How the Treasury Department Exposed the State Department’s Efforts to Stifle Reports about the Holocaust

Even after the U.S. entered World War II, the Roosevelt administration was opposed to taking any action intended specifically to help the Jews of Europe. Particularly hostile toward any plan that might lead to Jewish refugees turning up in America was the State Department and its anti-Semitic assistant secretary, Breckinridge Long. Henry Morgenthau, Jr.—the secretary of the treasury and a close friend and confidant of Franklin Roosevelt’s—discovered this when he and a team of Treasury Department lawyers attempted to do something to aid Jews in escaping the Nazis. Andrew Meier tells the story, which begins in 1943 with the efforts of the Switzerland-based lawyer Gerhard Riegner, who worked tirelessly and heroically throughout the war on behalf of his fellow Jews: