Scholar analyzed response to Holocaust
DAVID S. WYMAN
NEW YORK — David S. Wyman, a leading scholar of the U.S. response to the Holocaust whose “The Abandonment of the Jews” was a provocative, best-selling critique of everyone from religious leaders to President Franklin Roosevelt, has died at age 89.
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies announced that Wyman died Wednesday at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, after a lengthy illness. Wyman was a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The grandson of Protestant ministers, Wyman was in graduate school when he began a long-term quest to learn what was done on behalf of the millions of Jews rounded up and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.
He was best known for “The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-45,” which came out in 1984 and intensified a debate that began during the war. Drawing upon private and government records and contemporary media accounts, Wyman found widespread indifference and hostility to the Jews in Europe, even as their systematic extermination was conclusively documented. He faulted religious organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish; mainstream newspapers and movies; and the anti-Jewish feelings of the general public.
The federal government was slow to act, enforcing strict immigration quotas and refusing to bomb the concentration camps. It waited until well after the Holocaust had begun to establish a War Refugee Board, then forced the agency to rely mostly on private funding. The blame rose right to the top, with Roosevelt, who Wyman alleged was more concerned about angering anti-Semites than about helping the Jews.
Most scholars accepted his general argument that the U.S had done too little, but some disagreed with individual aspects, including his criticism of Roosevelt.