America's Soul in the Balance

by Wallance, Gregory J.

• ISBN13: 9781608322930
• ISBN10: 1608322939
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-17
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Llc

Summary

At the height of World War II, four lawyers in the U.S. Treasury Department discovered that the highly educated, patrician diplomats in the State Department had covered up reports of the Nazi extermination scheme-and then blocked the rescue of 70,000 Romanian Jews forcibly marched into the Nazi-conquered Ukraine and left to die of starvation and disease. The Treasury lawyers charged the diplomats with being "accomplices of Hitler." The outrage of the Treasury lawyers-tough-minded New Dealers from Christian, middle-class backgrounds-at the State Department's complicity in genocide precipitated a titanic intergovernmental battle. The stakes were nothing less than the fates of countless European Jews (symbolized by an orphaned girl's struggle for survival in Transnistria), the historical reputation of FDR, and the soul of America itself. Gregory J. Wallance uses rarely cited archival documents, memoirs, diaries, and transcripts to construct this gripping, nonfiction Washington political thriller. With exceptional narrative prowess, he examines the anti-Semitism and extraordinary heartlessness of the wartime State Department, whose behavior is a cautionary tale for world leaders weighing the costs of intervention to stop genocide. Wallance, a lawyer and human rights activist, is also the author of Two Men Before the Storm, an acclaimed historical novel about the Dred Scott case. The Boston Globe called this work "an impressive mining of historical records."

Table of Contents

Author's Note	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Eighteen Months Later	p. 9
The Good German	p. 17
The Tributaries of the Dniester	p. 34
The Riegner Telegram	p. 38
The Aristocratic Archipelago	p. 48
The Magical Village of Milie	p. 69
The Croquet Player and the Third Floor	p. 72
The Rabbi and the Diplomat	p. 85
A Reason To Live	p. 110
The Chief	p. 114
Jews for Sale	p. 143
From Foster Parents to the Orphanage	p. 161
Breck and Eleanor	p. 165
The Farmer	p. 192
The Orphans of Transnistria	p. 219
Cable 354	p. 222
"This Movement to Let the Jews Be Killed"	p. 226
The Cemetery of Bershad	p. 237
The March of the Rabbis	p. 240
The Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews	p. 250
"Why Didn't You Come Sooner?"	p. 265
Afterword	p. 271
Acknowledgments	p. 280
Notes	p. 282
Index	p. 320
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