During world war ii, the Nazis and their collaborators shot, gassed, starved, and worked to death some six million Jewish men, women, and children in order to destroy the biological substance of the Jews. They perpetrated what remains to date the only systematic effort by a modern state to exterminate an entire people across all national frontiers.

Upon gaining power in 1933, Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis targeted for persecution alleged blood enemies of the German race. Yet before the war Nazi oppression of German Jews followed a jagged trajectory. Some Nazi activists physically assaulted Jews in the early...

At the age of eighty-six, four months before her death, Mrs. Roosevelt traveled to Toronto, Canada, to address a Jewish women’s group. Three years earlier, the Jewish Forum had awarded her the Einstein Medal for lifetime humanitarian service to the Jewish people. This Mrs. Roosevelt was not Franklin’s wife Eleanor, who became renowned for her human rights advocacy. Rather, it was Franklin’s mother, the Grand Dame Sara Delano Roosevelt, who died in 1941, just four years before her son.

In the warm and nurturing home of Sara and his father James Sr., at Hyde Park, ninety miles north of New...

A partly paralyzed FDR eased back into New York politics by endorsing Al Smith for governor in 1922. Smith had lost his governorship in the Republican landslide of 1920 and faced stiff Democratic opposition from publisher William Randolph Hearst. In a nifty maneuver, FDR also backed for senator Dr. Royal S. Copeland, the author of a medical column for the Hearst newspaper syndicate. Both Smith and Copeland won the Democratic nomination and the general election. Still, Hearst never quite forgave Roosevelt for backing Smith.

In the midterm elections of 1922, the Democratic Party gained an extraordinary seventy-four House seats and...

After fdr’s nomination for president in 1932, some Democratic politicians, like Louis Howe in 1928, advised him to use his disability as cover for avoiding a political challenge. Convinced that Roosevelt could lose to Herbert Hoover only with a colossal blunder on the stump or a physical collapse, they argued that his health justified conducting an oldstyle “front-porch” campaign in Hyde Park. Roosevelt firmly rejected such advice. “I have suggested to Governor Roosevelt the dangers attending around the country public speaking,” wrote Democratic senator Key Pittman of Nevada. But “he does not feel the dangers.”¹

Not for the first or...

On april 7, 1933, the Nazi government enacted a measure that allowed it to remove Jews and political opponents from civil service jobs. The usually cautious Cyrus Adler, dean of American Jewish leaders, wrote, “The best thing that can happen for the Jews of Germany if at all possible would be to take every last one of them out…. The situation in Germany is indescribably bad.” A month later, after visiting Germany and learning of sporadic violence against Jews, prominent Jewish fundraiser Rabbi Jonah B. Wise (no relation to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise) called the long-term situation of German Jews...

The year 1934 began auspiciously for FDR with a sparkling fifty-second birthday celebration in January. Some 5,000 guests joined him on his birthday at New York City’s posh Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Fifty-two young women clad in white satin carried candles and formed themselves into the shape of a giant birthday cake to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” More than 300,000 birthday greetings poured into the White House, while Americans of every class, race, religion, and political affiliation attended some 6,000 parties across the land. The celebrations raised more than $1 million, not for FDR’s Democratic Party, but for his Warm Springs...

Fdr’s new deal programs softened the rough edges of capitalism, a historic achievement that nearly all American Jewish leaders applauded. Still, despite a 60 percent mandate in the 1936 election and expansive Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, FDR could not necessarily bend Congress to his will. In 1937, Roosevelt sought to protect his New Deal reforms from the Supreme Court with a plan to appoint additional justices, but the Senate decisively rejected his “court-packing” proposal. This battle divided the Democratic majority, reopened criticism of his alleged dictatorial ambitions, and breathed life into a moribund Republican opposition at...

In seeking destinations for Jewish refugees, FDR had reason to look southward. Most Latin American countries had expanses of undeveloped land, and shortages of both investment capital and skilled professionals. Many thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe had migrated to Argentina and Brazil during the 1920s, after the United States had imposed its immigration quotas. Just before the Great Depression, Peru had offered land for the settlement of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

On immigration issues, Latin America posed both promise and contradictions. Latin countries shared in the Western world’s nativist and anti-Semitic currents of the times, and the Great...

On march 15, 1939, Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia, encouraging Slovak politicians to secede and set up a Nazi satellite state. Adolf Hitler had wiped out the once formidable nation of Czechoslovakia. Angry about unopposed Nazi aggression, FDR warned fellow Democrat Tom Connally, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that invoking the Neutrality Act in case of another German invasion would turn America into Hitler’s tacit ally. On March 17, the United States condemned the destruction of Czechoslovakia and reimposed import duties on subsidized German goods. On March 20, Democratic senator Key Pittman, chair of the Senate Foreign...

During wars, americans often feared subversion by aliens. Even before the United States formally entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson had decried those immigrants who allegedly “have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. … They are not many but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once.” FDR had personally experienced this fear of an alien threat while serving in 1917 as assistant secretary of the navy. Informed of a possible German plot against him, the thirty-five-year-old Roosevelt began to carry a revolver. His...

In early 1941, Theodore N. Kaufman, the Jewish proprietor of a small advertising firm in Newark, New Jersey, self-published a short book that called for sterilizing all German men and dividing up Germany among neighboring states. An alert corps of Nazi propagandists saw in Kaufman and his book the perfect foil for their myth-making. They transformed this obscure self-publisher into the president of a bogus “American Peace Federation,” a leader of “international Jewry,” and a “close associate” of Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s speechwriter and confidant. On July 24, 1941, the headline of a front-page story in the central Nazi Party...

After revealing nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise told the press that FDR had offered American and Allied assistance to these imperiled people. He quoted FDR as saying that the United Nations were prepared to take every step “which will end these serious crimes against the Jews and against all other civilian populations of the Hitler-ruled countries and to save those who may yet be saved.” Roosevelt had made no such statement at his meeting with Jewish representatives, according to surviving notes, but the president had given Jewish leaders latitude to speak for him....

In late november 1943, en route to a conference of Allied leaders in Tehran, Iran, FDR flew in an army transport plane over parts of Palestine. The president recorded his impressions in a rare personal diary that he kept during the trip: “On Saturday we passed over Bethlehem and Jerusalem & the Dead Sea—everything very bare looking—& I don’t want Palestine as my homeland.” FDR understood that many Jews looked upon this barren desert as the promised land of their people, and, potentially, the only place where Jews could control their destiny and welcome their own without restriction. However, Britain,...

In late june 1944, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter labeled FDR “the twentieth century Moses.” The Nazi journalists noted that Roosevelt had just returned from his vacation on the estate of “the Jew Baruch” and that he had surrounded himself with Jews who were plotting to reelect “their president.” Nazi propagandists pointed to the new War Refugee Board as the latest evidence of Roosevelt’s dependence on Jews and his commitment to a “Jewish war.” They hoped that such propaganda would weaken the Allied cause or help defeat FDR in November.¹

Administration officials had long been sensitive to the charge, however...

On june 6, 1944 (D-Day), Hungarian prime minister Döme Sztójay met with Adolf Hitler to convey a request from Regent Miklós Horthy: now that Hungary had a stable government, Germany should restore full Hungarian sovereignty by withdrawing its troops. Hitler made it plain that German troops would not leave Hungary until the “Jewish Question” there was fully resolved.¹

The Nazis followed a dual strategy in Hungary. They regularly deported Jews from Hungary, while simultaneously trying to exploit Allied concerns for these victims. Two Hungarians carried to Istanbul an intriguing but suspicious offer to the West on behalf of Nazi officials;...

Suffering from an enlarged heart and high blood pressure, FDR felt and looked weary in the fall of 1944. Still, he believed it was his duty to remain commander in chief, if the American people willed it, until the war ended. He also apparently harbored the dream of solving the conundrum of Palestine.¹

Some Republicans saw the 1944 presidential campaign as a crusade against FDR’s allegedly dictatorial government and dangerous left-wing policies. “We must beat the 4th Term. It is the ‘last round-up’ for the American way of life,” said the influential senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. The Republicans nominated...

Fdr was neither a hero of the Jews nor a bystander to the Nazis’ persecution and then annihilation of Jews. No simple or monolithic characterization of this complex president fits the historical record. FDR could not fully meet all competing priorities as he led the nation through its worst economic depression and most challenging foreign war. He had to make difficult and painful trade-offs, and he adapted over time to shifting circumstances. His compromises might seem flawed in the light of what later generations have learned about the depth and significance of the Holocaust, a term that first came into...