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Michael Beschloss
Presidential Historian; Author, The Conqueros
In the spring of 1945 there was a Gallup poll that asked Americans, Even though we have won World War II against Germany, do you think that we will one day in our lifetimes have to fight another war against Germany under some future version of Adolf Hitler? The answer was yes, by about 70 percent. Americans felt that even though the war had been won, there was something in the German bloodstream that made them want to do this over and over and over again.
That view was very much shared by Franklin Roosevelt in private - that there was something almost in the German DNA that led to world war - so much so that at one point he said, "I think this war virus in the Germans is so deep that maybe at the end of the war we'll have to castrate the German men so that they won't keep on reproducing people who want to make war." I don't think he meant it literally, but it shows how deeply he felt that this was going to be a persistent problem.
In 1943, when Roosevelt met with Churchill and Stalin at Tehran, Stalin said, "Well, I think what we should do is after the war is won, just murder the top 50,000 German military officers." He had done that with millions more Russians and Ukrainians and others already. Roosevelt, who was trying to butter up Stalin to make sure the Red Army stayed in the war, said, "Uncle Joe, I think that's a little bit harsh. Why don't we compromise at 49,500?" Churchill hears this and is disgusted and storms out of the room and says, "You know, we're fighting this war against exactly things like this." And Uncle Joe grabs Winston and says, "Winston, I was only kidding." Of course he wasn't kidding at all. That was the way that Stalin did things.
But the point is that this was the diamond in the chandelier of World War II against Germany. Which was, Yes you win the war, but what happens next? The answer Roosevelt had was unconditional surrender. In retrospect, we now know that we Americans and the Brits, under Roosevelt and Churchill, fought the war against Hitler to absolute victory. But what we don’t know as well is that Roosevelt was virtually the only one in his administration who thought that that was a good idea. Almost everyone else said it’s going to extend the war possibly by years. Churchill thought it was terrible idea because he knew more British lives would be lost. But FDR insisted all the way through, against the opposition of Churchill and others, the only way to make sure that – unlike World War I – World War II resulted in eliminating the menace of Germany from the world was to defeat Hitler totally, march to Berlin, occupy the place and finally try to make Germany into a democracy. Years later, now that Germany is a democracy, that owes a lot to the fact that Franklin Roosevelt had that kind of foresight. Had he listened to others, and had we fought that war to something less than absolute victory, we and our children today might be facing the danger of having to fight against another Germany under some future dictator that wanted to make war against the rest of the world. That’s sort of the dog that didn’t bark, and that’s the greatness of Roosevelt in World War II.
At the same time, there was a side of Roosevelt that I think is not so great. In 1942 he began getting pretty specific information about the Holocaust – which is a word that we now know, but that was not used at the time – that Hitler was trying to do something unprecedented: remove an entire people, the Jewish people, from the face of the earth. And through 1942 and 1943 and into 1944, people would come to him, Jewish leaders and others, and say, Mr. President, reveal what you know, give a speech saying, "This is what we Allies are fighting against Germany to eliminate, and when we win the war the first people to be punished in post-war Germany are going to be the Nazis who are involved in this monstrous crime" – with the idea that that might deter them and stop some of the killing. There were other pleas to bomb the death camps and rail lines. Roosevelt refused, refused to relax immigration quotas, admit Jewish refugees, to seriously entertain using our military to try to stop the killing directly. In 1944, when there were a lot of suggestions to stop the killing by bombing the death camps and/or the rail lines, it was something that he sort of flicked from his lapel like a fly. It was not important to him and he didn’t give it the kind of consideration a president should for a matter that grave and decision that important.
What changed that somewhat was Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was his best friend in the government. He was a Hudson Valley neighbor of FDR. Morgenthau was Jewish – only the second Jew in history to be in a presidential cabinet – but he was so unobservant of his religion that he had never attended a Passover seder. His children, when asked their religion, were told to say they were Americans. He treasured his relationship with Roosevelt to the point that he never wanted to do anything to offend him. He said, "Franklin always made me feel so insecure that I never felt that I would have my job the next day." That was absolutely right, and Roosevelt loved to keep people off balance; he could control them that way. One sign of this was that Morgenthau was secretary of the treasury for 12 years and never felt secure enough to buy a house in Washington, and kept on moving from one rented furnished house to another because he thought that FDR would can him the next day. He was, by nature, not inclined to bring Jewish matters to the president and he did not think of himself very much in ethnic terms. In case he did, there was something that always stuck in his mind: Shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1942 Morgenthau was having lunch with Roosevelt along with a Catholic official named Leo Crowley, and Roosevelt said to them, You guys have to remember that America is a Protestant country and you Jews and Catholics are here under sufferance, so you have to do everything that I ask you to do. Morgenthau, who adored Roosevelt, nevertheless went back to his office and almost put his fist into his forehead saying, What the hell am I working so hard for if America is not for me? It did not exactly encourage him to bring matters like Jewish refugees into the president’s office.
In 1943, Morgenthau was told by Rabbi Stephen Wise a lot of the evidence that was coming out of Europe, showing what the Nazis were doing to the Jews and others. Wise said to Morgenthau, Do you know that they’re making lampshades of the skins of the Jews? Morgenthau almost fainted. From that moment on he became a very different person. He was no longer timid. He was so scandalized by what he heard that he resolved, even if it cost him his treasured friendship with FDR, he was going to tell the president that this inaction had to stop. He marched into the Oval Office, January 1944, under his arm the "Report on the Acquiescence of the American Government in the Murder of the Jews." He told Roosevelt that his government was obstructing in the entrance of refugees and therefore hundreds of thousands of people were being killed as a result, and also that there were other efforts to block consideration of using the Pentagon to try to stop the killing directly. The argument that sank home with Roosevelt was, You might not want to do any of this, but you should know one thing and that is, if you don’t, there’s going to be a political scandal because members of Congress now know about this. There are likely to be hearings and if that happens you’re likely to lose the Jewish vote in 1944 – which Roosevelt had won by roughly 90 percent in the previous three elections. In a fairly close election with Thomas Dewey, who had excellent relations with Jews as the governor of New York in 1944, Roosevelt knew that this might cost him the election. Only when Morgenthau framed it in political terms did FDR begin to move.
What does this tell you about FDR? In Roosevelt’s case I think you always have to begin by saying, This is the president that we have to honor for winning World War II. If it were not for Roosevelt’s courage in the late 1930s – despite isolationism, going to the American people and saying we may have to fi ght a war against Hitler and therefore we have to prepare our defense even if it made him unpopular – had he not done that we would have been unprepared to fight against Hitler and we would have lost the war. Yet he’s confronted with very clear evidence of what we now call the Holocaust. Churchill got the same evidence and his reaction was almost the opposite. He instantly knew what this meant. He said, This is the most monstrous crime in human history, and he immediately ordered his air force to see if anything could be done to stop the killing in the death camps. There was a strange disconnect in FDR where he really just did not get it.
Roosevelt gave a speech in 1936 saying that God weighs the sins of the warm hearted and the cold blooded in different scales. I hate to call FDR cold blooded, but this is someone who, in the end, made political decisions in rather icy terms. There was an upside to that. In 1942, when America looked as if it was in danger of losing World War II, he was so ice blooded that he was able to keep his cool and maintain his self-confi dence, and that was a big weapon in the war effort.
Morgenthau had been so radicalized by what he had learned and so shocked that he’d begun to worry desperately that even if we won the war Germany would come back and do this all over again in World War III. He came up with a secret plan to reduce the Ger-mans, after V-E Day, to the lowest level of subsistence: Bomb factories in Germany, flood the mines, turn Germany into one or more agrarian states. His idea was, This will teach the Germans a lesson and will prevent them from coming back with their industry and building the weapons of war again. Roosevelt adopted the idea for a time in the fall of ’44. Roosevelt goes to see Winston Churchill at Quebec and says, I want you to endorse the Morgenthau Plan; sign on the dotted line. Churchill says, This is terrible, I won’t do it; it will make the Germans more resentful and it will actually create more of a chance for a third world war. This is just the kind of thing that happened throughout this war in private. FDR says, If you do not sign I will cut off all American cash to you after V-E Day. And Churchill says, I think I see virtues in this plan that I didn’t see before; where do I sign? Which he did.
All this had happened in secret, and there were people in Washington, the secretaries of state and war, Stimson and Hull, who were astounded that Roosevelt had done this with Churchill. They thought it was the opposite of what we should do, and they did something that will be very familiar to all of us in 2002. They leaked the secret plan to the newspa-pers. Newspapers were full of Roosevelt blackmailing Churchill into signing this secret plan for post-war Germany. Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist of Hitler, had gotten into the act and he told the German people, This is what awaits you, you’d better fight harder to make sure that the Allies don’t win.
In the fall of 1944 Roosevelt was a very sick man. His medical records have just come open the last two years. He was in terminal cardiac failure; he was told this, he knew it. He was working about two to four hours a day despite the fact that we were at the peak of World War II. This was not known in public. Roosevelt would sign an important document and a day later have no recollection that he had ever signed it. So when the secretaries of state and war went to see FDR and said, How could you and Churchill have signed this Morgenthau Plan up at Quebec? Roosevelt said, I never did such a thing, who gave you this idea? I didn’t do it. They were trying to be polite and they said, Well, Mr. President, I hope you don’t say that to anyone else. They pulled out a photostatic copy of the document he had signed. Roosevelt’s reply: “I have no recollection of ever having seen that document in my life.”
It might have been that he was just lying to cover up the fact that he had done something he was embarrassed by, but I think it is very possibly that this was just another of these incidents that you see increasingly at the end of Roosevelt's life which he really is not the kind of president he had been. In April 1945, with the Allies going into Germany, Roosevelt suddenly dies just at a moment when you have to make a decision: when we conquer Germany, what do you do ? It turns out that the last night of Roosevelt's life he was down at the "Little White House" in Warm Springs. Roosevelt had these adoring ladies who used to sit in the room and basically knit and adore him and not say terribly much else, and this is what he liked while doing his paperwork. He felt he was always harassed by Eleanor; he didn't want to have to argue with her. The closest he had in life to friends were these adoring ladies. One of the things they did was they kept diaries which tell us what went on. And that night they were having dinner with Roosevelt along with his paramour, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, and in comes Henry Morgenthau for dinner. He spent the entire dinner arguing with Morgenthau about what to do with Germany after the war ends. This was very much on his mind, really to the end of his life. The next morning, he was having his portrait painted. We’d known that Roosevelt, just before lunch said, "I have a terrific headache." He has a stroke and pitches forward and shortly thereafter dies.
We now know that it was a little bit more interesting than that. The last act of Roosevelt’s life, it turns out, was this: Just before he pitched forward with his pain in his head, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket and out of the wallet he pulled his draft card into the wastebasket, almost as if he knew that the war was going to end and this was his way of showing , just before he left this earth,that he knew that this struggle that lasted almost five years was just about up. It turns out that he also said something else, while he was being carried to his bedroom just before sinking into a coma. He whispered two words: "Be careful." He probably didn't mean it this way, but if had to have tow last words that were sort of a message to Harry Truman about what you do with a post-war world, be careful us not a bad one. It's a shame that Truman never got it.
Truman came in entirely uniformed by Roosevelt about what he wanted to do in GErmany and almost everything else, and he had to fly by the seat of his pants. Truman, without any preparation, with not a great education, almost consistently made decisions that very few historians years later would have differences with. At the same time, Truman was a complex guy, too. April 1945, when the death camps were liberated and those tragic pictures were on the front pages of every newspaper in America, Truman saw them. He could see these during the day and then at night write things in his diary like, "The Jews think they're God's chosen people, I think God had better judgment." This was just at a time when even American anti-Semites were often saying, How could I have said and done such things when I see these pictures of the death camps and know how these people have suffered? It’s a side of Truman that’s almost impossible to explain.
In summer 1945 Truman went to Potsdam to see Stalin and Churchill in Germany. They had a day off and he went into defeated Berlin. He saw Hitler’s bunker and Hitler’s offices and he saw all these Germans walking around half-starving in rags and tatters. It reminded him of what his Confederate grandmother had told him growing up in Missouri. She said, After the Civil War the Yankees burned our barns and took our horses and it made us so bitter that it really deepened the rift between the North and the South in a way thathurt this country for a long time. So Truman said, As much as I would love to kill a lot of these Nazis and punish them, at the same time the best triumph we can have is to try to get Germany to be a democracy. That required this very difficult two-step which Truman ultimately did fairly well: punish the Nazis, have war-crimes trials, get them out of power in post-war Germany, but at the same time try to get the Germans to like our system. In that he was aided by the Russians. When the Red Army came in they raped upwards of two million German women, in many cases in front of their babies and their brothers and sisters and their parents. There was grave bitterness against the Soviets from the beginning.
How Do You Know We've Really Won?
Dwight Eisenhower was the first military governor of defeated Germany. And when he went in with our armies in 1944 he put up placards all over his part of Germany, in German and English, which said, "We come as conquerors not as oppressors." That’s where the title of my book comes from. But there’s no better summary of the way that we Americans behave in war: you conquer a country like Germany and try to punish the dreadful things they had done, but we know at the same time that if we want to really finally have a triumph over the system under Hitler, the way to do it is to get them to learn democracy. In 1945 Eisenhower said to his staff in Frankfurt, You guys may think that we’ve won World War II against Germany, but we don’t know that yet. The only way we’ll know if we won this war is 50 years from now Germany is a stable and prosperous and peaceful democracy. Then we’ll know that we have won the war.Turn the clock ahead 50 years and that makes it about 1995, just after unified Germany. Germany these days is many things, and it is not a perfect country, but one thing that we do not have to worry about is the specter of a Germany that is going to try to start a third world war under some future Adolf Hitler. For that I think we can thank our American soldiers, and the Americans of the period, and not a little bit Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
