Henry Morgenthau Jr.

Henry Morgenthau Sr., the future treasury secretary’s father, had been President Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I. While in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), the senior Morgenthau learned that the Ottoman authorities were committing atrocities against the Armenian Christian community on the eastern plains of Anatolia. The murders of over 1 million Armenians—now known as the Armenian genocide—deeply affected the ambassador as well as his son, Henry Jr. Ambassador Morgenthau helped create the Near East Foundation, a private humanitarian organization that worked closely with the US government to raise money and provide relief to survivors of the genocide.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. did not plan to follow his father into politics. Raised wealthy, Morgenthau loved the outdoors and growing apples on his estate, Fishkill, near Hyde Park, New York. His farm was located only a few miles from another prominent family, the Roosevelts, and as Franklin Roosevelt planned for a political career, Henry Morgenthau Jr. campaigned for him.

When Roosevelt became governor of New York, he made Morgenthau his commissioner of agriculture. After winning the presidency in 1932, Roosevelt appointed Morgenthau chairman of the Federal Farm Board. After FDR’s first treasury secretary resigned in December 1933, Morgenthau took the job. When a reporter asked him how he thought he would use his newfound power, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau responded, “Enthusiastically.”

Refugees

During the 1930s, critics and antisemites focused on the fact that President Roosevelt had many Jewish advisors. Some even called the president’s “New Deal” agenda “the Jew Deal.” Morgenthau was often a target of these attacks.

Throughout his tenure as Treasury Secretary, Morgenthau remained sensitive to this perception of himself, not wanting to openly lobby for issues that could be perceived as “Jewish” causes. Although he expressed his concern for European Jews privately, he did not endorse an increase in the US immigration quotas, which limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States.

Like many prominent Jewish figures, Morgenthau received letters from European Jews who needed an American financial sponsor in order to receive a US immigration visa. The letters arrived frequently at the Treasury Department, the writers often claiming to be distant relatives of the Morgenthau family. Though Morgenthau did not serve as a financial sponsor for any of these refugees, he and his wife, Elinor, donated money to aid her relatives attempting to flee Nazi Germany.

Morgenthau supported Roosevelt’s decision to recall the US ambassador to Germany after the Kristallnacht attacks, and proposed havens outside of the United States for European Jews, suggesting areas within Africa, South America, and the Virgin Islands.

Morgenthau and his wife, Elinor, host Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill at their farm, Fishkill, in Hyde Park, NY, August 1943. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Generally, however, Morgenthau did not speak out publicly about issues related to Jewish refugees. Prior to US entrance into World War II in December 1941, he focused on funding the British and Soviet war effort through the Lend-Lease Act and converting American factories from making consumer goods to making military supplies.

Morgenthau’s Treasury Department was also responsible for controlling all financial transactions between the United States and groups within enemy territory during World War II. This was a complicated task, since many American businesses worked closely with international partners, had European clients, and even owned factories in Nazi-occupied and Japanese territory. Treasury’s Foreign Funds Control department ultimately seized $8 billion in assets (the equivalent of more than $137 billion in 2022) to keep it out of enemy hands.

Exposing State Department Obstruction

In summer 1943, the World Jewish Congress asked to send $25,000 to its representative in Switzerland to aid Jews in Romania and France. The Treasury Department approved the request, but the State Department delayed forwarding this approval, claiming that the money might fall into Nazi hands, and that the British government did not agree to the World Jewish Congress’s plan. The Treasury staff soon discovered that State Department staff had also instructed the US legation in Switzerland to stop sending information about the Nazi regime’s murder of Jews to the United States.

Treasury staff, who had been exchanging angry and accusatory memos with the State Department over the relief delays, convinced Morgenthau that it was time to go directly to President Roosevelt. They prepared a report originally titled, “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews.” They argued, “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.”

On January 16, 1944, Morgenthau and two members of his staff met with President Roosevelt to explain what they had discovered. Roosevelt, responding to the Treasury Department’s information as well as to public and congressional pressure, agreed to create a new agency, the War Refugee Board. The WRB was responsible for carrying out a new US policy to rescue and provide relief to Jews and other victims persecuted by the Nazis, so long as its efforts did not impede the war effort.

The War Refugee Board

The War Refugee Board, which had its offices at the Treasury Department and was staffed almost entirely by Treasury Department employees, streamlined the work of private relief agencies, helping them send money and resources into neutral and enemy territory. They also placed American representatives in neutral nations to supervise projects and pressure these countries to welcome refugees. Morgenthau remained deeply engaged in the WRB’s work, acting as a constant advisor and using his influence to bring the WRB’s projects to Roosevelt’s attention.

Among other activities, the WRB opened Fort Ontario, a refugee camp in the United States; assisted thousands of Jews in Bulgaria and Romania to escape to Palestine, participated in ransom negotiations with Nazi officials; dealt with requests related to bomb Auschwitz (which did not happen); hired Swedish rescuer Raoul Wallenberg; shared detailed information about Auschwitz-Birkenau with the American people; and approved $11 million in relief and rescue funds for humanitarian workers in Europe.

In the WRB's final report, written in September 1945, the staff wrote that “the accomplishments of the Board cannot be evaluated in terms of exact statistics, but it is clear, however, that hundreds of thousands of persons as well as the tens of thousands who were rescued through activities organized by the Board, continued to live and resist as a result of its vigorous and unremitting efforts.”

The Harrison Report

In June 1945, one month after Nazi Germany surrendered, Morgenthau began to hear complaints from within the American Jewish community that Holocaust survivors were being treated terribly in camps controlled by the Allied military. Morgenthau and the War Refugee Board staff persuaded the State Department and President Truman that American lawyer Earl Harrison should tour Germany and Austria to survey the situation.

Harrison spent several weeks touring thirty displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria, and his report, completed in early August, severely criticized the military’s treatment of displaced persons in general, and Jewish survivors in particular. He claimed the victorious Allied military was giving preference to German civilians over Jewish displaced persons, was distressed that some survivors were still in concentration camp uniforms and living behind barbed wire, and reported that the Allies had not yet organized a way to help these survivors find and correspond with relatives. Harrison wrote: “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” Harrison’s report resulted in a dramatic change in the treatment of displaced persons, especially Jewish DPs, who were soon moved to their own camps and granted far better treatment.

Postwar Life

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was devastated by President Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, and never developed a strong relationship with the new president, Harry Truman. On July 21, 1945, Morgenthau resigned after more than eleven years as the secretary of the treasury. In the late 1940s, he became chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, a Jewish philanthropic organization. On a trip to the newly created state of Israel, Morgenthau toured a cooperative farming community where Holocaust survivors lived; they had named their community, Tal Shahar, in his honor. (“Tal Shahar” means Morning Dew, after the German “Morgen Tau.”) Morgenthau passed away in 1967.