FINNS ON OFFENSIVE, RAID ENEMY BASES (12/6/39)

Microfiche-New York Times archives, McHenry Library, U.C. Santa Cruz | 12/6/39

[samtheman]

I am truly interested in the question and thanks for the recommendation.

[samtheman]

From the review of the book on Amazon (from Publisher's Weekly):

Although Rosen is able to debunk some of the more overheated claims put forth four decades ago by Arthur Morse in While Six Million Died, his often simplistic arguments don't undo landmark works like David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews.

[BroJoeK]

"his often simplistic arguments don't undo landmark works like David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews."

Rosen's case is that Roosevelt did as much as he legally and militarily could have done. Also, that he actually did more than usually given credit for.

That Jews suffered terribly is not in dispute. Of Europe's pre-war nine million Jews, only three million survived the Holocaust. But this leads to some interesting historical questions:

• How DID those three million survive -- how many escaped, how many hid out, how many were protected and by whom, how many survived in concentration camps, etc.?

• How many MIGHT have been saved IF various leaders -- i.e., Roosevelt, Churchill, the Pope -- had behaved differently? For example, suppose Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to bomb Auschwitz -- how many more Jews would have lived?

I don't know the answers, but do know that Roosevelt's war-time policy was: the best way to save Jews is to defeat the Nazis, and that's what he did.