by Jay Winik
There would be, Roosevelt promised, swift punishment of the Nazis. “It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished.” Nor was he simply warning the Nazis; he was warning the satellite countries as well. “All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland . . . are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.” He reached out to the German people to separate themselves from Hitler’s “insane criminal desires.” He exhorted those under Nazi rule to hide Hitler’s victims and to “record the evidence, to convict the guilty.” And he maintained that the United Nations would “find havens of refuge for them,” until the tyrant Hitler was driven “from their homelands.”
The statement was electrifying. Suddenly the Final Solution was receiving the treatment it had long merited. There was a front-page headline in the New York Times: “Roosevelt Warns Germans on Jews; Says All Guilty Must Pay for Atrocities and Asks People to Assist Refugees.” In the days that followed, Roosevelt’s statement was translated into numerous languages throughout the Continent. It was broadcast many times by the BBC, as well as by numerous underground channels. Neutral radio stations quickly followed their lead. It was widely read behind enemy lines, and was even printed by many publications in the Nazis’ satellite nations. Perhaps most important, the WRB saw to it that Budapest was blanketed with the statement: many thousands of leaflets were dropped by air over Hungary.
The board also arranged for air drops warning that war crimes would be prosecuted. At the same time, the WRB enlisted the eminent Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman—Spellman was a confidant of Roosevelt’s as well as his liaison to Pope Pius XII—to record a radio broadcast instructing Hungarian Catholics that persecution of the Jews was an explicit violation of church doctrine.
And three days later, hoping to give Hungary further pause, Roosevelt again warned that “Hungary’s fate will not be like that of any other civilized nation—unless the deportations are stopped.” To add bite to Roosevelt’s words, the WRB prodded General Eisenhower to make his own statement, to be disseminated in June, after the Normandy invasion. Roosevelt quickly approved the WRB’s warning to the Nazis not to harm innocents (“whether they were Jewish or otherwise”). Eisenhower slightly watered down his statement, but still, his injunction was as direct as the president’s.
“Germans! You have in your midst a great many men in concentration camps and forced labor battalions.
“Germans! Do not obey any orders, regardless of their source, urging you to molest, harm or persecute them, no matter what their religion or nationality may be.
“The Allies, whose armies already established a firm foothold in Germany, expect, on their advance, to find these people alive and unharmed. Heavy punishment awaits those who . . . bear any responsibility for the mistreatment of these people.
“May this serve as a warning to whoever at present has the power to issue orders.”
MEANWHILE, IN TERROR AND anticipation, the Jews of Hungary waited. They waited, listening to the pitched whistles as the cattle cars rolled out. They waited for the Allied armies to save them. Hearing whispers of distant liberations, they waited for the Soviets to free them. Had they known, they would have also waited for those who were trying to rouse the world into action: the German industrialist Eduard Schulte; the Swiss humanist Gerhard Riegner; the activist Rabbi Stephen Wise; the Palestinian agitator Peter Bergson; the Polish agent Jan Karski; the escapees from Auschwitz, Vrba and Wetzler; the cabinet secretary Henry Morgenthau and his assistant John Pehle; the WRB; the archbishop of Canterbury; and the Polish underground. They waited for the bombers to fly overhead and the GIs to advance on the ground; and for the Axis satellites to seethe with discontent and for the Nazi regime to collapse. They waited for the camps to be bombed into submission. And most of all, they waited for the remarkable president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to come to their aid.
In the late spring of 1944, hundreds of thousands of Jews, the last remnants of a cornerstone of European civilization, hoped that the waiting would soon be over.
They did not have much time.
THUS WOULD BEGIN ONE of the most momentous decisions of Roosevelt’s presidency, and of the war. While American, British, and Canadian GIs were rushing onto the beaches of Normandy and punching through the German defenses, the fateful question arose: should the Allies bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, or even Auschwitz itself?
ON MAY 10, 1944, several weeks after the United Press reported that 300,000 Hungarian Jews had been forced into assembly camps, the New York Times published one of its most stunning reports, a wire from Istanbul headlined “Jews in Hungary Fear Annihilation.” Joseph Levy wrote, “Although it may sound unbelievable, it is a fact that Hungary, where Jewish citizens were comparatively well treated until March 19, is now preparing for the annihilation of Hungarian Jews by the most fiendish methods. Laughing at President Roosevelt’s warnings, Premier Doeme Sztojay’s puppet Nazi government is completing plans and is about to start the extermination of about 1 million human beings who believed they were safe because they have faith in Hungarian fairness.”
The article went on to quote a neutral diplomat who was lamenting “the most abominable crimes” being perpetrated. Despite his affection for Hungary, he all but called for “Allied bombings of Budapest” to put an end to the barbarism.
A few days later, the Times published another report, this time that the first group of Jews had been removed from the Hungarian countryside to “murder camps in Poland.”
Roosevelt’s reaction? Although the president had just returned from a month’s rest in South Carolina, he was still exhausted and ailing. His voice had lost its fire; his aides could sometimes hardly hear him. The following morning the New York Times, under the headline “Roosevelt Is Reported Avoiding ‘Killing Pace,’ ” said that the president’s physician, Ross McIntire, believed Roosevelt would need to continue “to take it a little easier than usual.”
For now, that meant it would fall to others in the administration to wrestle with the issue of Auschwitz.
ON JUNE 2, 1944, four days before D-Day, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote to Franklin Roosevelt about what he deemed “an urgent necessity.” The question was the internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, who nearly two and half years before had been forcibly removed from the West Coast to ten “relocation camps”—Roosevelt himself actually referred to these facilities as “concentration camps.” They were in remote places, and they were primitive at best: there were outhouses rather than basic sewer facilities, and as many as twenty-five people lived in a space designed for four. At the desert camps, summer temperatures reached 115 degrees; in the winter, the temperature plummeted to 35 degrees below zero. And every camp was surrounded by rows of barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.
Ickes now enumerated his arguments: that there was no justification for the continued internment; that the ban on Japanese Americans living on the West Coast was clearly unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court was likely to decide later in the year; that it was hindering efforts to have American POWs better treated by the Japanese; and that the entire process was psychologically damaging to the Japanese Americans. Ickes even wrote, “The continued retention of these innocent people in the relocation centers would be a blot upon the history of this country.”
And it was not just Ickes who was alarmed. Eleanor Roosevelt had long been pressing her husband to close the camps and begin a program of educating Americans about the tenets of democracy. Now, she joined with Ickes in asking Roosevelt to rescind Executive Order 9066, signed in February 1942, which established the camps and the internment system. The president took his time in responding. On June 12, he made his decision. The camps would remain open for now, and “the whole problem for the sake of internal quiet should be handled gradually.” In other words, for the moment, the order would st
and.
No one was more relieved by the decision than Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, known as “the department’s point man for domestic security.” After his own trip to the White House on June 12 to discuss a proposal to return a “substantial number” of Japanese Americans to California, he reported back to the West Coast military commander, “I just came from the President a little while ago. He put thumbs down on this scheme. He was surrounded at the moment by his political advisors and they were harping hard that this would stir up the boys in California and California, I guess, is an important state.” After all, 1944 was an election year, and like the Jewish question, this could prove to be a damaging embarrassment.
The roots of the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans could be discerned well before the strike on Pearl Harbor, and indeed in the very man to whom Roosevelt gave the job: John Jay McCloy. In some ways, McCloy’s life was similar to Roosevelt’s. Both lost their fathers at a young age to heart disease; both had strong-willed mothers. But where Roosevelt avoided practicing the law, McCloy immersed himself in it, rising through the ranks of one of New York’s top firms. And there were other key differences. When heart disease largely incapacitated Roosevelt’s father, young Franklin had no material worries or wants; his financial well-being was secure. By contrast, when John McCloy Sr. suffered a fatal heart attack, there was no income; there was not even any life insurance to fall back upon, because McCloy’s employer, PennMutual Insurance, would not write a policy for its own supervisor of applications and death claims.
When McCloy was twelve, his mother sent him to a boarding school, Peddie, in Hightstown, New Jersey, which educated the sons of men in the “middle ground” in the industrial and economic world. At Peddie, McCloy discovered an affinity for tennis, earned high marks, and gained admission to Amherst College in Massachusetts, in the western Berkshires. Afterward, he applied to Harvard and was accepted for the fall of 1916.
During World War I, McCloy was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and was shipped off to Plattsburgh. He specialized in field artillery and was first sent to Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont. There he caught the eye of Brigadier General Guy Preston. But despite General Preston’s urging, McCloy declined a career in the military and returned to Harvard Law School. After failing to gain a top slot in a Philadelphia firm, he made his way to Wall Street, eventually settling at the firm of Cravath, Henderson, and de Gersdorff.
There, he worked on corporate reorganizations and securities issues, for which he traveled across Europe. The following year, he married the sister-in-law of an influential New York congressman. Cravath sent McCloy to open an office in Paris, where he received a legal assignment at the international court at The Hague. The defendant, Bethlehem Steel, a Cravath client, claimed that a 1916 explosion in New York harbor, which had destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of Bethlehem munitions, had actually been the work of German secret agents. To McCloy, the case read like a spy thriller, and he was hooked.
McCloy spent the better part of the 1930s pursuing the alleged German saboteurs across Europe, at some times even tailing them with his wife. The case was finally resolved in favor of McCloy’s client by the Supreme Court in 1941. Yet the effects of the episode lingered long after. It made McCloy exceedingly conscious of any alleged subversive activities, and it also made him very sensitive to the concept of a “fifth column,” the term used for domestic disloyalty—here, his views were much like Breckinridge Long’s. When he joined the War Department, he was quickly promoted to an assistant secretary of war.
As German troops marched across Europe, McCloy was, in the words of his biographer Kai Bird, “obsessed” with sabotage: “Throughout early 1941, he was forever passing on to army intelligence rumors about various suspected saboteurs and their possible connection to a rash of strikes on American defense factories.” By November 1941, when he was reading army reports that claimed the Japanese had “a well-developed espionage network along the Pacific Coast,” McCloy, in Bird’s phrase, “did not doubt it.”
The sneak attack at Pearl Harbor stoked McCloy’s deepest fears. The day after the bombing, McCloy called Stimson at home to deliver the report that “an enemy fleet was thought to be approaching San Francisco.” It was quickly found to be a false alarm. But the belief spread that Japanese agents had infiltrated Hawaii and the West Coast. Nearly 1,400 Japanese aliens were detained in the first five days after the assault, and newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times breathlessly reported the likelihood of Japanese raids along the West Coast. By January, a congressman from Los Angeles was demanding that all Japanese be “placed in inland concentration camps.” Compared with German Americans and Italian Americans, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were a small minority, only about 120,000, and two thirds had been born in the United States. But that made them a more manageable target, and their concentration on the West Coast served to heighten their visibility.
The uneasiness approached hysteria after the release of the Roberts Commission Report on January 24, 1942. Charged with investigating the Pearl Harbor attack, the commission concluded that the Japanese strike force had been aided by espionage agents based in Hawaii. The commission offered no substantiating documentation, but the allegation was enough. The army’s general in the region, John DeWitt, began speaking of the Japanese as “an enemy race.”
But there were dissenters—influential ones. In Washington, no less than the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover sharply objected; in his view, the claims made by army intelligence showed signs of “hysteria and lack of judgment.”
On February 1, 1942, the two sides—for and against removal of the Japanese—met in Washington, D.C. The attorney general and Hoover argued strenuously against internment. The military argued for it. And sitting quietly in the room, as the civilian representative for the War Department, was John J. McCloy.
Finally, as the back-and-forth continued, McCloy interrupted the attorney general, saying, “If it is a question of safety of the country, [or] the Constitution of the United States, why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
So it was. Over the next few days, General DeWitt kept pressing, saying that he believed Japanese spies on the mainland were in regular communication with Japanese submarines off the coast. For McCloy, this was a strong incentive. He now began to look for a way to remove Japanese citizens, in mass evacuations, from their homes and communities up and down the West Coast.
On February 11, at McCloy’s urging, Secretary of War Stimson contacted Roosevelt about the evacuation plan. Stimson laid out his arguments, and Roosevelt readily agreed. As McCloy put it, “We have carte blanche to do what we want as far as the president is concerned.”
Once more, there was a range of opinion. Not every military officer agreed. For one, General Mark Clark, the army’s deputy chief of staff, strongly objected. Naval intelligence’s leading specialist on Japan, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth D. Ringle, estimated that less than 3 percent (only about 3,500 individuals) actually represented a threat—and most of them were already in custody. And there were questions about whether Roosevelt had truly assented on his own to the evacuation scheme, or merely turned the decision over to Stimson. But what is clear is that the president, as commander in chief, left the final call up to the judgment of his War Department, and the military men and their civilian bosses had decided yes. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, without regret. “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” wrote Attorney General Francis Biddle.
Executive Order 9066 authorized the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas from which any and all persons might be excluded” and gave the War Department the power to determine the “right of any person to enter, remain, or leave” those areas. The next step was to round up the Japanese Americans. Forced from their homes, forced to sell their goods and their land, they lost over $400 million in property—well over $5 billion in today’s dollars. The evacuations were
based on location, but also on descent. Somewhat reminiscent of the early debate in Germany about the Jews, initially any Japanese American with as little as one sixteenth Japanese ancestry was to be subject to the evacuation orders, but that was later amended to exempt anyone with less than one half Japanese ancestry and a Caucasian background. Thus tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were now trapped at assembly centers; at one such center, the Santa Anita racetrack, they were housed in horse stables and surrounded by guard towers and searchlights.
By the end of 1942, over 100,000 Japanese had been formally interned across the west in tarpaper barracks, with schools, communal kitchens, churches, and recreation centers. The original man in charge of the project, Milton Eisenhower, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s younger brother, quit after three months. He told his successor to take the job, “if you can do it and sleep at night”; he himself could not. Yet McCloy remained dogged in his efforts to keep the West Coast Japanese Americans contained inside barbed wire; in a loose sense, what Long was to the Jews he was now to the Japanese Americans. And initially almost no one in Washington voiced any opposition.
For the Japanese Americans inside the camps, the conditions were often brutal. At Tule Lake, in California, half a dozen tanks patrolled the perimeter, a barbed-wire stockade surrounded the camp, and the armed guards were a full battalion strong, with machine guns. “No federal penitentiary so treats its adult prisoners,” an indignant Chief Judge William Denman of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote later. “Here were the children and babies as well.”
By late 1943, as concern about European Jewry mounted, there were renewed fears in official Washington about the continuing internment, and challenges to its constitutionality were making their way toward the Supreme Court. The debate mounted. Reviewing the overall issue, Attorney General Biddle insisted to Roosevelt that the “concentration camps” went against every tenet of democratic government. Henry Stimson also told Roosevelt, in May 1944, that there was no military reason for keeping faithful Japanese Americans prisoners. And Harold Ickes and Eleanor Roosevelt made their requests for release by early June. But Roosevelt, faced with a choice between reason and politics, chose politics: the 1944 election trumped all other concerns. And in the worst sort of pandering, the administration was afraid of losing the critical California vote if the Japanese were released. (Actually, the New York vote was far more important.) McCloy, for his part, was worried that if Roosevelt lost, Stalin would make a separate peace with the Germans, so he made it his job to keep the internment issue under wraps until the late fall.
