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The Jew Who Defeated Hitler. Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and How We Won The War by Peter Moreira

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.2015.0045

1086-3141

Henry L. Feingold,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

Reviewed by: The Jew Who Defeated Hitler. Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and How We Won The War by Peter Moreira Henry L. Feingold (bio) The Jew Who Defeated Hitler. Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and How We Won The War. By Peter Moreira. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2014. 348pp. Historians sometimes overlook important actors in history. The case of Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, is especially puzzling. The oversight is not caused by a paucity of archival material, as Morgenthau maintained a most complete record of his doings. Almost daily he dictated his aggravations to Henrietta Klutz, his faithful secretary, who also served as his bridge to the Jewish community. After he left office he commissioned noted Yale historian Morton Blum to write his political biography. Blum’s three volumes, on which Moreira draws heavily, took twelve years to complete. Nonetheless, despite two [End Page 381] new books and a TV documentary about the Morgenthau dynasty, his remarkable contribution to the mobilization of American industry to which many trace the ultimate defeat of Germany remains largely unheralded. If indeed World War II was the most costly and impactful event in human history, as Moreira observes, then Morgenthau’s role in readying an unprepared nation for a war should go down in history as the crucial step assuring the ultimate Allied victory. The title of this book suggests that Morgenthau’s remarkable role is related to his Jewishness. He held the highest official position in the Allied camp, with a ringside seat to observe the workings of the “final solution,” and Morgenthau emerged from the war a newly affiliated Jew. His wartime role cannot be fully fathomed without understanding the Jewish-Holocaust nexus which is at the heart of the Morgenthau story. That relationship requires deeper probing than this book offers. Morgenthau was in many ways an unlikely candidate to be the “Jew who defeated Hitler.” Of all the Jews in Roosevelt’s inner circle, the Morgenthaus, who alone maintained social as well as political ties with the Roosevelts, were least communally affiliated. Berlin far more than wartime Washington recognized Morgenthau as a personification of the Jewish enemy. His family did not deny its Jewishness but neither did they carry it proudly like the Schiffs and the Marshalls. The young Morgenthau was never exposed to primary rites that serve as the traditional hallmarks of Jewish identity formation. He celebrated no bar mitzvah and did not attend a Passover Seder until 1945. His father had set the family against the Zionist current when most American Jews viewed a Jewish state as a possible answer to their perennial insecurity. In a sense he became Jewish by conversion as a result of the horrendous historical tragedy to which he bore special witness. That was at the heart of his Carthaginian plan for the postwar treatment of the Reich. In Goebbels’s words, Morgenthau planned to transform Germany into a potato field so that it could never plunge the world into war again. Some, like Republican Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, felt that Christian love rather than Jewish vengeance should shape postwar policy toward the defeated Reich. Others felt that by basing policy on mass rather than individual guilt, Morgenthau was serving ethnic rather than national interests. The plan marked the decline of his remarkable influence with the president. Ultimately the Morgenthau plan was emasculated, and his hope of dismantling Germany’s industrial capacity fell to the Russians, who used the reparations clause of the Yalta agreement to dismantle factories in their zone of occupied Germany. Some researchers conclude that given his high position, Morgenthau did not do enough for the rescue of European Jewry. When he finally [End Page 382] felt compelled to confront Roosevelt, he was strongly pressured by his three non-Jewish assistants who urged him to bring the plans for the War Refugee Board directly to the Oval Office. That meeting held on January 20, 1944, became the highpoint of the American rescue effort. Forgotten is the fact that there were few among the constellation of Jews who dared express an ethnic need in the Oval Office. He was virtually alone in daring to speak out. Paradoxically, even at...