Reader Jerry Steinman (Letters to the Editor, June 28) selects the most disputed aspect of FDR’s “Jewish legacy” to make the single most invalid point: that, in his view, the bombing of the death camps, or Auschwitz in particular, would have killed more Jews than Germans. As a long-time vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, I can attest that every survivor to whom I have discussed this with said they prayed daily in the camps for such bombings even were they to die.
One of the public boards on which I served for Gov. Pataki was the United Nations Development Corporation. One of my predecessors on that very board was FDR’s undersecretary of war and former Chase Manhattan Bank executive, the late John J. McCloy.
Doubtless in keeping with FDR’s (not Eleanor’s) “benign neglect” of the genocide of the Jewish people, McCloy wrote falsely in a report to FDR that any such bombing “would detract from the war effort,” this while the allies were bombing oil refineries five miles from Auschwitz.
No one should exonerate FDR from his administration’s concerted efforts to avoid saving the Jews of Europe.
Manhattan
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