Told to draw up a formal report for the secretary of state, Elting highlighted his belief “in the utter seriousness of my informant.”
Ten days after Schulte had arrived in Zurich, it seemed to all involved that it would be just a short time before Roosevelt, Churchill, and the world would learn about Hitler’s plans for the Jews.
They were sorely mistaken.
ARGUABLY, IN PERHAPS NO other aspect of the war would the White House be able to receive such authoritative information from deep inside the Third Reich. Yet in his August 11 cover letter accompanying the Riegner report, the American minister in Switzerland, Leland Harrison, sought to bring this drama to a premature close by attaching a watered-down message characterizing the report merely as “war rumors inspired by fear and what is commonly understood to be the actually miserable condition of these refugees who faced decimation as a result of physical maltreatment, persecution, and scarcely endurable privations, malnutrition, and disease.”
Riegner’s telegram wound up not in the Oval Office but on the desk of the State Department’s division of European affairs, where it was generally dismissed by the administration officials. One official, the prickly Paul Culbertson, didn’t even think the Bern legation should have “put this thing in a telegram.” His colleague, the bland, colorless Elbridge Durbrow, took an even harder line, commenting that the Swiss legation should refuse even transmitting such messages “to third parties,” and noting, with tragic certitude, that “American interests” were not involved. As to the veracity of the German industrialist’s disclosure? It was “fantastic,” yet another war rumor. Was there any curiosity about who the German industrialist was? Remarkably, there was not. Was there any interest in how intimate he was with Hitler’s inner circle? Equally remarkably, there was not. As for Riegner, who was a known quantity? He was simply treated as erratic, impetuous, a nuisance. The State Department’s routine would go on virtually unchanged by the Riegner report. It was as though the men in Washington had covered their eyes and ears and were simply waiting for the whole mess to disappear.
For the State Department now, the only decision left was whether to relay the Riegner report on to Roosevelt’s ally Rabbi Stephen Wise, as Riegner had requested. The answer was no.
“Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness,” recalled Riegner, “as when I sent messages of disaster in horror to the free world and no one believed me.” No doubt Schulte would have been in equal despair.
10
Riegner
IN THE DAYS THAT followed, there was some second-guessing within the State Department about the Riegner Telegram, but only about process, not content. One department official, Paul Culbertson, didn’t like the idea of sending it on to Rabbi Stephen Wise, but he cautioned that “if the Rabbi hears later that we had the message and didn’t let him in on it he might put up a kick.” His solution was to pass it on but damn it with a form of faint praise, adding that the “Legation has no information to confirm the story.” Others, like Elbridge Durbrow, took the opposite view. He continued to declare the allegations in the telegram “fantastic.” Even if the killings were about to take place, he worried about the “impossibility of our being of any assistance.” His advice? To bury the report and move on. Which is exactly what they did.
Moreover, Durbrow wrote a memo in which he declared that in the future the Swiss legation should refuse to pass on any more such message “to third parties,” unless it clearly involved “American interests.” This memo would be prophetic: within the next six months, the State Department would go to great lengths to strangle any further flow of information from Switzerland about mass exterminations.
Four days later, the State Department bluntly informed Leland Harrison, the U.S. minister in Switzerland, that Riegner’s message would not be passed on to Wise, because of its “unsubstantiated nature.” A week later Riegner was told the same thing; nevertheless, he was counseled that if he could supply “corroboratory information,” his message would receive further consideration.
Riegner’s last, best hope of getting word to Roosevelt was still Wise. Yet Wise remained in the dark.
WHO WAS STEPHEN WISE and why was he so important? On paper and in person, no man seemed more suited to publicize the Riegner Telegram than Wise. He was by turns brilliant, headstrong, imperious, and inflammatory. He was also perhaps the most well-known leader of the Jewish community in America in the 1930s and the 1940s. To his admirers, he was a seasoned diplomat and a much heralded truth teller, an unwavering defender of the downtrodden. To his detractors, he was dogmatic, on the wrong side of history—or a nuisance. But neither his friends nor his foes could ignore his connections, which were considerable; his following, which was extensive; or his commitment, which was unshakable.
Born in Budapest in 1874, he was the grandson of the chief rabbi of Hungary, and this lineage conferred a touch of royalty on him. His parents spoke German, and when he was a young child they immigrated to New York. He became a remarkable union of two diverse threads of Judaism that were uneasily interwoven; he embraced the New World—he graduated from Columbia University—even as he maintained his ties to the Old World: he was ordained in Vienna as a Reform rabbi. He headed a synagogue in Portland, Oregon, and later founded the renowned Free Synagogue of New York, a temple that quickly became as fashionable as it was famous—Wise was given the latitude to preach in any direction he wanted, and in a break from the past, dues were completely optional. An ardent political liberal, he was committed to social justice. He pushed for child labor laws, was an outspoken defender of workers’ rights, demanded benefits for striking employees, and tirelessly promoted free speech and civil rights. He formed an unshakable alliance with Christian reform leaders, and struggled on behalf of such social issues as honest city government and free labor unions. He pushed for Negro rights as well. Growing bolder with each cause, among his many accomplishments, he helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP. And like Lord Byron, he one day woke to find himself famous.
In private, Wise could be humorous, affectionate to his friends, and loving to his family. In public, he was charismatic, energetic, candid, and legendary as an orator, not only in the Jewish community but beyond. Whether he was defending the Jews or pleading for the poor, he was always eloquent, his voice filled with robust timbre. To the long-suffering masses, his was a rousing message: no longer need you feel inferior; no longer need you feel scorned or alone. Physically, he fitted his part. Tall and powerful, he had the build of a steelworker, the sturdiness of a Roman wrestler, and the presence of a statesman. With his magnificent thatch of hair, and with his muscular arms outstretched, he was a mesmerizing speaker. And because of his ability to mingle easily in the worlds of both religion and politics, his political power quickly grew.
As a young man on business in Europe in 1898, Wise had met the towering founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, and soon thereafter he broke with most Reform rabbis and became an early Zionist, committed to the establishment of a Jewish state. Wise also became a deputy to the future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, and together the two men helped prod president Woodrow Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which enshrined England’s support for a Jewish national homeland in the ancient land of Palestine. In the ensuing years, Wise’s fingerprints seemed to be everywhere in American Jewish life: he was at one time or another president of the World Jewish Congress, Riegner’s organization, which Wise had helped found in 1920; the American Jewish Congress; the Jewish Institute of Religion, a prominent theological college; and the Zionist Organization of America—as well as editor of Opinion magazine, not to mention a driving force of the journal Congress Weekly.
When the Great Depression came, Wise spoke out early and often for unemployment insurance and ample measures of relief. By then, he had already solidified a relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, whom he supported for governor of New York in 1928, not
withstanding the fact that the Republican candidate was Jewish. “I never voted as a Jew,” Wise later said, “but always as an American.” As an early and vocal supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Wise cultivated ties to such formidable Democrats as Roosevelt’s advisers Henry Morgenthau Jr., Felix Frankfurter, Frances Perkins, and Harold Ickes. But though Wise became a street-savvy participant in the upper echelons of American politics, his personal relationship with Roosevelt was complex and ambivalent. Where Roosevelt was in his gut pragmatic, Wise was a radical; where Roosevelt freely tapped into politicians of all stripes if they could be of help to him, Wise was inclined to divide the world into those who were right and those who were wrong; where Roosevelt was an amalgam of candor and obfuscation, Wise was put off by those who were indirect. In a sense, Roosevelt was all ego, Wise all superego.
When Roosevelt took an uncertain stand regarding the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City during his bid for the presidency in 1932, a disappointed Wise refused to back him. A year later, however, the president won Wise over with his charm and his New Deal. From then on, Wise was under Roosevelt’s spell; and from then on, he never faltered in his support for the president. He called Roosevelt “boss,” but actually Roosevelt was his hero. “He re-won my unstinted admiration,” Wise later gushed, “and I spoke of him everywhere I went with boundless enthusiasm.” He never looked back. In 1936, Wise wholeheartedly supported Roosevelt for a second term; in 1937 he was unfazed by Roosevelt’s Supreme Court packing debacle and by the mounting congressional opposition to the president; and in 1940 he supported Roosevelt’s third term. For better or for worse, Wise’s trust in Roosevelt was absolute.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Wise, by turns meticulous and melodramatic, became an implacable opponent of Nazi Germany. While Time magazine seemed entertained by Hitler’s grandiosity, dismissing him as a “bristle lipped, slightly potbellied,” comical figure who often “stroked his tuft of brown mustache,” and who looked like Charlie Chaplin, Wise knew better. From the outset, he knew that the demons had been let loose. When the brownshirts—the storm troopers—wearing their high-crowned caps and red swastikas were assaulting and bludgeoning Jews, men as well as women, young as well as old, who failed to thrust out an arm in the stiff Heil salute as Nazis paraded in the streets singing “Deutschland erwache!” (“Germany awake!”), Wise knew that these were not the antics of a lunatic fringe but the beginning of a terrible chapter in European history.
Zealously speaking out against Hitler, Wise also sought to engineer a movement to boycott German goods; urged Roosevelt to more strongly oppose the Nazi regime; and was the driving force behind many anti-Nazi demonstrations by Americans, including mass protests in New York City, one of which, at Madison Square Garden, drew over fifty thousand people. His ability to assess people was at times impaired—he remained in awe of the president, chronically unable to be objective about him, let alone critical. In the 1930s he was convinced that Roosevelt was as emotionally committed as he was to helping the persecuted Jews—true, Roosevelt did nothing to dissuade him of this, even appointing him to the Advisory Commission on Political Refugees chaired by James G. McDonald. In the 1940s, Wise believed Roosevelt would stop at nothing to somehow save the millions of victims in the Holocaust. On the basis of varying degrees of evidence, he believed in Roosevelt’s fervent support for the Zionist movement.
Was Wise’s euphoria about Roosevelt built on shifting sands? Yes and no. Early in the war the president had lifted Americans’ hearts with his fireside chats; couldn’t he now do the same to help the Jews? Yet in pressing for his personal cause, Wise had setbacks. When he had sought to change congressional opposition to the 1924 immigration act, he failed, receiving minimal assistance from Roosevelt. When he sought to alter British policy in Palestine, he again fell short—once more, he lacked the backing of the administration. Then in 1941 and 1942, Wise was devastated by the fragmentary reports trickling out of Europe about the Nazis’ atrocities against Jews. May 1942 was particularly bitter, especially when he heard the staggering account, smuggled out, which asserted that 700,000 Polish Jews had already been massacred by the Germans. Learning about this, Wise was more grief-stricken than ever.
As a member of the president’s advisory committee, Wise pushed and prodded the State Department to provide emergency visitors’ visas for Jews threatened by the Nazis, to the point of jousting ferociously with the department and irritating the administration. The frustration began to wear on him. So did age.
At sixty-eight years old in 1942 he was “far from being well,” as he confessed to a colleague. He had an inoperable double hernia, which necessitated frequent X-ray treatments; an enlarged spleen; and a bone marrow disease, which often left him pale and weak. Though his condition made it difficult for him to fly, Wise nonetheless pushed his body to the limit, traveling widely, usually by train.
As the months passed, a hard question lingered. Among a growing number of Jews there was a gnawing suspicion that Wise was too prone to vacillation, too establishment for the radicals, and too radical for the establishment. There was also a persistent view that his trust in Roosevelt was misplaced, that Wise was wedded to a president who, when it came to the Jews, offered lip service rather than action. Even Wise’s attempt to unify the American Jewish community would fall short; for one thing, conservative Jews would oppose his vocal liberalism, his support for the New Deal, and his Zionism.
Yet whatever his failings, his concern was real and so was his passion. And the fact remains that Wise was one of the pivotal civic and civil rights figures in the nation, and one of the most important Jewish leaders in the world. If anyone had been put on this earth to save the Jews, it seemed to be Wise. If anyone could persuade Roosevelt to take action, or to mediate between the warring factions at the State Department, it would be Wise. And if anyone could march into the Oval Office and wave the Riegner Telegram before Roosevelt’s eyes, it would be Wise.
But in August 1942, thanks to the State Department, Wise was still a bystander.
IN WASHINGTON, AS LURID accounts of Nazi atrocities continued to arrive, the professional diplomats seemed to keep doing what they did best: immaculate in their striped trousers, wing collars, and pince-nez, they shuffled papers, composed cables, and assembled in conferences. And they took their time.
Although Riegner’s message may have stalled in Washington, it continued to attract attention in London. At first, the Foreign Office hesitated, taking no action for a week. But Riegner had, sensibly, also requested that his report be passed on to Samuel Sydney Silverman, a highly respected British barrister who was a member of Parliament and also the chairman of the English section of the World Jewish Congress. Covering his bases, Riegner had added one extra line in the cable he sent to the British: “PLEASE INFORM AND CONSULT NEW YORK,” by which he meant Wise.
On August 28, Silverman did just that; he cabled Riegner’s information to the United States, addressing it directly to Wise. It was one thing to block a message from a relatively unknown Swiss Jew like Riegner, quite another to bottle up a report coming from a British MP. This time, while administration officials were adjourning from work for brandy, cigars, and conversation, Silverman’s message sped its way through both the State Department and the War Department. It landed on Wise’s desk on a Friday, while he was preparing for the Sabbath. Wise, of course, had no way of knowing that the State Department already had the Riegner Telegram, nor that it had been decided not to transmit the contents to him.
For several days, Wise urgently conferred with a number of colleagues, all of whom were “reduced to consternation” by the graphic accounts. Then he made his decision. On September 2, Wise passed Silverman’s cable on to Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state. Wise also added a personal touch, saying he deemed Riegner a scholar of “entire reliability,” “not an alarmist,” and “a conservative and equable person.” He asked the undersecretary to request that the American minister in Switze
rland quietly confer with Riegner about the possibility of additional corroborating information.
And he suggested that the Riegner Telegram be brought directly to President Roosevelt’s attention.
WHY DID WISE NOT bring the matter up with the secretary of state, whose wife was in fact half-Jewish? Wise calculated that he would get a better hearing from Welles than from Cordell Hull. For several years the State Department had been riven by antagonism and jealousy stemming from the recurrent bureaucratic clashes between these two titans. And time after time, Welles, rather than the secretary himself, had proved to be the one who ultimately had Roosevelt’s ear. This was not surprising. Fifty years old, Welles was tall, dignified, and blond. And he had all the right connections. He was a graduate of Groton and Harvard; he summered in Bar Harbor; and he was related to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the great foe of slavery and unwavering advocate of freedom. More important, for many years Sumner Welles had been a close friend of the president—the New York Times would write that FDR was “personally fond” of Welles—as well as of the first lady, who as much as anyone else in the administration had an abiding concern for the plight of the Jews. An instinctive humanitarian, Sumner Welles also increasingly became a champion of the Jews.
Hull’s résumé was also impeccable: born in a log cabin, he was now seventy-one, a former congressman, senator, and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the longest-serving secretary of state; he also worked on the foundation of what would become the United Nations, earning a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, not unlike FDR, he was in failing health. Too often he seemed tired, out of step, little more than a figurehead at the State Department. For one six-week period, his poor health forced him to turn over the running of the department to his subordinates. And the fact that his wife was half Jewish, far from being helpful, was actually a hindrance, because he went out of his way to prove that he was not swayed by special interests; indeed, he was one of the authorities that turned away the St. Louis, with its German Jewish refugees, in June 1939.