The War Refugee Board (WRB), established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1944, saved, or had a hand in saving, tens of thousands of Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. FDR’s public statement about the Holocaust on March 24 of the same year, in which he told the Germans directly that they would be held accountable for war crimes, may have saved additional lives. But John Pehle, the director of the WRB, also lobbied the War Department to do more, including bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz and the factories in the camp itself. In a thorough account of Pehle’s efforts, excerpted from his recent biography of FDR, Jay Winik writes:

Many years [after the war, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, who had repeatedly stalled Pehle’s requests], told a journalist that Roosevelt’s close adviser and good friend, Harry Hopkins, maintained that “the Boss was not disposed to” order the bombing of the death camp. Nonetheless, Hopkins himself had enjoined McCloy to solicit the advice of the War Department. McCloy indicated that the Air Force was against the idea of bombing the camps. Insisting that he had “never talked” to the president in person, McCloy said bluntly: “That was the end of that.”

However, several years later McCloy, by then elderly and evidently conscience-stricken, gave a different version of what had happened. In an interview with Secretary [of the Treasury Henry] Morgenthau’s son, he indicated that he and Roosevelt had talked about whether to bomb Auschwitz. In this account, McCloy said the president felt that the bombing would amount to little except to make the United States seem complicit in the Final Solution, a view some Jews themselves held. Roosevelt then evidently told McCloy that the United States would be accused of “bombing these innocent people,” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business.” Thus, the president himself denied the request, without offering any other imaginative alternatives.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.