Three weeks later Roosevelt sent Wise a follow-up letter asserting that the plan was ready to be enacted, and that only some details remained to be ironed out between the State Department and the U.S. mission in Bern.
Yet the past was repeated once again. For six and a half weeks, the State Department surreptitiously delayed the license. Indeed, it would hold up the license for a full eight months after the initial request for funds, by which time Riegner’s rescue plans would be tragically outdated: by then Adolf Eichmann had pressured the Romanians into canceling the arrangement.
TWO DAYS AFTER WISE met with Roosevelt, the Allied bombing campaign laid waste to Hamburg, leaving it a flaming, smoking ruin. An astounding forty-two thousand German civilians were killed in the Hamburg bombings, a figure dwarfing the number of British civilians who had died during the murderous blitz. Weeks earlier, Düsseldorf and Cologne had fared little better. The same was true of the Ruhr, Berlin, and the Ploiesti oil fields in Romania, which Roosevelt enthused was “a smashing victory.” In a message to Congress, Roosevelt, with almost boyish glee, once again took an opportunity to mock Hitler, just as the Führer once mocked him: “Hitler . . . started boasting that he had converted Europe into an impregnable fortress. But he neglected to provide that fortress with a roof. The British and American air forces have been bombing the roofless fortress with ever increasing effectiveness.” Meanwhile, as German casualties mounted on the home front, Joseph Goebbels was forced to acknowledge that the Allies’ offensive was “a catastrophe of hitherto inconceivable proportions.”
The Allied targets were numerous—and multiplying: oil refineries, rubber facilities, transportation facilities and vehicles, ball bearing factories, shipyards, ammunition dumps, dams, and airplanes. And of course there was collateral damage to civilians. Roosevelt never had any qualms about the inadvertent bombing of German civilians, though he hastened to say that the United States was not bombing civilian targets “for the sheer sadistic pleasure of killing.” His hope was to degrade the German military and destroy the morale of the German people.
Yet while the president balked at the thought of explicitly bombing German targets as a reprisal for the murder of the Jews, the Nazis openly insisted they were liquidating the ghettos as reprisals for the Allied bombing campaign.
ON AUGUST 17, 1943, Roosevelt met for the fourth time with Churchill, first at Hyde Park, where they sipped scotch and munched on hot dogs, then more formally at Quebec City.
The Quebec conference principally dealt with the coming Normandy invasion. The president and the prime minister discussed the gritty logistics of crossing the Channel. They talked about landing craft, fuel pipelines, movable harbors, and the tons of matériel that would be deployed. They talked about who would command Overlord, agreeing that it would be an American. And then, cautiously looking ahead, Roosevelt raised the matter of Hitler’s surrender. He wondered if the military chiefs had made backup plans in case Germany collapsed unexpectedly. The British assured the president that plans were in place if needed.
One other topic loomed large at Quebec: the atomic bomb. In October 1939, the renowned scientist Albert Einstein had written an urgent letter to Roosevelt telling him about the pioneering work by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard with uranium and urging preliminary research on an atomic weapon. Among other things, he emphasized the extraordinary destructive potential of nuclear fission and a nuclear chain reaction, and said it was “conceivable—though less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”: bombs so stupendous that they could demolish “whole ports” and their surroundings. He also pointed out that the Nazis might already have begun work on an atomic weapon themselves.
An atomic weapon in the Nazi arsenal? Few notions were more alarming. Because of the dread that the Nazis would get there first, the possible advance of weapons technology—despite all the problems it involved—had thus become one of the imperatives of the war. Roosevelt took action, establishing an advisory committee on uranium to explore a once unimaginable weapons program. But while a new generation of conventional weaponry was being developed and began rolling off American assembly lines—radar-guided rockets, amphibious tanks, bazookas, proximity fused shells, napalm, SCR594 ground radar—the scientists working on the atomic bomb appeared baffled in the early stages: the theoretical problems were complicated enough, the operational ones even more so.
In that first year, the advisory committee’s work was halting and seemingly futile. The distinguished scientist Niels Bohr forlornly compared its work to that of the “alchemists of former days, groping in the dark in their vain efforts to make gold.” He did not overstate. By contrast, the British were more optimistic; they believed that a working bomb could be constructed from U-235. With ample resources devoted to it, they estimated that the first weapon could be available by the end of 1943.
Churchill gave the go-ahead in Britain, but Roosevelt hesitated to expedite the research in the United States. Pearl Harbor changed everything. The president scribbled a laconic note on White House stationery to an aide: “Okay—returned—I think you’d best keep this in your own safe.—FDR.”
The research in the United States now took on new urgency. The British soon arrived in Washington with a gleaming black metal box full of scientific secrets, while the Americans quickly reshuffled agencies and personnel. Eventually, the president established the National Defense Research Committee, whose members were eminent scientists, and finally comprehensive research on atomic fission began. Under the auspices of the army, the Manhattan Project was born, code-named after a secret headquarters in a nondescript building at 270 Broadway in Manhattan. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers began building huge, futuristic research facilities that amounted to the stuff of science fiction: atomic cities laboring in the greatest secrecy. When Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, went to Capitol Hill for funding, Senator Sam Rayburn waved him away and said: “I don’t want to know why.” The funds for the project were buried deep within the War Department budget.
Nobody knew which method would successfully produce the U-235 isotope and plutonium. Diffusion? Electromagnetism? Heavy water? Different pilot programs worked on different components of the problem. At the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, Fermi racked his brain, delving into plutonium research. At the Standard Oil Company, equally tenacious physicists worked on the centrifuge method. At Columbia University Harold Urey blazed a different path, conducting gaseous diffusion research. Foremost in the minds of the scientists and officials alike was the frantic requirement for speed. They couldn’t let Hitler get there first.
The president of Harvard, James B. Conant, came to an appalling conclusion: that the Germans might be a year ahead of the Allies. “Three months’ delay,” he direly mused, “might be fatal.”
From the outset, the Americans and the British agreed to cooperate, quickly combining their programs. Concerned about the ongoing German air attacks over Britain, Churchill balked at the risk of constructing the enormous facilities needed to develop the atomic weapon in Britain. So Roosevelt promptly agreed to shoulder the burden, approving tens of millions of dollars for the research at home. Henceforth, all the research and development was conducted in the United States; the government would spend nearly $2 billion on the Manhattan Project and employ 120,000 people. Actually, as work on the atomic bomb progressed, and the lights flickered into the late hours in the Los Alamos laboratories in New Mexico, Germany decided to shelve its own program, favoring instead its vaunted V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs. In January 1942, as the Germans at Wannsee formalized their decision to go ahead with the Final Solution, Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s armaments minister, decided that the cost of constructing an atom bomb was too high and the project itself too fraught with peril. In any case, Hitler, arrogant as always, scoffed at nuclear science as “Jewish physics” and evinced little interest in an atomic weapon.
It was in Quebec that Churchill and Roosevelt reaffirmed th
eir commitment to share the results of the Manhattan Project: they would both keep the results under wraps, and each would refrain from using the awesome weapon without the consent of the other. At the same time as the two leaders reached this understanding, thousands of Robert Oppenheimer’s scientists and technicians were working in the many sectors of the vast project.
By December 30, 1944, Roosevelt would receive a report saying that the first bomb would be ready “about August 1, 1945,” and would be the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT.
Here, as in so many other aspects of the war, the Allies were outstripping the Axis powers.
THREE AND A HALF months had come and gone since the Treasury Department had undertaken to help rescue the Romanian Jews—the Riegner plan—and what Morgenthau called “the relatively simple matter” of getting the American minister in Switzerland to issue a license. Incensed at what he considered the State Department’s treachery, Morgenthau wrote directly to Cordell Hull. Meanwhile, intrigues were seemingly everywhere. John Pehle, Morgenthau’s foreign funds control chief, lamented about the State Department: “The way they kick this stuff around . . . All of a sudden, right in the middle of something, they will refer it to the Intergovernmental Committee and nothing will happen.” Then Britain’s Foreign Office stepped in—the State Department had insisted on consulting it—expressing its concern about “disposing” of anything like “70,000 refugees,” the number envisioned by the Riegner plan.
Confronted not simply with the State Department’s objections but with the Foreign Office’s message, Morgenthau memorably said that they were “a satanic combination of British chill and diplomatic doubletalk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death.” And of the State Department’s position, Morgenthau’s aide Ansel Luxford noted, “That is a stock reply when you hit the Jewish problem. . . . You can find one million reasons why you can’t get them out of Europe, but if somebody put their mind to getting them out, you can spend the next 10 years on what you’re going to do with them.”
A distressed Morgenthau himself agreed, baldly asserting, “When you get through with it, the attitude to date is no different from Hitler’s attitude.” This was echoed by Morgenthau’s advisers. Randolph Paul said, “I don’t know how we can blame the Germans for killing them when we are doing this. The law calls it para delicto, of equal guilt.” Herbert Gaston added, “We don’t shoot them. We let other people shoot them, and let them starve.”
For some time, the tough-minded Oscar Cox of the Lend-Lease administration—he was “haunted by the suffering of refugees”—had been pressing Morgenthau to push for a separate rescue agency, what the speakers had called for at the Emergency Conference rally at Madison Square Garden earlier in the spring. Such a “War Refugee Rescue Committee” would, Cox maintained, “attack the whole problem afresh.” Cox was in a position to know: he had drafted the Lend-Lease Act and the legal opinions concerning Japanese-American internment, and had prosecuted the captured German saboteurs who sneaked into the United States earlier in the war. While mulling it over, Morgenthau nonetheless still clung to the idea that somehow the State Department could pick up the slack. But it would not.
He scheduled a Monday morning meeting with the secretary of state and Breckinridge Long. Hoping to clear the air, Hull protested that the problem stemmed more from bureaucratic inertia than malfeasance. “The trouble is,” he explained, “the fellows down the line,” adding, “I don’t get a chance to know everything that is going on.” This, of course, was as true of Morgenthau as of Hull, yet the Treasury Department was able to act within a day, as opposed to within months. Hull also launched into a contorted monologue, blaming just about everyone else for thwarting well-meaning American initiatives for refugees—he mentioned the British, the Nazis, the Latin American countries, and of course bureaucrats within the department.
Hearing Hull’s explanation, Breckinridge Long pulled Morgenthau aside and asked if they could speak privately in another room; there he quickly sought to cover his tracks, distancing himself from the very policies that he had promoted for years. He too blamed “people lower down in the State Department,” even going so far as to blame one official (Bernard Meltzer) who Morgenthau knew was among the few voices in the State Department actually pushing to rescue the Jews in Romania.
Hearing Long openly prevaricate so brazenly, Morgenthau did not restrain himself. “Well, Breck,” he said, looking his colleague in the eye, “as long as you raise the question, we might be a little frank. The impression is all around that you, particularly, are anti-Semitic!” Taken aback, Long protested, “I know that is so. I hope that you will use your good offices to correct that impression, because I am not.”
“I am very, very glad to know it,” Morgenthau replied. But he wasn’t about to back down. He added that the State Department was no different from the British Foreign Office—about as withering a charge as he could level.
If Morgenthau’s prodding constituted pressure from within—after five months’ delay, an embarrassed Long finally approved the license for the relief and rescue programs—there were now mighty forces increasing pressure from without.
ON NOVEMBER 9, 1943, twelve influential senators—they were led by Guy Gillette of Iowa and six of them were members of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee—picked up the idea begun by Peter Bergson and favored by Cox; they introduced a resolution calling on the president to create a “government rescue agency” to save the surviving Jewish people of Europe from extinction at the hands of the Nazis. Their resolution also increasingly found support in the House, where the straight-talking California Democrat, Will Rogers Jr., was the principal sponsor. If the Gillette-Rogers resolution reached the floor of either the House or the Senate, it would raise an embarrassing debate on the administration’s mismanagement of the Jewish plight. As the measure gained support, Oscar Cox warned the State Department that Congress would eventually seize the initiative and do what the administration “should have done a long time ago.”
Soon, five days of hearings on the resolution were held in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Sol Bloom—a close ally of Roosevelt’s who had been a delegate at the ill-fated Bermuda conference. While Bloom denied that he was opposed to the legislation, his attitude from the outset was tepid at best. He repeatedly pointed out the expense of rescuing up to 100,000 people. “You have to figure at least $2000 a person,” he said, “so that would be $200 million.” This led Congressman Andrew Schiffler to angrily retort, “I do not think money is of primary importance.”
Actually, Bloom straddled the fence. To the proponents of the resolution, it seemed clear that the chairman was seeking to kill it, or at least choke it off. But confronted with the mounting public pressure, Bloom sent a telegram to the editor of the New York Post: “I personally agree that the resolution should pass.”
The most explosive moment of the five-day hearings came on November 26, when Breckinridge Long testified at a closed session. Why closed? Long insisted on secrecy because the Nazis might thwart a possible refugee aid operation if they knew what he discussed.
His testimony, lasting a grueling three and a half hours, was a masterpiece of showmanship. Citing little-known facts from the State Department’s impenetrable visa system, he convinced the committee members that the administration was doing everything possible in its power to thwart the Nazis and save the Jews. He sought to use reason: “There has been,” he said, “an agency of the American government actually attending to these affairs for a little more than four years.” He sought to use emotion: “I have thought many times of the very definite and pertinent fact that there is no man or woman in this room that I know of whose ancestors were not refugees. Mine were, every one of them.” And he sought to use intimidation: “I think your committee will desire to consider . . . whether any action on your part would be interpreted as a repudiation of the cause of the Jews.”
A number of the members of the committee were seduced by Long’
s seeming sincerity and honeyed words. One after another, these members fell over themselves to thank Long for his dedication and tireless efforts. Moreover, the committee hearings foundered on the politically charged question of whether the resolution should call for immediately opening Palestine to Jewish refugees. At one point Representative Karl Mundt worried aloud that the legislation had become a “hot poker.” In effect, Long’s testimony managed to strangle the rescue resolution in the committee and prevent it from reaching the House floor. But worried about antagonizing American Jews, Bloom, the committee chairman, decided to ignore the concern for secrecy and instead released the entire transcript of Long’s remarks. His plan, or at least his hope, was to quell the discontent from Jewish groups and individuals.
It instead backfired. A furor immediately broke out.
During his testimony, Long had not been above flagrantly misleading the committee. For one thing, he claimed there was no ocean transportation available for refugees, when in fact Portuguese and Spanish passenger ships were coming to America three-quarters empty. For another, he claimed that the United States had taken in about 580,000 refugees since Hitler had come to power, which prompted a front-page article in the New York Times headlined, “580,000 Refugees Admitted to United States in Decade.” The truth was a very different story. This figure, as David S. Wyman notes, encompassed all visas, whether in fact used or not, whether permanent or temporary, whether provided to Jews or not; and it referred only to visas that were authorized, not to the number of refugees who actually entered the United States. The more accurate number was less than half that, and many of those refugees were not Jews. Indeed, in the previous year only 2,705 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution had been admitted to the country, the equivalent of one hour’s worth of the gas chamber’s at Auschwitz.