HISTORY: Did F.D.R. Do Enough?

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Despite that effort, William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian of the Roosevelt era, agrees with Wyman that F.D.R.'s record on the Holocaust was "shameful." ^ The U.S. Government could not have prevented the Holocaust, Leuchtenburg explains, but it took little advantage of opportunities to help its victims. Consider the question of whether American bombers should have attacked the railroads and gas chambers at Auschwitz. The documentary contends that while American Jewish leaders were being told such raids would be too dangerous for airmen, U.S. bombers based in Italy were attacking an I.G. Farben factory less than 50 miles from the death camp. In partial defense of this military myopia, Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz has argued that the Germans could have quickly rebuilt the bombed railways and that attacks on crematoria would have killed thousands of Jewish inmates.

Dawidowicz has written that historians should limit their moral judgments to "the is of history, not the ought." Robert Herzstein, author of Roosevelt & Hitler, concurs. Whatever his failures in dealing with the refugee issue, F.D.R. was "the most consequential anti-Nazi leader of his time." He quietly fought anti-Semitism at home and took enormous political risks in preparing the U.S. to join the Allies at a time when most Americans favored neutrality. "Suppose he had adhered to the Neutrality Act," says Herzstein. "What kind of world would the Jews have been in, in Europe? How many would have survived the Holocaust?" In seeing that the only sure way to end the genocide was to destroy Hitler, F.D.R. surely had a larger vision than his critics.