Special Interview the Holocaust As Christian Tragedy

Prof. David Wyman, author of “The Abandonment of the Jews” — which documents the “criminal negligence” of the U.S. toward the rescue of European Jews during the Holocaust –said that the Holocaust “is still not perceived by non-Jews as their issue — or their loss.”

Wyman was interviewed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at WNET-Channel 13 here before a taping of “Why in the World,” a program in which a group of teenagers question leading figures. He said that the four years of writing the book — preceded by II of research in 60 archives — were “agony. I had to come face to face with (the Holocaust) and I began to cry for the first time in my adult life.”

Wyman said that when he first became aware of the Holocaust it became clear to him that “it was a Christian tragedy as much as a Jewish tragedy. It was Christians who perpetrated it — the Nazis who were the product of Western Christian civilization and those Christians in the U.S. and Britain who stood by and failed in their Christian duty to do everything to stop it and to help those who needed help.”

MASSIVE FAILURE OF CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

What that says to him as a “practicing Christian” — he was raised as a Methodist and two of his grandparents are Protestant ministers — is that “here was a massive failure of Christian civilization — a religious failure — a loss of the soul.”

Wyman told JTA that while many Jews continue to feel that they did not do enough to help fellow Jews, “most Christians are oblivious. They don’t even know they failed.”

What he considered most “distressing” was that during the Holocaust, the liberal American Protestants “pushed the issue aside.” He cited in this connection the publication “Christian Century,” which had, he said, a major effect on social-action oriented clergy and laymen, and which discredited the disclosures in late 1942 by Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, that the Nazis were implementing their “Final Solution.”

The publication, he wrote, “defaulted” on the opportunity to become a “leading edge of Protestant backed pressure for rescue action.” Had Christians “risen”, as they should have in late 1942, he said, “had the church made a loud noise,” the War Refugee Board might have been established in 1943 rather than in 1944, a full year later.

Wyman told the JTA he was “disappointed” at not getting much response — “yet” — from Christians to his book, which was published in November by Pantheon and which has gone into its fourth printing. Of the 200 letters he has received so far, less than 10 percent are from non-Jews. Of those, half are from anti-Semites, including the “Revisionist” historians who propagandize that the Holocaust never took place.

The book documents the abstruction by the State Department of rescue efforts and projects, the silence of organized labor, liberals, intellectuals as well as the church, the lack of coverage by the mass media, the “crisis in leadership” on the part of Congress and the President, and the lack of unity on the part of American Jewry as contributing to the failure of the U.S. to help save European Jews.

The main underlying factor, he said, was “anti-Semitism, which was at a peak in the U.S. during the war.” While he estimated that only 20 percent of the society actually wished to harm the Jews, the broad part of the population was characterized by “passive anti-Semitism.”

These non-Jews, he continued, could not be appealed to exert themselves to help Jews “because of the ingrained attitudes against Jews in our culture, stemming from 2,000 years of Western civilization.” When they heard about Jews being harmed, he said, “it bounced off them.”

Wyman felt, however, that possibly one-third of the nation had some “quality of generosity” and could have been sympathetic to Jews — or any other group in similar straits — had their support been mobilized.

Roosevelt, he said, feared a backlash from the anti-Semites on rescue. Wyman acknowledged there would have been some of this “but just from the fringe. “Had he taken the issue to the public via radio and press conferences, had he called upon the churches, had he based his appeal on American idealism and human decency, “he could have built a counter-constituency among that one-third” of the nation, Wyman said.

But, said Wyman, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Roosevelt “didn’t have the imagination or the interest” to take action to rescue European Jews. His “indifference” to the mass murder of European Jewry “emerges as the worst failure of his presidency.”