America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, & the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy

This is the chilling true story of the senior officials of the U.S. State Department at the height of World War II, whom some accused of being accomplices of Hitler . It is a largely forgotten chapter of American history. After America entered World War II, a genuine opportunity arose to save at least 70,000 Romanian Jews who had been deported to the killing fields of Transnistria. America did not intervene. Treasury Department lawyers believed that the State Department was not simply guilty of a failure to act but also of deliberately suppressing reports of the vast slaughter in occupied Europe and blocking efforts to rescue Jews. America’s Soul in the Balance is an exploration of the truth behind that accusation, and of the dispute that ensued. It is a meticulous research that reads like a suspense novel. Though the book contains nearly five hundred endnotes, Greg Wallance explores this titanic bureaucratic battle in prose that reads like an engrossing novel. The drama is high as Treasury Department lawyers, tough-minded New Dealers from middle-class backgrounds, fought with the diplomats in the State Department, whose elitism isolated them from the suffering of human beings different from themselves. Plenty of applications for our modern world. Wallance draws parallels from this cautionary tale for current world leaders as they weigh the costs of intervention against genocidal madness and the consequences of not acting. Quoting from the Talmud, he reminds them that To save one life is as if you have saved the world .