sign that the Allies didn’t want to save the Jews, and didn’t care about them. The ominous role this might have played in the official formulation of “the Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941-the wholesale extermination of Europe’s Jewish population-one can only speculate about. It seems safe to say that it played a part, even though that part might have been minor. But that is certainly bad enough.

Lack of a moral compass in confronting Anti-Semitism

The Jews were blamed for anything and everything in Europe and wholly demonized. This had started already in 1936 with deportations of Jews from Germany, and continued with the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938, and became a national policy of genocide after 1939.  There was never a justification to persecute the Jews of Europe. The USA and the Allies (along with Australia and the UK who also actively refrained from saving Jews during the War) lacked the moral compass to understand this. Instead, there were vague explanations of protecting “the Protestant profile” of the USA, and absurdly claiming the moral high ground when refraining from punishing Germany after the war.

Roosevelt had envoys meet with Hitler to convey his understanding of Hitler’s “concerns” about the Jews. Roosevelt claimed that the USA also had “a Jewish problem”, that too many Harvard students were Jewish, and that the Jewish influence was alarming. Roosevelt’s emissaries tried to calm the Nazis by saying they did not wish to interfere with the handling of “the Jewish question” by the Nazis (this would of course change later).

The role of Morgenthau during the war

This leads us to what Morgenthau erroneously became most famous for among the wider Nazi and Allied populations during and after the war.

Morgenthau’s last visit to Europe during the war was in 1944. He then concluded that the only way to prevent this calamity from happening again-more specifically the German attempts at occupying other countries and starting major wars-was to deindustrialize Germany. Without going into depth on the military aspects of the war it was of course crucial to the outbreak of the Second World War and the immense military success that Germany initially had, that the Germans had built up such an immense war machine, even under the terms of the Versailles treaty of 1919 which forbade this. This war machine was of course made possible by the enormous industrial capacity Germany possessed. The Morgenthau plan wanted to prevent the conditions that had made two world wars and untold horrors possible by reducing Germany to an agrarian society.

“The Morgenthau Plan” of deindustrializing Germany was later rebuffed. The ways in which this plan was rebuffed though are also telling of where the Allies were at this time,

The role of the United Kingdom in the Holocaust

We will now make a small detour to discuss the closest ally of the USA during the war: The United Kingdom.

A whole separate historical account can and has been written on the culpability of the UK and the Commonwealth for not preventing the Holocaust. It has been widely established that Churchill knew about the death camps in Poland and refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to them, transporting millions of Jewish victims to them (“we’ll save them at the end of the war” he is reported to have said, many millions of Jewish lost lives later). But no less importantly, Churchill upheld the notorious White Paper policy of the UK government, preventing and/or severely limiting Jewish immigration to the Palestinian mandate, which was in British hands at the time. This policy was ostensibly there to appease the Arabs.

These facts alone should lead many to reappraise Churchill’s canonized status (Bibi Netanyahu has claimed to have a picture of Churchill in his office), but one can and should add his culpability in the millions who died of starvation in India due to his refusal to send food there during a famine during the Second World War. Churchill didn’t mind using Indians (and Jews) as servicemen in the British war effort, but when it came to saving their lives, he was less conscientious.

But most poignantly in the case of Morgenthau, Churchill described Morgenthau as “a Shylock” for wanting to deindustrialize Germany. In other words, just as the Jewish Shylock of Shakespeare wanted to enact a perverse sort of revenge against his non-Jewish fellow human beings, Morgenthau was accused of exacting a purportedly irrational revenge against Nazi Germany.

The moral hypocrisy of the Allies

The American Stimson also denounced Morgenthau in the same vein, accusing him of lacking Christian compassion.

This could be deemed the most absurd aspect of Anti-Semitism from a moral perspective. The Anti-Semites first persecute the Jews in the cruelest fashion possible, exhausting every type of human cruelty there is, and even inventing new ones, and then end up accusing the Jews of that very cruelty. This Anti-Semitic trait, of committing the evil and then projecting it on the victim, has a long history, including the Medieval accusations of the Jews eating the blood of Christian children (who eats “the blood of Christ” in “the holy communion”?).

Where was the Christian compassion towards Japan during the war? President Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt after his death in 1944, proclaimed that “a rain of ruin” would befall Japan. And so it did. Even before the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing 120 000 people, Tokyo was firebombed in March 1945 killing 80 000-100 000 people in one night.

There was of course “no Christian compassion” shown towards Japan in these events, and even Germany was hardly hit by the carpet bombing of Stuttgart, Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin. But Germany had more friends in the US State Department, as pointed out by Hilan Warshaw.

Moral lessons for the Jews

“Hindsight is 20/20”, they say. How can we from our current position judge people who had to make very difficult decisions under very testing circumstances?
Difficult times are a litmus test for our values. If certain values are deeply embedded, then they tend to make themselves known during crises, especially the deeper and more existential the values are.
Was opening the borders to Jewish refugees, opening up overseas territories to Jews or even sending money to bribe foreign rulers not to kill innocent Jews really that difficult? I don’t think it was. In fact, the US war-time administration had been shown to have gone to great lengths in trying not to save any Jews prior to 1944 (the feeble attempt of the Bermuda Conference in 1943 notwithstanding).

The fact that Roosevelt and Churchill didn’t care about the Jews and may also have been slightly Anti-Semitic doesn’t obscure the fact that they played a pivotal and crucial role in defeating Nazism and its attempt at world domination.

But as far as the Jews are concerned, the only constant that one returns to and is as rock solid as ever, as close as to an eternal truth on international relations as it comes, is that we need to act out of a clear sense of NATIONAL SELF-INTEREST. When you see how Churchill and Roosevelt acted during the war, statesmen who are considered to have been “the good guys”, you realize that in all times it is best for the Jews to act out of national self-interest. We Jews, especially us, who are more vilified and victimized than any other ethnic group in history (“the Gypsies” also come to mind, but they are not really a coherent ethnic group as we are) which is all too apparent in our current era, as if all the previous persecutions weren’t enough, where we see groups and individuals from every corner of the world (Africa, South America, Europe, North America and the Middle East), and from every political persuasion almost (leftwing, far right, islamist) rally against the Jews and the Jewish state, blinded by irrational hate, we need to be acutely aware that the yardstick of any moral action we take visavi the Nations, should be: Is it good for the Jews?

This yardstick first and foremost entails that an alliance, or the actions of an international actor, is assessed by the extent by which it serves the physical survival of the Jewish nation and Jewish individuals.

Instead of this yardstock being applied we sadly see the age-old, lamentable tendency of some Jews of putting the world ahead of their own people. In our day and age, it is not traitors like Samuel Rosenman who merely put their host country ahead of saving millions of Jews, but now we have descendants of Jacob fighting “the Palestinian cause”, spearheading or joining the bandwagon in the political struggle against the Jewish state. This is not the way forward and these Jews will not be included in the future of the Jewish people; their offspring won’t be as they are not.

Siding with President Trump, regardless of all his other faults as a President, which are apparent for everyone to see-whether one is on the left side or on the right side of the political spectrum-is “a no brainer” for anyone who has the physical survival of the Jewish state and the Jewish people at the forefront of his or her concerns. President Trump’s track record of fostering peace between Israel and Arab states like Bahrain, The United Arab Emirates and Marocco, as well as moving the embassy to Jerusalem are a testament to this.

But most importantly President Trump’s determination to prevent Iran to achieve nuclear weapons, instead of giving them a get-out-of-jail card in the form of a nuclear treaty, a modern variant of the Munich Agreement in 1938-trusting genocidal dictators to give up on their ideology, is of the highest concern for the Jewish people. The genocidal and Anti-Semitic Iranian regime is the biggest existential threat to the Jewish people since the Nazi regime of Germany. This regime has vowed to wipe Israel off the map and is acquiring nuclear weapons to do so. They are already aiding and abetting the genocidal terrorism that has been directed at us since the 7^th of October, and previous to that as well. To add to that, Iran even attacked Israel directly through missile strikes since the 7^th of October. Having an American President who understands this danger and sides with us on this issue and is willing to let us defend ourselves freely against this threat is paramount. Nothing can trump this concern (no pun intended).

In a world which is still devoid of a clear moral compass, as the stances made against Israel and the Jews show with all clarity, we do not have the luxury to choose who is our ally.  Allies are usually actors whose interests converge with ours, not actors who we share a strong bond of values with, like many people assume must be the case. Many Western organizations and individuals would rather side with Islamist forces from the Dark Ages than with the Middle East’s only democracy. Many LGBT-people would rather side with groups that execute homosexuals without a trial (Hamas) than side with the only Middle Eastern country where LGBT people live freely (Israel).

In a world like this it is readily apparent that one lacks many options, and we need to be shrewd in seizing upon those options when they become available.

The situation of the Jewish people is eternally precarious until the arrival of the Redeemer, when things will be settled once and for all. Until then realpolitik is the name of the game as it in fact always has been.