Holocaust Scholars Demand Revision of FDR Museum Display

Several prominent Holocaust scholars are demanding that the federally funded Franklin D. Roosevelt Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., revise a display caption that they claim downplays the 32nd president’s complicity in the slaughter of six million Jews.The caption acknowledges “stains on the American record” and mentions the country’s failure to open its borders to refugees fleeing Nazism. But in a sentence that has sparked an uproar from historians, the caption continues: “Yet even Roosevelt’s bitterest critics concede that nothing he could have done – including bombing the rails leading to Auschwitz in 1944 – would have saved significant numbers from annihilation, let alone dissuaded the Nazis from doing what they were so intent on doing.”The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies plans to release a petition later this week calling on the museum to edit the caption. As of last evening,18 scholars in America, Bosnia, Canada, and Israel had signed on, including a Harvard professor who is also the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power.Mr. Wyman, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has devoted much of his career to exposing the Roosevelt administration’s passivity in the face of Nazi genocide. The petition was prompted by an e-mail exhange between the New York Sun and the Wyman Institute’s director, Rafael Medoff.The display at Hyde Park, the site of the Roosevelt family estate, also features a Torah scroll that was rescued from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and was presented to Roosevelt in 1939.“This caption is unbearable. It lacks all shame,” the former project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Michael Berenbaum, said in a phone interview from Poland.The caption and exhibit, designed by staff members at the FDR Presidential Library, have been in place since May 1994, according to the museum’s curator, Herman Eberhardt. Officials at the museum and the library did not return phone calls seeking comment, but Mr. Eberhardt told the Sun in an e-mail message that “plans currently call for the FDR Museum to undergo a complete renovation – including the revision and updating of all exhibits to meet standards of current scholarship.”The museum, which first opened in 1941 during FDR’s third term in office, is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, a federal agency.According to a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Marvin Kalb, “even a less-than-serious review of World War II history would show that the allies could have disrupted rail lines into Auschwitz and thereby damaged Hitler’s killing machine.”American planes stationed in Italy could have executed missions to disrupt the death camp’s operation in late spring 1944, Mr. Berenbaum said. At the time, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, opposed the aerial assault on the death camps, but by July 1944 – as specific information regarding the extent of the atrocities at Auschwitz reached the Jewish Agency – prominent Zionists urged the Allied governments to go forward with a bombing campaign.Even before 1944, Roosevelt could have acted to rescue many European Jews from Hitler’s grasp, according to an emeritus professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Robert Michael. Instead, in 1939, the president opposed the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have allowed 20,000 German refugee children to enter America. And in 1940, the president appointed the notoriously anti-Semitic Missouri politician Breckinridge Long as assistant secretary of state. Long used the post to deny entry visas to Jews.The Wyman Institute petition charges that the State Department’s restrictive immigration policy “had the full knowledge and approval of President Roosevelt himself throughout the Holocaust years.”However, an emeritus professor of history at Pennsylvania’s Millersville University, Jack Fischel, said that anti-Semitic and isolationist sentiment on the home front would have prevented Roosevelt from opening America’s borders to refugees.A professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Toronto, Michael Marrus, said that an aerial attack on the rail lines leading to Auschwitz would have been largely symbolic, since the bulk of the Eastern European Jewish population had already been exterminated by mid-1944. “This controversy is a tempest in the teapot,” Mr. Marrus said.

Holocaust Scholars Demand Revision of FDR Museum Display

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