Comment

1944

FDR and the Year That Changed History
Jan 07, 2016
Wonderfully written and extremely engaging -- Mr. Winik is a vivid storyteller considering such a heavy topic as The Holocaust . However the author is completely wrong about Roosevelt’s failure to bomb the death camp at Auschwitz . After the war , Albert Speer --- who had been the Nazi minister of armaments and war production --- proclaimed that if the Allies had destroyed the gas chambers, he told a historian, “Hitler would have hit the roof. . . . He would have ordered the return to mass shooting. And immediately, as a matter of top priority.” Indeed, after the SS abandoned Auschwitz in January 1945, the ever-resourceful Nazis found ways to murder another quarter of a million Jews before the victory Roosevelt did not live to see finally came that May.