Arthur D. Morse, Author of ‘while Six Million Died,’ Killed in Auto Accident

Arthur D. Morse, author of the best-selling book “While Six Million Died,” was killed yesterday in an automobile accident in Yugoslavia. He was 50, Morse, who had homes in Scarsdale, N.Y. and in Italy, was executive director of the International Broadcast Institute. He was visiting Yugoslavia to attend an international television symposium. Morse was the author of several books on major American social issues and as a producer-writer for CBS produced television documentaries on those subjects. But his fame rested on “While Six Million Died,” subtitled, “A Chronicle of American Apathy,” published in 1967, which accused the Roosevelt administration in World War II of failing to act when there was a possibility of rescuing substantial numbers of Jews from the Nazi holocaust.

One of the principle bases for the charges in Morse’s book was a memorandum sent to President Roosevelt in 1044 by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. criticising the State Department for having delayed for five months a proposal to negotiate with the Nazis for the release of thousands of Jews in France and Rumania. Morse contended in his book that as early as August, 1942, a Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress reported through the U.S. Consulate reliable information from a German source that Hitler had ordered the extermination of all Jews in Europe. The State Department in Washington did not transmit this message to American Jewish leaders. American officials were said to have regarded the report as “fantastic” and to have concluded that even if true the U.S. could not have assisted the victims. Morse, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Frank Moskowitz, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. and was educated at the University of Virginia. He served as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II.