Introduction

In July 2015, I had the opportunity to visit Normandy, France for the first time. For me, this was the fulfillment of a childhood dream, one that led me to becoming an historian. Next to Gettysburg, the American battlefield I most wanted to visit growing up was Omaha Beach. My wife, as she so often has, made this dream of mine a reality.

Standing at Point du Hoc is to be surrounded by history. The massive German fortifications, the power of naval artillery, the obstacles ahead for the U.S. Army Rangers, all these things still envelop visitors in the present. To stand where presidents have stood, including Ronald Reagan, whose stirring words about “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” first caused me to want to visit Normandy, is a powerful experience. Reagan’s rhetoric at that spot hit just the right chord on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day.2 “We’re here,” he said to the assembled veterans, their families, and government officials:

To mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history … The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge—and pray God we have not lost it—that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt … These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”3

Walking the beach itself, to see and stand upon that long stretch of sand, to view where the German guns were – knowing they were raking the beach with murderous fire, is to better understand what those American boys turned soldiers had to do in order to get off the beach and into France. To be alone in the wind and surf, and to try and comprehend the chaos that was June 6, 1944, can only be attempted on the ground. To later drive among the hedgerows is to better grasp how dangerous the job ahead was going to be for the Allies. And to then visit the American Military Cemetery, with its over 9,000 graves, perfectly laid out in orderly, cascading rows of crosses and Stars of David, interspersed by rose bush clusters (which highlight a portion of the German defenses) both stirs the soul and confirms that from time to time, the government does indeed spend tax dollars wisely.

If Normandy’s beaches seem an odd place to start a reflection on the Holocaust, they should not. For Americans, this is exactly where our involvement with that noble endeavor to end the crime of the century begins. True, Britain and France had been at war with the Nazis since 1939. Russia, then known as the Soviet Union, had joined the conflict against Germany in 1941 – but only after the Nazis had negated a non-aggression pact between the two countries by invading Soviet territory. The United States, on the other hand, had only joined the war in December 1941, after Germany’s Axis partner Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. And while American forces waged war against them and had taken part in successful invasions in North Africa in 1942 and Italy in 1943, all while being the “arsenal of democracy” and joining the air war over Germany, by and large the Nazi crimes remained the stuff of “buried” news, mixed with disbelief and anxiety over the stories being or being seen as propaganda, which prompted little Allied action to stop it. During those years, Germany’s European empire remained intact, and the killing continued.

From an American perspective, all that changed with D-Day. As President Franklin Roosevelt said in the prayer he offered as the country awoke to news of the invasion: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”4 That was the mission of the American forces on D-Day, “to set free a suffering humanity,” and it became a defining moment for the man who commanded the Allied forces that day, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Eisenhower’s mission was more complex than merely defeating the German armed forces on Normandy’s beaches and beyond. America and her allies had done that once before in his lifetime. It was also more than just liberating nations the Germans had occupied. As Roosevelt had prayed, Eisenhower was leading a mission to “preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization” against a brutal, totalitarian system that sought not just to forge an empire, but to eliminate whole groups of people in the process. While Eisenhower had little foreknowledge about what he was to encounter in the midst of liberating Western Europe from the Nazi grasp, the Holocaust, with its camps, victims, and perpetrators were destined to change him and the nation he led. And though the Holocaust has become an historical touchstone, and has been studied widely,5 the act of liberation and its impact on those took part, even when it is mentioned and even when it is the focus, is often lost in the “frightening abyss” that was the ideology and end result of the camps that Nazi Germany built.6

Until now, despite the fact that Eisenhower “dominated American public life” from the D-Day landings in 1944 until his death in 1969, his encounter with the Holocaust has been little studied. Perhaps this is not surprising, as it took decades for historians to stop underestimating his role as both a general and as president, with authors seeing him as either incidental to the actual war effort or as a kindly “grandfather,” who happened to serve as president.7 For a very long time, he was viewed as an “enigma,” some sort of benign figure looming indistinctly out of the mists of the past, an administrative general and a caretaker president who presided over eight years of international calm and domestic tranquility. And yet, as some authors have noted, there is a complexity to his character.8 Family, including his beloved wife Mamie, believed that it was nearly impossible to really know Ike in full, as he compartmentalized his life. His son John, himself a West Point graduate, eventual general, ambassador, and author, once wryly noted that to understand his father, you needed to appreciate that Ike was 25 percent congenial and “75 percent cold-blooded.”9

However, the real Ike was more than any of those images convey. His staff knew him to be a tireless taskmaster who worked with incredible subtlety to move events in the direction he wished them to go. As one commentator put it, “beneath the cheery demeanor and the easy, jocular way Eisenhower interacted with people, there was a mind that worked like a steel trap. He was a man of deep conviction and a firm set of ideas honed during the ‘crisis years’ of World War II.”10 Most would agree he was a man of principle, decency, and common sense, whom the country could count on to do what was right. Few seemed to grasp that “in both war and peace he gave the world confidence” that what America was doing was often the right thing to do to begin with.11

Part of his own confidence in America’s mission was shaped by witnessing the Holocaust for himself. While publicly, Ike did not often dwell on what he saw, learned, and heard about Nazi atrocities and their victims, the private Eisenhower was another matter. His wartime experience, including what he saw at a liberated camp named Ohrdruf, shaped not just his leadership style but perhaps more importantly, his moral sense. Considering how long it took historians to appreciate Ike, it is equally understandable as to why placing his encounter in a narrative involving the Holocaust has often seemed problematic.12 As Mark Celinscak notes, “the story of a concentration camp fits awkwardly within the context of military affairs.”13 Furthermore, historian Max Hastings has pointed out that Holocaust scholarship and works on World War II while covering the same events and individuals are often written in isolation from one another.14 Studying Eisenhower’s encounter with Holocaust then, allows us to bridge these disciplinary genres. Doing so in a book that keeps its focus squarely on both topics gives a broader context than either alone can muster. Hopefully, other scholarship will follow in the years to come that will further bridge this divide. With Ike’s journey, we take the first step in that direction.

What follows then, is not just another book about the Holocaust, nor a new biography of Ike. Rather it is the neglected story of Eisenhower and the Holocaust: It will argue that his witness of the crime of the century changed not only his understanding of the crusade he was leading, but also his eventual presidency. As...