Morgenthau, Henry, Jr.

(1891–1967)

   As secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau was the highest-ranking Jew in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. During his tenure as Treasury secretary, Morgenthau had considerable influence with the president and, as the conditions of the Jews in Europe deteriorated under the Nazis, Morgenthau used his position to initiate rescue efforts on their behalf. The creation of the War Refugee Board (WRB) in January 1944 was Morgenthau’s most important achievement in his effort to save the remaining Jews of Europe. As the Nazi onslaught against the Jews intensified in 1942, Morgenthau concluded that the State Department was to blame in thwarting the efforts of those Jews who were legally entitled to enter the country under the immigration laws. By 1943, Morgenthau was deeply concerned about the impending fate of European Jewry as the massacres of Jews and the news of gas chambers reached the shores of America.

   In January 1944, Morgenthau’s assistant, Josiah DuBois Jr., a nonJew, handed him his “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” which documented the State Department’s “willful failure to act.” Morgenthau tempered the title of the report and it was changed to “A Personal Report to the President” before delivering it to Roosevelt on 16 January 1944. Along with two other Jewish advisors to the president, Benjamin V. Cohen and Samuel Rosenman, Morgenthau met with President Roosevelt. In the aftermath of the meeting, the president established the War Refugee Board. The creation of WRB came too late to save the lives of millions of Jews, but it did manage to rescue approximately 200,000 Jews from deportation to the death camps. In 1945, Morgenthau promoted the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which called for the “pastoralization” of the former Third Reich, because he feared the rebirth of an industrialized Germany could bring about World War III. Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry S. Truman, dismissed the plan as impractical.