This Day in Presidential History (FDR and the Holocaust Eyewitness)

July 28, 1943—For approximately an hour and twenty minutes, Franklin Roosevelt met secretly with Jan Karski, an agent of the Polish government-in-exile, who gave him the fullest account he had heard to date of what posterity knows as the Holocaust.

Though he left out what he had experienced himself as an eyewitness—robberies, beatings and stabbings of Jews transported from Czechoslavakia to the transit depot in Izbica Lubelska in Poland, 40 miles from the extermination camp of Belzec—what Karski told the President was grim enough:

* He informed the President of the existence of one of the most infamous concentration camps, Auschwitz.

* He told him of conditions of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, which were so desperate that they had led to an uprising against the Nazi regime that had been harshly crushed.

* He said that 1.8 million Jews had already been killed in Poland.

* He passed on the belief of the commanders of Poland’s underground Home Army that if the Allies didn’t intervene within the next year and a half, the Jews of their country would “cease to exist.”

The problem that this courier from the Polish underground faced was only partly that the crimes he was describing lay beyond the capacity of most people’s imaginations. Just as worrisome was America’s experience with atrocity stories in World War I. Edward Bernays, who became known as a public relations genius after the war, admitted afterward that his colleagues whipped up anti-German sentiment in Latin America by spreading around atrocity stories.

One thing that Karski had going for him was this: as a Christian, he could not be accused of special pleading on behalf of Europe’s Jews. Moreover, as the interview came to an end, the 29-year-old Karski could not help but feel comforted by the President’s words: "You will tell your leaders that we shall win this war. You will tell them that the guilty ones will be punished for their crimes. You will tell them that Poland has a friend in this house."

In some ways, FDR was as good as his word. He was determined to bring the Nazis to heel—and did. He was determined that Hitler and his henchmen would be punished—and, as soon as the Allies won the war, they initiated the Nuremberg trials. But in the unspoken yet implied promise of his last words, he did all too little—and far too late—to halt the Nazi death machine.

A half century after the White House meeting, Karski told interviewer Hannah Rosen that his visit did not have an effect on the President. In contrast, John Pehle, later head of the War Refugee Board, claimed that the interview led ultimately to the creation of that humanitarian organization.

What makes both men’s statements tenable is FDR’s way of dealing with people. He was used to charming everyone, thinking it would do no harm in telling someone exactly what he or she wanted to hear. He told his longtime friend (and Secretary of the Treasury) Henry Morgenthau Jr. that he was a juggler and that, even if he seemed inconsistent, he was willing to mislead in order to win the war. At the same time, as Michael Beschloss noted in his superb history, The Conquerors, the war was already so straining his capacity to keep multiple balls in the air that he could sometimes not recall having committed to a particular course of action.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the charge brayed most consistently by FDR’s vociferous GOP critics—that Eastern Europe fell under Soviet sway because of the President’s concessions at Yalta—has lost its potency. And, as The Wall Street Journal reported this past weekend, the regulatory systems he engineered, which had been systematically stripped away beginning with the Reagan Revolution, are coming back with a vengeance now because of the current distress in the financial and housing industries.

But over time, the question of FDR’s passivity in the face of the Holocaust has gained greater potency. It threatens one of the most enduring parts of his legend and legacy: that he was, to borrow the subtitle of the James MacGregor Burns biography, “The Soldier of Freedom.”

In moving America away from isolationism, Roosevelt took a number of huge risks that could have gotten him impeached, including an undeclared shooting war in the North Atlantic. But one wishes he could have gambled once more and acted faster, when it would have counted, to save more of Europe’s Jews from the gas chambers.