Jason Lantzer is the author of the new book Dwight Eisenhower and the Holocaust: A History. His other books include Mainline Christianity. He is the assistant director of the Butler University Honors Program.
Q: What inspired you to write Dwight Eisenhower and the Holocaust?
A: My journey with this book started with a visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A student I was working with on a project had identified some materials the USHMM they needed in their archives and since I happened to be going out to D.C. I told him I would swing by and make copies for him.
After doing so, I went through the permanent exhibit. Eisenhower's quote, taken from a letter he sent to General George Marshall after visiting [the Nazi concentration camp] Ohrdruf, greeted me the moment I stepped off the elevator.
I knew that I knew that quote—like I knew that Eisenhower had visited a camp. But I also knew that was all I knew! As I walked through the displays, the quote stuck with me. By the time I finished I knew that I had to know more.
And the more I thought about it (and looked through the sparse references in the Eisenhower literature) the more convinced I became that this was a story waiting to be told.
Visiting the camp had obviously made an impact on him (how could it not?)--so, what did that mean for the rest of his time as a general? And what kind of influence did it have on him as president? Those are the questions that drove my research forward.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: The research started with lots (and lots) of reading. I needed to read about Eisenhower, about World War II, and about the Holocaust. All three of these are their own literatures (especially the latter two) and don't always intersect with each other.
Then it was time to contact and visit various archives and repositories, starting with the Eisenhower Presidential Library but also including the USHMM.
My research was further enhanced by the fact that a colleague and I started offering a faculty-led short-term study abroad program to Germany in the midst of this research, which gave me the opportunity to visit museums, archives, and sites in Germany as well.
When it comes to surprises, I think there are two that stand out.
The first was Eisenhower's press offensive when it came to talking about the camps. In that letter to Marshall, he goes on to request a congressional delegation as well as the assemblage of other official visits so that the world would know what happened in the camps (which he saw firsthand).
For Americans, this is the start of "never forgetting." It was also done deliberately. Eisenhower talked then (and later) how he did not want people to ever doubt that the camps and the atrocities were real and not propaganda.
This action differs from how our wartime ally, the Soviet Union, largely treated the discovery of the camps in their portion of the European Theater of Operations.
The other surprise was the degree to which Eisenhower worked towards bringing (at least some of) those who ran the Holocaust to justice.
While we can wish that more perpetrators had been convicted (and lament that the Cold War got in the way to a degree), those who did see the inside of a courtroom in the immediate aftermath of the war are the direct result of Eisenhower's orders—from gathering and preserving evidence, to holding the trials at Nuremburg.
The Eisenhower administration even played a small role in making sure Adolf Eichmann was brought to justice.
Q: How do you think the Holocaust affected Eisenhower?
A: There are at least two ways I believe encountering the Holocaust affected Eisenhower.
The first is in how he saw the war. There is no doubt that he always viewed it as something the United States and our allies needed to win---that we were the "good guys" and the Axis powers were the "bad guys."
But beyond being a very traditional American view of war, it also fit with Eisenhower's own love of sports—our side had to beat our opponents.
What the Holocaust did was provide a moral hue to the conflict that had largely been lacking. We were the good guys, for real, in this conflict. The Nazis were not just our opponents but bad, evil. And they had to be stopped and what they had unleashed on the world could never be allowed to happen again.
The second way it affected him was in how he waged the Cold War. Eisenhower saw the devastation the Nazis had unleashed upon Europe and its peoples firsthand. But he also knew that the armies he commanded and were allied with had destroyed large swaths of the continent as well.
When faced with another totalitarian state with territorial ambitions (the Soviet Union) in a world that after August 1945 included the atomic bomb, Eisenhower knew that another war on the scale of the Second World War could not be allowed to happen again, even as he also recognized communism as a very real threat.
His focus on American leadership, alliance building, the threat of force, and covert operations as president were all an outgrowth of his experiences as Supreme Allied Commander, including encountering the Holocaust.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope they take away a greater appreciation for Eisenhower as a leader—both as a general and as president. He was much more active, with his decisions more often than not being both decisive and correct, than he often was or took credit for.
Having just commemorated D-Day +80, we have his "okay, let's go" decision still ringing in our ears. But nearly as important was that letter (which got me started on this journey) to General Marshall detailing what he saw at Ohrdruf and wanting to make sure the world knew and just as importantly, never forgot or doubted it.
I'm hopeful that we will commemorate that decision next year with at least some of the fanfare we saw in Normandy a few weeks ago.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I currently have several projects going on!
One is looking at how various American military units were affected by becoming part of the liberation of the camps during World War II. Another is serving as the project historian on work that is looking at the impact of cultural and political polarization on religious congregations.
I also have two other manuscripts (one on a Hoosier family and the Great War, the other on the Northwest Territorial Ordinance) that are nearing completion.
And, considering some of my other scholarship on, and my recent participation in the documentary How Disney Built America, there might be something else on Disney in the pipeline eventually as well!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: World War II was one of my gateways (as a child) into becoming an historian. To be able, with this book, to get to explore a part of that conflict for the first time professionally, was very rewarding personally. That it also happens to be, in my opinion, a timely book makes it even more so.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment