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This all changed with a phone call to Morgenthau\u2019s office toward the end of 1943. That fateful day, the Secretary of the Treasury picked up the phone in his office and was surprised to hear a familiar voice \u2013 it was none other than the Rabbi and close friend who had officiated at Morgenthau\u2019s own wedding. The agitated Rabbi pressured Morgenthau to tell him everything he might know about what was happening in occupied Europe. The baffled Secretary of the Treasury asked his friend to explain the meaning of his request.\u00a0 Over many minutes, the Rabbi related in great detail the long list of atrocities the Nazis were perpetrating against the Jews, the emptying of the ghettos, the trains to the East and the concentration camps. \u201cHenry, do you know that lampshades are being manufactured out of the skin of the slaughtered Jews?\u201d his friend asked. Reeling from all he had heard, Morgenthau asked to end the conversation before he fainted.<\/p>\n
The more he learned and heard from the many reports coming from survivors who had managed to escape the inferno,\u00a0 the more Morgenthau felt himself changing from a mild-mannered man into a man with a mission. He felt it his duty to save as many Jews as possible.\u00a0 Determined to force Roosevelt to act even at the price of his job, he met with the President in 1944 and presented him with a detailed report titled \u201cReport on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of Jews.\u201d He then spread the facts before the President (which Roosevelt had known already since the start of 1942), and demanded that the American government take every action to stop the systematic and industrialized killing of the Jewish People. He did not stop with a moral demand, but appealed to the President\u2019s base interest. He called upon Roosevelt to reveal publicly what was happening in Europe and to condemn the Nazi atrocities in no uncertain terms, lest the discovery lead to a scandal which would seriously damage Roosevelt\u2019s chances of re-election to a fourth presidential term.<\/p>\n
The chance Morgenthau took paid off: within weeks a refugee commission was formed, whose purpose was to unite the efforts to smuggle Jews out of Nazi occupied areas. An agreement was signed allowing for the unrestricted admission into the US of Jews from Europe, and considerable aid was sent to Raoul Wallenberg to help in his heroic rescue efforts. Less than two months after their encounter in the Oval Office, Roosevelt made his first speech acknowledging the Holocaust that was raging in Europe. Morgenthau did not stop there. He formulated a plan of action against Germany: the plan called for the destruction of all military and civil industry in Germany at the end of the war. \u201cThe Morgenthau Plan\u201d was rejected by Harry Truman, Roosevelt\u2019s successor to the presidency after the latter\u2019s death in April 1945 (only weeks before Germany\u2019s surrender).\u00a0 In the end, the efforts of Morgenthau and of other American activists led to the rescue of 200,000 Jewish refugees from the jaws of the Nazi killing machines.<\/p>\n
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