"A Calculated Restraint: What Allied Leaders Said About the Holocaust" Book Talk - Livestream

The Allied leaders rarely spoke directly about the Holocaust in public. When Churchill and Stalin alluded to Nazi mass murder of civilians in early speeches, they said much less than they knew. Not until December 1942 did Allied governments issue a joint statement about Nazi Germany’s policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe. Roosevelt deferred his own public statement until March 1944. Why didn’t these leaders speak up sooner?

 

Through close readings of public and private statements, Richard Breitman, an acclaimed author and distinguished emeritus professor at American University,  pieces together the competing motivations that drove each leader’s response to the atrocities. Timely and incisive, A Calculated Restraint sheds new light on the relationship between World War II and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the Allied leaders’ responses cannot be reduced to a matter of character. What they said—and chose not to say—about the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military exigencies that drove their decision-making.

 

Breitman will be in conversation about the book with Rick Salomon, a co-founder of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Renew Democracy Initiative.