Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

February 6, 2020

How the Roosevelt Administration Decided That Helping Jews Escape Hitler Was a Betrayal of the “National Interest”

And lessons for the present.

In 1942, a German mining executive got a message to Gerhard Riegner, a lawyer working for the Jewish World Congress in Switzerland, with concrete information about the mass-murder of Jews in Poland. Riegner rushed to the American consulate to convey the information to the U.S. State Department and to American Jewish leaders. But, as Sol Stern writes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State Department “had been turned into a vipers’ nest regarding the plight of the European Jews,” and its initial reaction was to keep the information secret:

SaveGift