‘A Calculated Restraint' Review: How the World Turned Away From Horror

Wall Street Journal

03-07-2025

In January 1939, Adolf Hitler gave a major speech about his plans for the Third Reich's future. Careful not to provoke Franklin Roosevelt, he did not mention the U.S. president by name and played down, relative to some of his other speeches, his hatred for the Jewish people. But even as the Führer sought to reassure the West of his intentions, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Nazi Party's SS (the Schutzstaffel, or 'protection squadron'), was already planning to build concentration camps and cremation ovens for the disappearing of those to be exterminated. Nearly three months earlier, thugs had attacked Jewish homes and businesses across Nazi Germany in what would come to be known as Kristallnacht. Laws were introduced to deprive German Jews of the privileges and civil rights they had enjoyed for centuries.
In 'A Calculated Restraint,' Richard Breitman argues that by the time Hitler gave his speech in early 1939, 'he already hoped to physically eliminate the Jews of Europe.' Antisemitism was an essential and well-known element of Hitler's regime. So why did Americans and non-Reich Europeans continue to ignore it? Mr. Breitman's study concerns itself primarily with how a combination of institutionalized antisemitism and conservative diplomacy among Western governments was called on to deal with the vagaries of warfare. A distinguished professor emeritus at American University, Mr. Breitman has written extensively on World War II, including 'FDR and the Jews' (2013, with Allan J. Lichtman) and 'Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew' (1998). In 'A Calculated Restraint,' he sets out to explore 'the contrast between what Allied leaders knew and what they said publicly about the Holocaust,' re-examining some of his earlier conclusions in light of new and revised information.
Mr. Breitman suggests that moral timidity meant that the dilemma faced by Europe's Jews was not a prime consideration for military and religious leaders. For years, Pope Pius XII equivocated about speaking out against Hitler's plans for fear of placing European Catholics in the Nazi leader's sights. Surprisingly, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Roosevelt were similarly reluctant. They 'initially viewed the Nazi campaign against the Jews as one small element of the war,' Mr. Breitman writes. The author's deep research reveals that their continued hesitation to acknowledge such organized killing is demonstrated by the historical record.
Rabbi Stephen Wise, a co-founder of the World Jewish Congress and its first president, was a close friend of Roosevelt's and kept him apprised of antisemitism in Europe and the U.S. He urged more than once that FDR make a public statement about what was happening under the Nazi regime. But the president felt strongly that successfully prosecuting the war itself was of more immediate concern than the suffering of refugees, Jewish or otherwise. 'In retrospect,' both Roosevelt and Churchill 'could have done more to articulate genocide without major damage to the Allied war effort,' Mr. Breitman acidly asserts. 'That would have had at least some benefit in alerting potential victims and rescuers in Europe.'