Diplomacy, Dissent, and the Holocaust: Speaking Out, Then and Now

[Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues Ellen Germain opens the special event on “Dissent, Diplomacy, and the Holocaust: Speaking Out, Then and Now” on March 23 at the U.S. Department of State’s Marshall Center in Washington, DC.]

SPECIAL ENVOY ELLEN GERMAIN: Good afternoon, and Ramadan Kareem for all those who are observing on this first day of Ramadan. I’m Ellen Germain. I’m the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues. And on behalf of the State Department, I’d like to welcome you all to this special screening and panel discussion on “Diplomacy, Dissent, and the Holocaust: Speaking Out, Then and Now.”

I’m glad to see you all here. And since this is a hybrid event, we have an audience joining us through Webex as well. And I’m also very happy that we have quite a few colleagues from the diplomatic corps, congressional staff, and civil society with us here today as well. My office, the European and Eurasian Affairs Bureau’s Office of the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, is pleased to be co-hosting today’s event with the American Foreign Service Association and the Secretary’s Open Forum.

We’re going to show half an hour of excerpts from the recent Ken Burns PBS documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, which examines the role of American foreign policy decision makers and American public opinion in U.S. decisions during World War II about helping Jews who were trying to flee Europe during the Holocaust. The clips were made available through cooperation with local public television station WETA, Florentine Films, and the filmmakers: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein. We are also providing the documentary to all U.S. embassies, consulates, and about 600 American Spaces– [MICROPHONE ECHOING]– around the world.

[LAUGHING]

So all of our embassies, consulates, and American Spaces are going to use the film to launch local discussions about why it’s important to acknowledge and learn from the past to try to prevent disasters and do better in the future. Following the film, we’ll have a panel discussion about the consequences of U.S. policies during the Holocaust and how that legacy continues to influence department policy today in trying to prevent atrocities and in handling dissent. But first, we are very honored to have open– [MICROPHONE ECHOING]

We are very honored to have opening remarks from Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who in her long and distinguished career, has always been a champion of human rights and is a strong supporter of the State Department’s channels for expressing dissent. Deputy Secretary Sherman, welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

DEPUTY SECRETARY WENDY SHERMAN: Great to see you all, those who are Webex and those who are here in person. Good afternoon to everyone. And thank you, Ellen, for your introduction. My thanks to your team for not only organizing this event, but for working year-round to make real the promise to never forget the Holocaust and its legacy.

I want to note– Ellen and I were talking about this. Colleagues were talking about this beforehand. I haven’t watched every last moment of the Holocaust. One has to sort of take it in pieces because it’s so powerful. But you all are going to — if you haven’t seen it, this half an hour will be a really remarkable and quite important, if not searing, experience.

So you’re fortunate to have this taste of it, and I would urge you all to watch the entire thing through your local PBS station or in the American Spaces and embassies around the world.

Dissent has deep roots in the American story, yet we are gathered here to recall a period when voices of dissent went unheeded and unheard with fatal consequences for millions. Dissent is about summoning the strength to speak out, even if what you say is unpopular.

It’s about gathering the bravery to sound the alarm about matters of consequence and urgency, life and death, even if those in power don’t want to listen. It’s about giving voice to causes often ignored, even if the chorus arrayed against you would rather drown you out. This documentary reminds us what can happen when we tune out dissent and allow prejudice, antisemitism, and society’s worst impulses to prevail.

This film shines a light on a past we have to own up to — that before American GIs liberated concentration camps, before the U.S. led the campaign against Nazism and fascism, before our country belatedly established a War Refugee Board to rescue the remaining Jews in Europe — there were forces in our government, in the U.S. government, setting up roadblocks to a response that met the magnitude of Nazi terror.

There were visa and immigration policies designed to refuse entry to refugees fleeing certain death.

There were high-ranking officials, painfully especially here at the State Department, who responded to slow or not at all, or who actively worked against necessary answers to the horrors of Hitler’s final solution. As one historian put it, America in the 1930s was no haven for the oppressed. We must acknowledge that part of our history if we wish to never repeat it. We must recognize when we fall short and fell short of our values, where we reached a point, in the words of Congressman Emanuel Celler, when, quote, “We might as well black out the lamp beside the golden door.”

We must also remember that these past failures didn’t happen due to a lack of knowledge about the Nazis’ crimes. Voices of dissent were out there — diplomats, journalists, advocates, clergy — who saw what was to come, who spoke up early on, whose desperate pleas were often met with deafening silence. Many refused to accept inaction as a fait accompli. Many acted heroically to save lives, but none could do nearly enough on their own.

There were Hiram Bingham and Varian Fry — a U.S. diplomat and a journalist in Marseille — who provided Jewish refugees with visa documents so they could reach safer shores. There were reporters like David Shearer and Sigrid Schultz, who documented Hitler’s rise and the Nazis’ horrifying agenda. There was the filmmaker Carl Laemmle, who put up enough of his fortune to bring 300 families from Germany to the United States against the wishes of this department.

There was even a member of the president’s cabinet, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, whose team repeatedly raised the truth of what was transpiring and detailed our government’s refusal to stop it. There were, most of all, Jewish community leaders, rabbis, organizations, and more trying to tell anyone who would hear them what was actually happening and why America needed to step forward.

Taken together, all of this points to a painful reality we still have to grapple with.  The information was there. The will to act was not. The harsh facts were there. The courage to confront them was not. The searing truth was there. The conviction to do right was not.

Thankfully, we have changed and grown. And we now occupy a different State Department, not to say there aren’t times we aren’t still challenged. We are. But we work in a department with teams dedicated to addressing Holocaust issues, countering antisemitism, advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, and working to prevent atrocities.

We serve in a department that fosters dialogue through the Open Forum, that started the Policy Ideas Channel to bring creative concepts to the table, that established the Dissent Channel to open an avenue of debate on high stakes issues.

Today we will view a film that urges us to keep going, that summons us to heed the warnings of history, that calls us to be the voices of conscience when the times demand it, that implores us to see dissent as not merely our right as Americans, but our duty as public servants, as advocates of policies that give life to our principles for if never again — if never again is to mean something, then silence is inadequate and neutrality unacceptable when events worldwide cry out for more.

When a brutal dictator initiates a barbaric invasion against a sovereign nation, when atrocities are perpetrated against innocents as a matter of official policy, when human rights are violated with seeming impunity, when people’s basic dignity is discarded because of who they are or what they believe, we must ask ourselves, who among us will dissent? Who will speak up? Who will force us to turn our eyes toward the truth?

The answer must be us — guardians of the public trust, diplomats, activists, academics, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, American citizens — everyone who cares whether our ideals have meaning, whether we still stand by them in word and deed. If not us, then who?

As you watch this documentary, I urge you to take the lessons of the Holocaust to heart.  Remember when it matters to replace silence with dissent. Always keep faith with our determination to grow and change, to counter antisemitism with action, to fight hatred with hope.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

GERMAIN: Thank you so much, Deputy Secretary Sherman. And now we’re on to the film. We’re actually showing two separate clips, so don’t be surprised when you see a few seconds of silent, black screen between the two.

And I also just want to note that in the film you’re going to see my good colleague, Deborah Lipstadt, who is an eminent historian and, of course, is currently the State Department Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Antisemitism. Unfortunately, she could not join us today. Otherwise, she would be part of our panel that will follow the film as well. So on to the film.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[AUDIO LOGO]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DANIEL MENDELSOHN: All of my grandparents are immigrants from Eastern Europe, except one grandmother who was born here. So, I sort of grew up haunted by stories of, as they used to say, the old country, haunted by the story of my grandfather’s brother and his family living in a provincial town in eastern Poland. And then they disappeared. All you think about is that they had been consumed by this conflagration that consumed all of Europe.

[CHATTER]

[CHILD LAUGHING]

NARRATOR: When Nazi rule began in 1933, there were 9 million Jews in Europe. Twelve years later, when the second World War ended in 1945, at least two out of every three of them had been murdered.

DANIEL MENDELSOHN: It’s not so easy to put the picture together. The real scale of what happened to people, it is unbelievable. It boggles the imagination. You don’t know what 6 million people looks like.

NARRATOR: As the catastrophe of what would come to be called the Holocaust unfolded, Americans heard about Nazi persecution of Jews and others on the radio, read about it in their newspapers and magazines, and glimpsed it in newsreels. Some Americans responded by denouncing the Nazis, marching in protest, and boycotting German goods. Individual Americans performed heroic acts to save individual Jews.

Some government officials battled red tape and bigotry to bring Jewish refugees to America. In the end, the United States admitted some 225,000 refugees from Nazi terror — more than any other sovereign nation took in. And by defeating Nazi Germany on the battlefield, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and their allies stopped the killing of the surviving Jewish people in Europe. But during the years when escape was still possible, the American people and their government proved unwilling to welcome more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge.

REBECCA ERBELDING: The Holocaust disrupts any idea that we have of good and evil, of right and wrong. This is a story in which everyone is challenged all the time. We are challenged as Americans.

We’re challenged as parents, as children. We’re challenged as neighbors and as friends to think about what we would have done, what we could have done, what we should have done. And even though the Holocaust physically took place in Europe, it is a story that Americans have to reckon with, too.

DANIEL GREENE: We tell ourselves stories as a nation. And one of the stories we tell ourselves is that we’re a land of immigrants. But in moments of crisis, it becomes very hard for us to live up to those stories. I think the impetus should not, then, be to wag your finger at people in the past and think that we’re somehow superior to them, but to struggle to understand why that’s such a tension between having a humanitarian ideal and then living up to it on the ground.

NELL IRVIN PAINTER: Part of our national mythology is that we are a good people. We are a democracy. And we are a democracy. And in our better moments, we are very good people, but that’s not all there is to the story. And I think if we’re going to congratulate ourselves on our democracy, which I think we should, we also need to face up to the other side.

DEBORAH LIPSTADT: In the past few years, I’ve begun to wonder how serious America’s commitment to looking at some of the dark marks in its history really is. How can we learn from the past? Where did we go wrong? How can we not go wrong the next time? And I think while there is much we can be proud of of this country, the episode of America and the Holocaust is not one that redounds to our credit.

GUNTHER STERN: How did America treat its potential refugees? The refugees, they lost their lives because those doors– the golden door was not wide open.

[SOLEMN MUSIC]

EPISODE ONE: THE GOLDEN DOOR (BEGINNINGS – 1938)

Excerpt from EPISODE ONE (1935)

NARRATOR: Hitler was not mollified. At the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in September, the swastika was declared the German national flag. It, Goring said, has become for us a holy symbol. It is the anti-Jewish symbol for the world. At Nuremberg, the Nazis also issued a series of new and still more harsh antisemitic laws.

Jews, and potentially anyone opposed to the Reich, would become subjects, not citizens of Germany with no political rights at all. To uphold the supposed racial purity of the German people, these laws banned marriage or sexual relations between Jews and persons of what they called German or kindred blood. The German jurists who wrote these laws had closely studied statutes in the United States that had for decades reduced African-Americans to second class citizens and barred interracial marriage in 30 states.

DANIEL GREENE: Even as the Nazis are writing the Nuremberg laws that strip Jews of their citizenship in 1935, they’re looking to Jim Crow laws in the United States to understand segregation here.

PETER HAYES: And when the Nazis were reproached for discrimination against Jews in Germany, their first answer was Mississippi. They were able to say, in the United States, you say that we should not treat these people whom we regard as inferior badly, but you do it. You have lynching in the United States. You make it difficult for them to vote, so how dare you reproach us for this?

REBECCA ERBELDING: African-American newspapers at the time here in the U.S., they’re saying, you, the American people, seem to be upset about what Hitler is doing. You’re not looking down the street. We, too, are being persecuted. We, too, are being attacked by our own neighbors.

Where are the marches for us? Where are the petitions for us? Where are the rallies for us?

NARRATOR: In one respect, the Nazi statutes were less harsh than many U.S. state laws that defined a person of color as anyone who had a single drop of Negro blood. Instead, they categorized people as full Jews, Jews by definition, and mongrels of the first and second degrees.

ACTOR: There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.

ACTOR: “Adolf Hitler hardly ever makes a speech today without belittling, blaming, or cursing Jews. Every misfortune of the world is in whole or in part blamed on Jews. There is a campaign of race prejudice which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen. And I have seen much.”  — W.E.B. Du Bois.

Excerpt from EPISODE TWO (1940)

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1940, an Alien Registration Act sailed through Congress, requiring non-citizens over the age of 14 to be registered and fingerprinted and sharply curtailing their rights to free speech and political participation.

“Something curious is happening to us in this country,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her column. “And I think it is time we stopped and took stock of ourselves. Are we going to be swept away from our traditional attitude toward civil liberty by hysteria about fifth columnists?”

But the President told the press that he had been told that in several countries, Jewish refugees had become spies for the Germans — involuntary spies, he explained, because if they didn’t agree to spy, the Nazi government back home had told them we are frightfully sorry, but your old father and old mother will be taken out and shot. Of course, the President continued, it applies to a very, very small percentage of refugees coming out of Germany.

DEBORAH LIPSTADT: Of course, a refugee would be the worst person to be a spy. A refugee doesn’t speak the language, speaks the language with an accent. The refugee doesn’t know the ways to work their self into the woodwork and not be noticeable, but nonetheless, there is this irrational fear. No one says a nation should let people in that is going to harm it or weaken it, but the evidence was nonexistent.

NARRATOR: Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and many of his colleagues thought, without evidence, that Jewish refugees were especially dangerous. A wealthy contributor to Roosevelt’s first presidential campaign long had served for three years as FDR’s Ambassador to Italy and was semi-retired when Roosevelt called him back to government service to run the visa division.

Hundreds of thousands of desperate people, most of them Jews, were already on the waiting list for American visas, and more were lining up every day. Long was unmoved. To him, every train or ship carrying Jews out of Nazi Europe represented what he called a perfect opening for Germany to load the United States with Nazi agents. Long’s goal, he confided to his diary, was practically stopping immigration.

DEBORAH LIPSTADT: Breckinridge Long is working every which way to prevent Jews from coming into this country. When people are desperate to get out, he is amongst those helping to create the barriers.

NARRATOR: Long especially loathed Rabbi Stephen Wise, whom he found sanctimonious because he spoke so often of the courage of men and women fleeing from torture by dictators. Only an infinitesimal fraction are of that category, Long noted in his diary.

DANIEL GREENE: One of the lessons of this history is something else was always more important for the Americans than aiding Jews.

Excerpt from EPISODE THREE (1941)

DANIEL MENDELSOHN: There are already people who think that every Jew who died in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz, died in a concentration camp, died in a gas chamber. No, there’s whole chapters of this story.

NARRATOR: As hard as Shmiel Jager had tried, he had been unable to get himself, his wife, Ester, and his four daughters out of occupied Poland to America. German troops had reached his hometown of Bolechow in the summer of 1941. Within weeks, his daughter, Rochele, was murdered. That was only the beginning.

DANIEL MENDELSOHN: There was another roundup, which was the biggest roundup in my family’s town of 2,500 people. And my great aunt, Ester, and the youngest girl, Bronia, who was 13 at the time, they kept them — this huge group of people — in the square outside of the City Hall. And, there were a lot of atrocities that took place, mostly against children.

There were some Soviet documents that had come to light, including a report, and they listed all the children who had been shot. Then actually, Bronia was the first child on the list. This was in September of 1942. You know, they were throwing children off the balconies of the City Hall — really terrible stuff. Whoever survived the couple of days of the roundup were shipped to Belzec, and that’s where my great aunt, Ester, died in the gas chambers.

I was able to find out that Shmiel was hiding with his second daughter, Frydka, and that was because there was a Catholic Polish boy who was in love with her. And he was helping to hide her in the home of a local schoolteacher and that, for some unknown amount of time, they were being successfully hidden, the father and the daughter, in an underground dugout until someone betrayed them. And they found them. And they took them, and they shot them both.

And then they killed the schoolteacher, too. The oldest daughter, Lorka, joined a partisan group that operated with some Polish partisans in a nearby forest. She was killed when the whole partisan group was wiped out.

Except for my poor great aunt, Esther, nobody was killed in a camp. They were killed in all different ways, in all different manners. And I think that already is being erased — the particularity of what happened.

DEBORAH LIPSTADT: Here’s the tragedy. Millions of people could not be rescued. They’re in the hands of the Germans. They’re deep into Eastern Europe. They’re in Germany, in Austria, in France, Belgium, Netherlands. But there were people who had gotten to Portugal, who had gotten to Spain. There are people who eventually get to North Africa. If you had taken more people from those places, maybe more refugees could have come in. Maybe more people escaping could have come in. Are we talking of rescues of hundreds of thousands? No. But if it’s your family, it doesn’t matter if it’s one.

Excerpt from EPISODE THREE (1965)

LYNDON JOHNSON: This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill, yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration for it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation.

NARRATOR: In October 1965, after more than 40 years of dogged effort by New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, Congress passed an immigration bill that finally abolished the discriminatory quota system based on national origins that had denied sanctuary to so many desperate people trying to flee Hitler in the years before the war. But the bill imposed limits on people from the Americas who had gone back and forth across the border for generations. And it still made no provisions for most of the world’s refugees. The President of the United States held the signing ceremony at the Statue of Liberty.

LYNDON JOHNSON: This measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves, both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in 100 unseen ways. And today we can all believe that the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today. And the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly in the light of an increased liberty for the people from all countries of the globe.

[APPLAUSE]

NELL IRVIN PAINTER: Americans are now coming to terms with our past. What we have over and over and over again in American history is, on the one hand, this stream of white supremacy and antiSemitism. It’s a big stream, and it’s always there. And sometimes it bubbles up. And it shocks us, and it gets slapped down. But the stream is always there, and we should not be shocked. We should not think, this is not America. It is.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: This thing that people call white supremacy, that’s not some marginal thing. You have to look back and say, how can we change so that we really can be a republic or really can be a democracy? If we’re going to be a country in the future, then we have to have a view of our own history which allows us to see what we were. And we can become something different. And then we have to become something different if we’re going to make it.

REPORTER: The 2,400-word manifesto is filled with hatred for Blacks, Hispanics, Jews–

REPORTER: He wanted to start a race war, as you said–

DONALD TRUMP: My first hour in office, those people are gone.

REPORTER: These cultures are changing us. We are not changing them.

PROTESTERS: [CHANTING] Jews will not replace us.

REPORTER: Hundreds of white nationalists storming the University of Virginia.

PROTESTERS: [CHANTING] Jews will not replace us. Jews will not replace us.

REPORTER: We now know one person has died in addition to those five in critical condition.

REPORTER: 11 Jewish worshipers have been killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. A man has been charged with hate crimes and could face the death penalty. He was reportedly motivated by conspiracy theories about Jewish leaders and immigration.

[GUN SHOTS]

REPORTER: And we’re trying to figure out what’s happening on the Senate floor. Josh Lederman, tell us what’s going on outside.

JOSH LEDERMAN: We are watching a situation that has gotten much and much more tense.

PROTESTER: Let’s go!

PROTESTERS: [CHANTING]

DANIEL MENDELSOHN: The institutions of our civilization are under tremendous stress. I’m not necessarily saying they’re going to go in the same direction, but they could go in the same direction because institutions are just conventions. And as soon as somebody flips a switch and says, oh, it’s OK to shoot grandmothers in a cemetery on a Saturday and then go to church on Sunday — the fragility of civilized behavior is the one thing you really learn because these people, who we now see in these photographs — these sepia photographs — and they’re receding into time, they’re no different– no different– from us. You look at your neighbors, the people at the dry cleaners, the waiters in the restaurant, that’s who these people were. Don’t kid yourself.

GUNTHER STERN: We have seen the nadir of human behavior and we have no guarantee that it won’t recur. If we can make that clear and graphic and understandable, not as something to imitate but as a warning of what can happen to human beings, then perhaps we have one shield against its recurrence.

[SEAGULLS CAWING]

[SOMBER MUSIC]

[Excerpt from “The Golden Door Was Not Wide Open: Henry Morgenthau Moves,” Resource 6 of “The Diversity of Response: Perspective, Choice, and Strategy During the Holocaust,” from Ken Burns In the Classroom on PBS Learning Media]

NARRATOR: Two days after Himmler’s secret speech and three days before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Peter Bergson arranged for 400 mostly Orthodox rabbis to march to the Capitol. For fear of encouraging antisemitism, FDR’s chief speechwriter Sam Rosenman, and most of the handful of Jewish members of Congress, had opposed their coming. The rabbis sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” recited the Kaddish– the Jewish prayer for the dead– and met with Vice President Henry A. Wallace.

RABBI WOLF GOLD: We pray an appeal to the Lord. Blessed be he that our most gracious President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, consider and recognize this momentous hour of history and the responsibility which the divine presence has laid upon him — that he may save the remnant of the people of the Book, the people of Israel. And we pray that the Lord, they aid us to gain complete and speedy victory on all fronts against our enemies and that we may be blessed with everlasting peace.

NARRATOR: The President did not see the rabbis, but they had an impact nonetheless. Several senators and congressmen introduced a resolution calling for a new commission tasked with somehow saving the surviving Jewish people of Europe. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long testified against it for four hours behind closed doors.

There was no need for such a commission, he said, since the State Department had welcomed 580,000 refugees to America since 1933. It was not true. The real refugee number was one third of that.

DEBORAH LIPSTADT: Breckinridge Long in his testimony clearly misrepresents– some would say lies. But the best you can say is it’s a total misrepresentation of America’s record. He was crazed about preventing any refugees from coming here.

NARRATOR: The resolution stalled in the House. And when Long’s testimony became public a couple of weeks later, Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Celler called for his immediate resignation.

ACTOR AS EMANUEL CELLER: The tempest-tossed get little comfort from men like Breckinridge Long. If men of his temperament and philosophy continue in control of immigration administration, we may as well take down that plaque from the Statue of Liberty and black out the lamp beside the golden door.

NARRATOR: At the end of 1943, Gerhart Riegner was still waiting for the all-important license he needed to help Jews in Romania and France, which John Pehle had approved five months earlier. Breckinridge Long and his staff continued to stall, raising every possible potential barrier, even though the President himself was on record favoring it.

JOHN PEHLE: The people who were handling visa matters and the policy at the State Department seemed to be such that instead of facilitating the entry of refugees, obstructions were thrown in the way. It’s as simple as that.

NARRATOR: Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. was the President’s close friend and upstate neighbor, as well as the only Jewish member of his cabinet. All through the Hitler years, he had been careful never to seem to be seeking special treatment for his fellow Jews, but this was too much. He confronted Long and the Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The license was finally issued. But in the course of investigating the reason for the lengthy delay, Morgenthau’s staff discovered that the State Department had deliberately suppressed Riegner’s reports from Switzerland about the extermination of the Jews.

JOHN PEHLE: People in the State Department were saying, don’t send any more messages over about what’s happening to the Jews.

REBECCA ERBELDING: The State Department has been deliberately obstructionist. They have been delaying relief money that could go to Jews in occupied Europe and lying about it so that people would stop rallying, they’d stop protesting, and they’d stop asking the government to do more.

NARRATOR: Morgenthau’s outraged aides wrote an internal report, setting forth the evidence of the State Department’s deceit.

ACTOR READING FROM THE REPORT:   It appears that certain responsible officials of this government were so fearful that this government might act to save the Jews of Europe, if the gruesome facts relating to Hitler’s plans to exterminate them became known, that they attempted to suppress the facts. We leave it for your judgment whether this action made such officials the accomplices of Hitler in this program and whether or not these officials are not war criminals in every sense of the term.

NARRATOR: Treasury staff titled the document “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” But Morgenthau, who understood his boss better than most, toned down the accusatory rhetoric and renamed it simply “Personal Report to the President.”

Morgenthau’s own father, who had been the Ambassador to what was then the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1916, had tried unsuccessfully to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to intervene on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Armenian civilians who were being systematically massacred by Ottoman troops. He had called it race murder.

REBECCA ERBELDING: Henry Jr. went to Turkey, went to Constantinople — now Istanbul — to see his father as all of these events were unfolding. He points that directly to Roosevelt. He says, you remember what my father saw. You remember what I saw in Armenia. We can’t let this happen again. To be the Secretary of the Treasury and to be in a position to actually point his friend to the past and to say, we have the chance to do it better this time.

NARRATOR: After a meeting with Morgenthau and Pehle, Roosevelt issued an executive order on January 22, 1944, establishing the War Refugee Board– the only government agency created by any of the Allies specifically to do what it could for the Jews still under Nazi threat.

[END FILM]

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: OK, now I’d like to invite our panelists to the stage, and I hope we’ll have time at the end to take a few questions from the audience. And I want to remind everybody that this discussion is on the record. And while our panelists are coming up here, I want to observe that there’s a long tradition of internal dissent in the U.S. government during crises.

So the State Department established something called the Dissent Channel in 1971 as a way for employees to express constructive criticism of U.S. Foreign Policy and to ensure that those criticisms are read by senior leadership of the State Department. The Secretary of State’s Open Forum is another way the State Department encourages creative thinking and discussion on policy issues, including expressing dissenting views. And for almost 50 years, the American Foreign Service Association has sponsored an award program that recognizes and encourages constructive dissent and risk taking.

So we’re pleased to have with us AFSA Vice President Tom Yazdgerdi as one of our panelists. We also have with us a recent winner of AFSA’s William R. Rivkin Award for Constructive Dissent, Foreign Service Officer Elizabeth Zentos. And another panelist is Colleen Crenwelge, who is the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which leads the State Department’s participation in the U.S. government’s Atrocity Prevention Task Force. And last, but definitely not least, we’re very fortunate to be joined by historian Rebecca Erbelding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum here in Washington. You saw her in the documentary, and she’s an expert on the War Refugee Board.

So let’s begin with you, Rebecca. Let’s start where the film left off with the War Refugee Board. John Pehle, who led the Treasury Department’s efforts to get the U.S. to help Jews in Europe said, “What we did was little enough. It was late and little.” So as an author and a historian with special expertise on the War Refugee Board, how do you respond to his observation about the work of the board?

REBECCA ERBELDING: Well, the civil servants among us will understand why I need to say that my participation in the film was in my private capacity, as are my remarks today. First, I think the War Refugee Board did an incredible job. They did everything that they could think of, everything that everyone suggested to them. They tried.  Pehle’s remarks are generally not so much about his work and the work of the board, but looking at the U.S. in general. What the United States did during the Holocaust in the 1930s and the 1940s was little and late.

At the same time, that is often true. No matter when there is some sort of humanitarian intervention, atrocities have already occurred. Something has already occurred to urge us to act. And that can often be thought of as whatever we are doing is too little, and it is too late. Atrocities have already begun. And I think it’s important to recognize that it will almost always be too little, and it will almost always be too late.

But it does not mean that we should not be trying something.

And I think it would have been very easy for the Treasury Department in January 1944 to say, well, the Allies are winning the war. We are just going to wait this out. Why start something when we don’t have clear boots on the ground in most of Europe? It’s very difficult to get humanitarian aid. Why don’t we just encourage and wait for the end of the war?

And they did not do that. They said, we are still 11 years into Nazi control of Germany and certainly a few years into the war. We don’t know what will happen in the future. And so they didn’t know in January 1944 that the war was going to end in the spring of 1945. They are still making the effort. And I think that is an important thing for us to remember is that buck against these criticisms of little and late.

It is always possible. And as Ambassador Lipstadt says in the film, if it’s your family, it doesn’t matter if it’s just one. That’s still one.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Yeah, very true. And your comment about there were many voices saying, just wait. The best thing we can do is win the war. And indeed, the Treasury Department took action to speak up and force the government to take action, despite all those voices saying, let’s wait.

So Colleen, if I can ask you as one whose bureau is working with the Atrocity Prevention Board, we just saw in the documentary that there were various groups trying to sound the alarm about Nazi actions and trying to push the U.S. government to action. Can you tell us a little bit about what the Atrocity Prevention Task Force is? And I understand that the task force actually visited the exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Americans in the Holocaust, which was, in fact, the impetus. It was the inspiration for this documentary.

DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY CRENWELGE: Sure. Is this– yeah. The task force is a body charged with coordinating U.S. government action to prevent and respond to atrocities. It plays a central role in implementing the U.S. strategy to anticipate, prevent, and respond to atrocities. And that strategy was released last year. It was really a great step forward in our efforts across the U.S. government to anticipate and prevent atrocities.

We are shifting — have shifted, or are trying to shift, our efforts toward anticipating atrocities that we can respond before they happen because as Rebecca said, all too often, we act only after an atrocity already has taken place or is underway. The task force is a White House-led body. It’s led by the National Security Council. It includes the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security. It also includes USAID and the FBI and the intelligence community. So it really is meant to bring together the U.S. government across its many departments and agencies to respond to atrocities, to prevent them, to support recovery after atrocities happen.

And the task force engages regularly with partners across civil society. We have a very close relationship with the Holocaust Memorial Museum. We also work with partner governments who are as interested as we are in anticipating and preventing and responding to atrocities. The task force members did have a chance to visit this exhibit, America and the Holocaust.  And I think for them, the exhibit really drove home the importance of transparency and openness and the importance of information sharing.

And we have increased our efforts over the last many months where information sharing is concerned. In fact, last December, we published the U.S. Atrocity Risk Assessment Framework, and I think many of our international partners and others have found this useful. And we’ve used that framework ourselves, looking around the world and assessing where atrocities are most likely to occur and how we best can respond to them.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: You’re talking– you mentioned transparency and information sharing. I think we just saw in the documentary how our own State Department was able to not be transparent and not share information. We were actually holding information, as we like to say, in a silo. It was being suppressed. And so it sounds as if one of the goals of the Atrocity Prevention Task Force is to try and help us prevent something like that happening again.

Since it’s always– I think one of the most important things is to try and understand what might be happening today in our efforts to encourage dissent and ideally try and identify warning signs of atrocity. Liz, I’d like to turn to you because you won an award for your dissent on a very important policy issue.

Of course, the tradition in the State Department is that we express our views through the policy formation process. And if you lose the argument, you either implement the policy or you resign. So can you tell us a little bit about how and why you decided instead to dissent? That must have been a rather scary process. And were there any procedures or mechanisms at State that hurt or helped in your efforts?

FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER ZENTOS: Thank you. Yes. I was in Embassy Kabul as the Deputy Political Counselor from 2020 to 2021. And so when I was there, my team and I there were increasingly concerned as we saw the Taliban coming and especially as we talked to our Afghan colleagues at the embassy. They were already starting to have Taliban members knock at the door.

They were very concerned about their safety and their families’ safety. And so I think for those of us who wrote the cable or signed onto the cable, I think that was a driving force in why we decided to dissent. In the political section, we had been sending cables — many factual cables– about what was happening, and we were able to do so.

Our cables went through and were going back to Washington. But I think what was most concerning to us is that we didn’t see that there was quite the urgency and the policy action to get ready to be sure we were ready to help our Afghan — especially our Afghan colleagues at the embassy.

So I won’t get into great details of the cable. It’s classified, and I’m actually quite proud that it hasn’t been released. We used the channel as we were supposed to. Thank you for helping to promote that channel. And so just to emphasize, it was myself and my colleague who drafted the cable, but with 24 other people at Embassy Kabul who signed on and contributed. So it was really a team effort. And I think that was extremely important because we were able to get experts in different fields together and see together what we saw coming and what we thought Washington needed to know. And we needed to feel that we had made extremely clear to Washington what actions we thought would help us to help our Afghan colleagues.

Was it scary? A little bit. But I think it really helped that we saw it spelled out. If you use the Dissent Channel, there is no retribution. The fact that there’s an award associated with it, I think, helps State Department employees understand that dissent is something that’s respected in the department and not something that you receive retribution for.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Thank you. Yeah. And I want to highlight something that you said, Liz. I mean, you said you sent this cable in with your recommendations on what to do, and that was partly because you were not seeing action being taken from the normal cables that were going back. And I just think that’s important to realize that at least the information was going back to Washington and being shared.

But you didn’t see action as there was no action almost 80 years ago when those in the Treasury Department and others were trying to get State to take action. And so just to highlight that there are always resonances, and I think certainly what you’re trying to — what you were trying to do and we’re all trying to do is do better than what happened almost 80 years ago.

And in that vein, I want to turn to you, Tom, because the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), is the sponsor of these dissent awards. And just for those who are not familiar, AFSA is independent of the State Department, although it is the Union for State Department employees. Some people say that if a dissent channel had existed at the time of the Holocaust, lives could have been saved. Can you tell us a little bit about what the Dissent Channel actually is, and then maybe give us an example of how the Dissent Channel has made a difference since its implementation?

AFSA VICE PRESIDENT YAZDGERGI: Sure. Well, I’ll dissent a little bit from that question because what I found in looking at the Dissent Channel– and first of all, it’s an internal mechanism. So you don’t go to Congress. You don’t go to the media. You actually keep it within the State Department. That’s the rule, and people respect that. Liz did that when she sent her Dissent Channel cable in. So it’s been around for, as Ellen said, since 1971. We’ve given an award almost as old as that time it was founded to senior level, mid-level, entry level, and specialist. We have Foreign Service specialist members who are proud AFSA members as well, and we’re really proud of it.

But when I looked back at the history of the Dissent Channel to prepare for this panel, I found out that it’s really only as good as the administration wants it to be. Right? So if you have an administration that prizes openness, transparency, dissenting views, opposing views, rigorous debate, you’re going to have a pretty rigorous dissent channel process. If you don’t, you won’t.

So looking back at the time of the Holocaust — the Holocaust era — had there even been a dissent channel at that time, I’m not sure it would have made a huge amount of difference because where was the outrage or the critical mass of doing something within the State Department? We just saw an excerpt that showed there was not a critical mass to do that. So had that dissent channel existed — I don’t want to be too much of a pessimist — but I don’t really that it would have created a huge amount of difference.

So again, it really is important that administrations, regardless of whether they’re Republican or Democrat, really respect what I think is a American tradition of dissent and rigorous debate to come up with a better policy. So I mean, the critical mass at the time in the Holocaust era of what the United States was doing was the Treasury Secretary and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and what happened there. But that was late in the game.

So again, I don’t want to be too much of a pessimist, but we really need to make certain– and we can learn from that experience that if we create a mechanism like the Dissent Channel, that — it’s not always acted upon, and we get that, but that at least it’s read by the highest level officials. And I can tell you right here that the Secretary reads every single Dissent Channel cable that is sent.

And it doesn’t go through a clearance process. It goes directly to the Policy Planning staff, but they send that directly to the Secretary. So he reads every one of them. That’s incredibly important. May not always act on it, may not always follow that advice, but he’s aware or she is aware, or the Secretary of State is aware of that — that there are dissenting views in the field about an important foreign policy issue.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: So following onto that with Rebecca, I know hypotheticals– we all try to avoid hypotheticals.

REBECCA ERBELDING: Historians, especially.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: But in your research, were there any key moments during the Holocaust when there were practical suggestions or actions of what the U.S. could do that might have made a difference but were dismissed? Or were there any records of such things? And if so, what were the dynamics around that?

REBECCA ERBELDING: There are many. I’ll give you one example, which is that after Kristallnacht — so the pogrom in November 1938 — Roosevelt does a number of things. He brings back the U.S. Ambassador as a sign of protest for what the Nazis are doing. He allows people who are here on tourist visas — German Jews who don’t feel safe going home — to remain indefinitely in the U.S. He uses presidential power to do so. And he says, I will continue to do that until it is safe for you to go home. This is not– you do not have to worry about this. I will continue to extend this protection. But when he is asked, will you advocate for change of our immigration laws, he says, no, we have the quota system.

I think it’s really important to understand that there are crucial differences between then and now. We have an Atrocity Prevention Board. We have a Dissent Channel. We have a refugee policy, which we did not have during the war or in the 1930s. And so people could not come– we used the word “refugee,” but people could not come as refugees, as asylum seekers, as migrants. There is only an immigration process, and that is controlled by Congress. And so Roosevelt could have put his power behind changing those immigration laws, but Congress and the American people are also not behind this.

And so there are certainly and were challenges within the State Department. But this is also something where all Americans need to look inside ourselves and to learn this history and think about, what is the role of Congress in this history? What are the role of American citizens to make our concerns known to our elected representatives? How do we all participate in a democracy that is more humane?

And so I think there are many moments. But if there had been a groundswell after Kristallnacht to open up immigration even further, you would still have the rest of 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, and many more tens of thousands of people could have gotten out – not 6 million, almost certainly, but many, many more.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Yeah, and I think that comment about had there been– it is not only government officials who can speak up or should speak up. It is really up to everyone. Again, as we saw in the documentary, there were not only Jews, but clergy of all persuasions. There were American citizens who were speaking out against this but perhaps just not enough. And maybe some of the tools were not in place to make it happen.

And so on that question, Colleen, are there new tools or mechanisms that we now have in place to help with either identifying warning signs of upcoming crises or impending atrocities?

DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY CRENWELGE: Sure. I mentioned earlier the Atrocity Risk Assessment Framework that we revised and published online last December. And we continue to use that framework as we work across the interagency to identify risks in particular countries and then to to identify actions that we can take collectively and with our partners to try to prevent atrocities. And some of those actions are as simple as diplomatic engagement behind the scenes. There are public statements that we put out. There are other tools that we can use, like sanctions, when we try to prevent atrocities.

I also wanted to touch on one tool– one new initiative that we introduced last May in the atrocity response realm. Shortly after Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine, we established — we funded — the Conflict Observatory, an initiative that partners with U.S. academic institutions and the private sector to document evidence of atrocities committed in Ukraine.

And our partners through this initiative collect and analyze open source, publicly available information, and they publish reports documenting what they see. They document atrocities, human rights abuses, and harm to civilian infrastructure. The initiative’s most recent report, which was published just last month, detailed a network of Russia-run sites and processes to relocate thousands of Ukraine’s children to areas under Russian government control. And that report was widely publicized and it continues to attract a lot of attention. And we’re hopeful through this initiative that the information collected and documented will be used in current and future efforts to document atrocities and then– or I’m sorry, to investigate and prosecute those atrocities. So in my mind, it’s really an innovative tool. It’s a valuable tool, the Conflict Observatory. And it is an effort on our part to make sure that vital information is captured and can be used later and is not missed.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Yeah, to ensure accountability at some level, ideally, to prosecute those who are found who committed the atrocities. Yeah. Liz, how do you make sure now in your current role– you’re Deputy Director of the Russian Affairs Office, which is an extremely busy office, of course. How do you make sure that the differing viewpoints of your staff are heard? And how do you do that while still maintaining the discipline that’s needed to implement U.S. policy?

FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER ZENTOS: Great question. And just to note, thank you so much, Colleen, on the Conflict Observatory. It’s extremely useful. We can point to the reports. Accountability, I think, will be so important in Russia’s war against Ukraine, so I’m grateful for what you and your team do on that account.

So thank you for this question. I think it’s extremely important in the realm of dissent to make sure that you are really listening to your people and creating an environment where people feel that they can share their thoughts and their views and where debate and dissent are really valued. In Kabul, as I was mentioning, I found that extremely useful.

On the compound in Kabul, there’s not a whole lot to do other than go to the gym or be in the office or the cafeteria. And so I remember evenings, running up to us writing this cable, when we were sitting around in the office at night with our dinner, talking about how did we see this going? What were our big concerns? Was there something more we could do?

And that’s what really led us, in the end, to write this cable. And in that case, I was the Deputy Political Counselor, but it was really the action officers in my office who had all of the knowledge. And we had to bring that together and talk about it to really come to these conclusions.

And so I’m trying to make sure we do the same now, working on Russia in my office — try to create the space. It’s very busy, as you said, but find the time to talk with the people on the team and get their thoughts on, is there more we could be doing? What could we be doing? Do you think we should be doing it differently? And so I really do think that’s key.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Thank you. I wanted to see if we have any questions from the audience. So if we do, we have microphones at either side of the auditorium. If anyone has a question, please go to one of those two microphones. All right.

AUDIENCE: Hi, Michael Feldman, retired Foreign Service Officer, recovering policymaker. I wanted to ask about the Welcome Corps, which is a initiative launched by the PRM Bureau at State. And how does that help build that public engagement, public attention? Maybe the type of public engagement and attention we needed 80 years ago in terms of caring for refugees. Thanks.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Would any of our panelists like to take that question? Are you — OK. We have– so I will just– as a Foreign Service Officer, also, I’m familiar with what — the Welcome Corps is this new initiative to encourage Americans to basically welcome and sponsor refugees into the United States.

And so I think that is one of the ways that we, as State Department and the U.S. government, are indeed trying to make the point that this is a group — this is everyone — everyone can contribute to welcoming and supporting refugees and welcoming them into the United States and to drawing, as you said, more of the American public into the actual actions necessary to make refugees welcomed here in the U.S.

AUDIENCE: All right. Thank you all so much. Hi, my name is Mia Levy. I’m a Civil Service Officer at USAID. I wanted to say thank you for your transparency and for opening this to the public, as someone who’s a proud Jewish-American — a proud Jewish-American who did lose family in the Holocaust.

My question to you is, you’ve spoken beautifully today about how we work in international relations to deal with the atrocities that are happening overseas. But as we also know, there is a rise of hate crimes, especially for Jewish-Americans, but for other minorities in the U.S. So I was wondering if there are any strategies for people who are public servants that could take place so that we can prevent atrocities in our own homeland. So thank you so much.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Well, I will– would anybody like to answer that? Because I will also just remind everyone, we are State Department. We do not work in the United States. Our work is focused abroad, outside the U.S., and so we’re generally not focused on domestic policy and domestic strategies. That said, we are all citizens of the United States and take a great interest, as the questioner does, in what’s going on here, so I’ll open it up.

REBECCA ERBELDING: I will put my museum hat on just for a second and talk about the importance of Holocaust education. That’s a lot of what I do now. And a lot of it is just making sure that teachers all across the country have access to free and flexible and reliable and historically accurate ways to teach about the Holocaust to all kinds of students. That is something that my department in the museum is really focused on right now.

And a lot of that is also talking about the long history of antisemitism, both in the United States and in Europe and around the world, really, but helping students understand how long some of these antisemitic tropes have happened, how they have morphed over the years. Give students, then, the tools to see and dismiss them when they encounter them in the wild now.

They can recognize this kind of rhetoric. They can recognize these kind of images, and they can understand what the people who are putting out that rhetoric and those images are trying to do and hopefully reject them. And so that’s something that at least — I always turn to education as something that’s really valuable there.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Absolutely. Thank you for really emphasizing that, Rebecca. I think we have another question.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I’m Leon Weintraub, a retired member of the Foreign Service. I’d like to ask about the influence of Breckinridge Long, if some of you might be able to discuss that. We understand he was an acquaintance or a friend of the President. I just wanted to know, how could he exercise such immense influence without the President, presuming if he was unhappy with that, could have fired him at the drop of a hat? The only conclusion seems to be that he was following what he thought the President wanted him to do. How would you explain his immense influence in this area?

REBECCA ERBELDING: I’ll back up a little bit to say that the Roosevelt administration changes Washington dramatically and changes almost every branch of the U.S. government. Almost every agency changes dramatically under the New Deal and under World War II. One of the agencies that really doesn’t change — their purpose does not change– is the State Department.

And this is a moment in time where the Democrats have a supermajority in Congress for the entirety of the Roosevelt administration. And Roosevelt, though, does not have unilateral control over the Democratic party. The Democratic Party is splitting between Southern Democrats, who are entrenched segregationists, anti-immigrant, and Northern Democrats, who are courting immigrant and Black votes.

And so when Roosevelt is staffing his administration in 1933, he needs a place to stick the Southern Democrats. And where does he stick them but the State Department — the ones who are not going to change. And so you get Cordell Hull, Senator from Tennessee. You get Breckinridge Long from Missouri– want to be Senate candidate, lost.

These are the people– not all of them, but these are many of the people who are the loud voices in the State Department. Cordell Hull’s interest is foreign trade. He is not at all interested in immigration or visas or carrying out that policy. There are some really disturbing transcripts in 1943, where it becomes very clear that Cordell Hull does not know the staff of the visa division at all. He knows Breckinridge Long, but he does not know the head of that office, whom Long supervises. And this is in 1943.

You would think that is a very critical moment to be very aware of how U.S. immigration policy is happening. It was not an interest of Cordell Hull’s. And therefore, Roosevelt is– I think this is a legitimate criticism of Roosevelt. A place where we can really criticize him is why isn’t he paying much more attention to this? Why is he trusting what Hull is saying, largely? Even when the Treasury Department comes to Roosevelt and says, the State Department is being obstructionist, he’s like – he responds, that doesn’t sound like Long to me. You can have your War Refugee Board, but I think you’re wrong about Breckinridge Long.

Roosevelt tended to be very trusting. If he trusted you once, he’s going to trust you despite what you do after that. And I think that’s a flaw in Roosevelt, really.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: OK. Thank you very much, Rebecca. I want to give our panelists a chance for some final thoughts as we draw towards the end of our program here. I will be interested in whatever this has—whatever thoughts this has provoked in you about dissent and diplomacy and how we can learn from the Holocaust. How can we learn from this history to try to do better in the future? Tom.

AFSA VICE PRESIDENT YAZDGERGI: I would just say that we do have more tools now. We do have a whole bureau devoted to this. We have an Atrocities Prevention Board. We have the Dissent Channel.

We have modern technology that we can actually see real-time what’s happening in the world. Despite, for example, what the propaganda is about Ukraine from the Russian regime, we can actually see with our own eyes what’s going on there. So it’s incredibly powerful. And I think Foreign Service members have a special role to play, as well, as the eyes and ears of the government — our government overseas. And they have to provide the best information possible. It may not always be necessarily what the administration in power wants to hear necessarily, but we have an obligation to do that.

And that’s what the whole basis behind, I think, the Dissent Channel formation was back in the early ’70s when there was a huge strife with the Vietnam War and President Nixon’s expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos. We have an obligation to do that. And we’re not always successful, but we have to be able to do that. And I think the Holocaust is perhaps sort of the guiding star and what happens if we don’t do something like that.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Yeah. Liz?

FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER ZENTOS: Yes. A good friend reminded me the other day of a quote that history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And so this, to me, has made me think about how we should be thinking about history and reflecting on history, even as we work on current issues today. I’m reminded how when I was in Kabul, more than one person told me, this isn’t Saigon. Don’t be so emotional.

I think there were some parallels with Saigon. It wasn’t Saigon. I recognize that. And Putin isn’t Hitler, as I’m often told these days. But I still think it’s important to recognize, yes, the situation may not be exactly the same, but it’s important to step back and think about parallels and think about how history will judge us and what we can do today to make sure we’re doing the right thing.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Colleen?

DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY CRENWELGE: Yeah. We do have new tools, as we’ve discussed today. And we are always looking for new ways in which to deploy them and looking for ways to deploy them more effectively. So that’s always top of mind. And on the atrocity prevention side, and even across other issues across the U.S. government, I think there is more and more clearly an interest in the U.S. government in identifying lessons learned from the past. We spend more and more time these days looking at the past, at lessons, and then trying to apply those lessons to what we’re doing today. I know you, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, have done great work in identifying tools that have been effective in the past in preventing atrocities or in effectively responding to atrocities and eliciting behavior change. And I think that’s really valuable, and those efforts will continue and will become even more important, I think.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: And Rebecca.

REBECCA ERBELDING: Yeah. I think I’ll speak as a member of the public here. I think there’s a tendency, especially when I read newspapers or magazines, when they talk about the Holocaust, and particularly Americans responses to it — there’s a tendency to say, well, it was so difficult back- – or it was so easy back then to know what to do. We absolutely should have done these five things. It is just way too difficult now. The world is just much more complicated.

And I think, no, it was a very complicated world back then. There was a Great Depression. There was a World War on two fronts. It was very difficult to know what to do. But we look back, and we say, we should have done more. And I think it is then incumbent upon us to take those lessons and move them forward as we address the myriad challenges in the world today.

And I’m really grateful for panels like these and for this kind of opportunity that shows that the State Department is looking back to the past and trying to think of ways in which we can do it better. What tools can we have? What can we put in place, like the Atrocity Prevention Board, which is not different from the War Refugee Board. There are a lot of similarities to that. And so I’m really grateful that people are looking at the past and trying to make a better world now.

SPECIAL ENVOY GERMAIN: Yeah, hindsight is always 20/20. The question is, what can we learn from that? I want to close with something that Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said when he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize. He said, “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

I think important words for us all to remember. A huge thank you to our panelists for offering their time and their insight and really illuminating an important discussion. So thank you to the panelists, and thank you all for coming.

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