War and Remembrance (126 page)

If all this sounds bitter, remember that I’ve destroyed my career, relinquished
ten years of precious seniority, because I think it’s the truth. What the State Department did at the Bermuda Conference finished me off, though it was probably only a question of time before I’d have quit anyway. The Jewish problem had grown for me into a cancerous obsession, and Breckinridge Long was aggravating my condition to dementia. Now I am
out,
and recovering.

Long drafted me into the Division of European Affairs, as you know, to handle Jewish problems. He was then under very heavy pressure to break the visa logjam facing refugees from Hitler, and also to do something about the Jews being railroaded to extermination. He’s a beset man who has taken to clutching at straws. I guess he wanted one plausible figure in the division with a “pro-Jewish” reputation, who could speak sympathetically to Jews without having any power to help them. And I guess he counted on me, as a good loyal State Department hack, to follow his policies no matter how they went against my grain. The real question is why I accepted the job. The answer is, I don’t know. I suppose I hoped that Long meant what he said, and that I could be a loosening, liberalizing, moderating voice on Jewish matters.

If so, I was self-deceived. From the first, and until I left the Bermuda Conference in mid-session, I ran into a blank wall. On the whole, I now feel sorry for Breckinridge Long. I don’t even regard him as the villain of the piece. He can’t help being what he is. He sent me to Bermuda to be a sort of Gentile Sol Bloom, a support diplomat with demonstrable pro-Jewish sympathies, to be cited at future congressional investigations, if any. My resignation is not going to look very good on the record, but of course I have no interest now in keeping up the State Department façade.

And what a façade it was! How carefully it was stage-managed by our Department and the British Foreign Office to screen out pressure, challenge, and controversy! Newspapermen couldn’t get there. Labor leaders, Jewish leaders, protest marchers — the broad ocean protected the conference from all that. Bermuda was lovely with spring flowers, and we met in charming hotels far from the new military bases, with plenty of time off to swim in the pools and drink the island’s rum concoctions. In the social evenings amid Bermuda’s smart set one could almost forget there was a war on.

Poor Dr. Harold Dodds — the president of Princeton, dragooned for the chairmanship of our delegation — beseeched me to stay on, but by the third day I had had enough. I told him that I was either going to raise the question of the Jews threatened with extermination
(these Jews were a forbidden topic at the conference!)
or I was going to fly back to Washington and resign from the Foreign Service. Dodds was helpless. He couldn’t authorize me to go against the policies that bound him. So I left, and at least I brought away a small shred of my self-respect.

The proceedings of the conference haven’t yet been published. The Department is now frenziedly pleading a need for secrecy “to protect the measures to aid political refugees.” What Messrs. Hull and Long really hope is that interest in the conference will die out, and they’ll never have to come clean. But it will not. The pressure for disclosure will build, and there is going to be a hell of an explosion when the truth is uncovered.

My memorandum will give you an inkling of what really happened at Bermuda. You remember that horrible document I received in the Bern movie theatre, describing the Wannsee Conference? I could not authenticate it, but events have since done so with a vengeance. Unless President Roosevelt acts quickly, history will say that the Jews of Europe were destroyed between the hammer of the Wannsee Conference and the anvil of the Bermuda Conference. The American people under Roosevelt will be blamed, equally with the Germans under Hitler, for the massacre! That is a cruel distortion, but it is exactly what Breck Long is bringing about.

You know President Roosevelt well. I send you this memorandum, to do with what you will. It is a clear and true warning of what impends after Bermuda, not only for the European Jews, but for the historical reputation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and certainly for the postwar moral position of America in the world. Please read it carefully, and consider whether — in any form you choose to revise or amplify it — it should go to the President.

Hurricanes never find people prepared, Bill, and by the time improvised safety measures are taken, the storm has wreaked its worst. The German massacre of the Jews is a hurricane. There has never been anything like it. It is going on behind the smokescreen of a world war, in a rogue nation cut off from civilized society. It could not be happening otherwise. Recognition of it has been slow, measures to deal with it laggard. But all these mitigating facts will be lost in later years. Seen in retrospect, the Bermuda Conference will be perceived as a ruthless, heartless farce, perpetrated by America and England to avoid taking any action while millions of innocent people were being slaughtered.

So long as the responsibility is not taken from Breck Long this distortion will deepen and harden, yet the final disgrace will not rest with him, for he will be a forgotten small man. If the Bermuda Conference remains the Allies’ last word on the Nazi barbarity, Franklin Roosevelt will go down as the great American President who led his country out of depression and into world triumph; but who, with full knowledge of this horrendous massacre, failed the Jews. Don’t let it happen, Bill. Warn the President.

For the sake of my own sanity, with this memorandum I sever my accidental involvement in the most terrible crime in the history of the world. The burden was never mine, except in the sense that it is every man’s. The world so far refuses to shoulder it. I have tried and failed, because I am nobody and powerless. This memorandum written in blood — the Jews’, and mine — is my legacy of the experience.

Sincerely,

Leslie Slote

William Tuttle could readily see in the enclosed memorandum, scrawled on legal-length yellow sheets, the exasperated outpouring of a subordinate quitting his job in anger. The style was hurried, the tone intemperate. That this careful and timorous man had taken a job involving parachutist training sufficiently showed how shaken up he was.

Nevertheless, the memorandum disturbed Tuttle. He had been wondering about the Bermuda Conference. He did not sleep well for a couple of nights, wondering what to do about all this. Breck Long had always seemed to him a sound enough person; a polished self-assured gentleman, very much an insider, a good judge of horseflesh, and all in all anything but a villain.

But Tuttle still resented the recent orders that had come from the State Department to stop transmitting through Department codes the Jewish reports out of Geneva about the exterminations; and he was well aware that all the information he had sent to the Division of European Affairs had vanished into silence. He himself did not like to dwell on the Jewish horror, and he had let the lack of response pass as bureaucratic delay and inattention. But if Long was at the bottom of it, and doing it purposefully, the President perhaps ought to know. How to tell him?

In the end he heavily cut Slote’s memorandum, toning down the bitter diatribes against Breckinridge Long. He sent the typed revision to Washington via the Swiss pouch, with a handwritten covering letter marked
Personal and Urgent, for the President.

August
5, 1943

Dear Mr. President:

The author of the enclosed document served at the Bermuda Conference and resigned from the Foreign Service in protest. He is a Rhodes Scholar who worked with me here in Bern. I found him a man of rare intelligence, always thoroughly reliable.

I hesitate to add to your grave burdens, but a twofold concern compels me to do so: firstly, for the terrible fate of the European Jews; secondly, for your own place in history. This report may help fill in for you a true picture of what happened at the Bermuda Conference, behind the official reports. I am afraid I tend to believe Leslie Slote. With deepest respect and admiration,

Sincerely,

Bill

CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM

The Bermuda Conference: American and British Complicity in the Extermination of the European Jews

Since early 1941 the German government has been engaged in a secret systematic operation to murder Europe’s Jews. This stark fact goes so far beyond all previous human experience that no social machinery exists to cope with it.

Because of the war the German government is an international outlaw, answerable only to the German people. By police state terror the Nazi regime has reduced them to docile compliance in its savage acts. Yet the sad truth is, popular resistance to the Nazi policy against Jewry has been minimal since Hitler took power.

The roots of the massacre lie in a broad and deep German cultural strain, a sort of desperate romantic nationalism, an extreme reaction to the humane liberalism of the West. This body of thought extols a brutish self-glorification of warlike German “Kultur,” and implies, where it does not openly express, virulent anti-Semitism. This is a complex and dark subject. The philosopher Croce traces this uncivilized strain to an event in Roman times, the victory of Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest, which cut off the German tribes from the meliorating influence of Roman law and manners. Whatever the origin, Adolf Hitler’s rise and popularity indicate how that strain persists.

The Bermuda Conference took place because the secret of the massacre leaked out. On December 17, 1942, the governments of the United Nations publicly and jointly warned that its perpetrators would be punished. This official disclosure sparked a strong public demand in the United States and Great Britain for action

Unfortunately, in his Jewish policy Adolf Hitler struck at the Achilles’ heel of Western liberalism.

Quite aside from the Jews, the call for action has come from press, church, progressive politicians, intellectuals, and the like. But other forces, glacially silent and immovable, have prevented action.

What the Jews want from England is the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration, an obvious step to relieve the Nazi pressure. But the British Foreign Office believes it cannot risk Arab opposition, at this stage of the war, to such a step. An equally obvious move for the United States would be emergency legislation to admit the threatened victims of Hitler. But our drastic restrictive laws are the will of Congress, which is against changing the “racial composition” of our country.

If Allied liberalism were government policy, rather than something between an ideal and a myth, these steps would be taken. As realities stand, Adolf Hitler has put the Allies on the spot.

Hence, the Bermuda Conference. It was launched with fanfare as the Allied response to the Nazi horrors. The Conference produced an appearance of action, to placate the demand; and the fact of inaction, to conform to policy. It was a mockery. The diplomatic menials went through the motions
with very bad consciences, to which they adjusted with bravado, mendacity, or ulcers.

In all this there was not so much villainy as a pathetic inability to come to grips with history’s most monstrous villainy.

That is the heart of the matter. The Nazi massacre of the Jews is still farfetched newspaper talk to most people, obscured by big battle stories. The German action is so savage, so incomprehensible, so far from the mild dislike of Jews which is an old story everywhere, that public opinion shuts it out of mind. The glare of war makes that easy.

The agreed purpose of the Conference was “to
deal with the problem of political refugees.”
Great emphasis was placed on the avoidance of the word “Jews” in the agenda. Moreover, the only “political refugees” that could be discussed were those in neutral countries; that is, people whose lives were already safe! These rules were secret. No word of them ever got out to the press.

Someday the minutes will have to come to light. They will show nothing but a dreary sham, a repulsive exercise in diplomatic dodging, shadowboxing, and double-talking. Every attempt to expand the agenda is beaten down; every suggestion for real action — even to relieve the pileup of refugees in neutral countries — is frustrated. There are no funds; or there is no shipping; or there is no place to send people; or they pose too great a security problem, because of possible spies and saboteurs among them; or the action in question might “interfere with the war effort.”

A game of buck-passing goes on and on. The Americans push for North Africa and the Near East as a place to dump refugees. The British insist on an opening up of the western hemisphere. In the end they cordially agree on negative conclusions; and to produce the illusion of action, they agree to revive the moribund Committee on Refugees established by the Evian Conference, a similar fiasco perpetrated in 1938.

It is easy to condemn the delegates who had to go through this contemptible charade. But they were puppets, acting out the policies of their governments, and ultimately the public will of their nations.