Seventy years ago, there raged in Washington one of the most portentous, and least known, debates in Western history. World War II had not yet begun. The full extent of Hitler’s maniacal plan to wipe Europe free of Jews was not yet known. The United States hadn’t taken even the first steps toward the informal alliance against Nazi Germany that the Lend-Lease Act symbolized.

For decades, historians have suggested that Franklin Roosevelt was aware but not much moved by the danger that Jews faced in a Europe that eventually would be overrun by the Nazis and their ideology of anti-Semitism. The president has been celebrated for his masterly prosecution of the war, but in the verdict of history there always has been an asterisk for his callousness toward the Jews and his willingness to intern Japanese Americans in camps in the western United States.

Documents found

Now new evidence filling out the portrait of Roosevelt in the years leading to the Holocaust has been unearthed from an unlikely source — a team of historians examining the papers of James G. McDonald, an FDR confidant who served as League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and who issued some of the earliest and most passionate cries of alarm over the threat that Hitler posed in Europe.

These newly discovered documents are not exculpatory — they do not relieve Roosevelt of the historical burden of answering why he did not do more — but they show an American president more interested, more horrified and ultimately more involved in these issues in the period leading to the war than previously believed. These documents, assembled this spring in “Refugees and Rescue” (Indiana University Press), change our view of FDR, though not as dramatically as his thoughts about the Jews in the late 1930s might have changed their tragic destiny.

They show Roosevelt in anguish over the agony in Europe, struggling to find a solution, thinking out loud about what steps might be taken to rescue Jews from Europe before they were engulfed by the fires that would come to be known as the Holocaust. They show FDR, who had presided over a huge increase in the role of government in his New Deal response to the Great Depression, speaking in the most ambitious terms of rescuing the Jews. His plan was no less dramatic than to sweep every Jew out of Europe to safety abroad.

Roosevelt referred to this as “my refugee proposal,” and the details were set forth in a remarkable account found in the Library of Congress, tucked away in the heretofore uninspected papers of Arthur Sweetser, who worked in the League of Nations information section. This account quotes Roosevelt saying:

“We had the matter up at the Cabinet, to see if we could not do something for these unfortunate people. … Then suddenly it struck me: Why not get all the democracies to unite to share the burden? After all, they own most of the free land of the world, and there are only … what would you say, 14, 16 million Jews in the whole world, of whom about half already are in the United States.”

Resettlement plans

They show Roosevelt, in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi rage against the Jews in November 1938, trying to find $300 million to settle 100,000 families at the cost of about $3,000 a family. They show him thinking that some of these families, so threatened by the coming storm, might be settled in Tanganyika, the Cameroons and the Middle East — options he discussed with Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis.

Roosevelt even spoke of congressional appropriations for such an undertaking, a notion that startled State Department officials. He spoke openly of seeking $150 million over a four-year period. Listen to the official minutes of a private White House meeting:

“The president pointed out that as yet no practical suggestion of colonization had been developed. The president suggested that an appropriation by Congress might be conceivable when practical plans emerge if other governments and private agencies participate.”

Some six months later, the president pressed for action. This diary entry from Jay Pierrepont Moffat, head of the State Department division of European Affairs, details a White House meeting on the German Trust, set up to administer seized Jewish property — a session that revolved around warnings from the U.S. embassy in Berlin that “unless places of settlement were opened up very shortly the radicals would again gain control in Germany and try to solve the Jewish problem in their own way”:

“The president, however, stuck to his point, and said that in his opinion we should tell the Germans in a fortnight — not one day longer — that an organization was in existence which could deal with the German Trust. It was not so much a question of the money as it was of actual lives, and the president was convinced that the warnings given by our embassy in Berlin were sound and not exaggerated.”

These plans came to naught. War came to Europe, and eventually the United States was swept up as well. The president became more concerned about winning the war than saving the Jews, or perhaps believed he could accomplish the latter only by succeeding in the former. Though the president did not open American borders to European Jews, this new book gives lie to the notion that Roosevelt didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t plot.

FDR ‘active and concerned‘

“It says that Roosevelt had different views at different times, and that any flat statement that is a moral judgment — he didn’t care, he was anti-Semitic, you choose it — doesn’t really do justice to a politician who changed according to circumstances,” says Richard Breitman, an American University historian who was part of the team that assembled the documents in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “It doesn’t mean he was right in every circumstance. Some of the response to news of the Holocaust was belated, and there was resistance to doing things that he thought might get in the way of fighting the war and finishing it as soon as possible. But in 1938 and 1939 he was very active and concerned about what he thought was a looming disaster in Europe.”

World War II was monstrous and complicated. It has been over for about two-thirds of a century and still we do not have a comprehensive picture of it or of its principal players. The picture has just changed again.