7 - From Negation to First Dialogues - American Jewry and Germany in the First Postwar Decades

Summary

The American Jewish community, one of the most faithful supporters of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, failed in its efforts for refuge and rescue of fellow Jews before and after the United States entered World War II. Although in the late 1930s it contributed, together with other segments of society, to shifting American public opinion from isolationism to face the Nazi German threat, it had no influence on the making of wartime policies and did not carry much weight in the government's handling of defeated Germany. Because of the Third Reich's persecution of the Jews, which culminated in the wartime murder of millions, American Jewry became consistently anti-German and remained so long after the internal American discussion about the postwar German settlement had been decided in favor of West Germany's economic reconstruction and its inclusion in the Western community. In the confrontation between the supporters of a soft and a hard peace, most American Jews preferred the latter, though the organized community refrained from taking a stand on the harsh anti-German recommendations of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., the only Jew in Roosevelt's close circle who was deeply affected by the Holocaust.