The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945

• Author: Lieutenant Colonel Walter M. Hudson2
• Pages: 06

164 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 180

THE CONQUERORS: ROOSEVELT, TRUMAN, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF HITLER'S GERMANY, 1941-19451

REVIEWED BY LIEUTENANT COLONEL WALTER M. HUDSON2

The Conquerors is victor's history. It pronounces this in its title. Its first epigraph is from Eisenhower to the German people: "We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors."3 Michael Beschloss, the author, does not cite a single German language document in the hundreds of books, documents, interviews, and papers listed in the bibliography. These omissions, however, do not mar his book. Indeed, his very point is to write this history from the winner's vantage point.

A contrast thus can be made with another recent book, John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.4 Dower's book won virtually every conceivable literary and historical prize.5 But the laurels obscure the clay. A work such as Dower's is groundbreaking and powerful, and yet one can never get beyond the impression that it is an exercise in tweeded sneering at the Americans who occupied and helped rebuild Japan. It may be too much to ask that even gifted historians possess a kind of Shakespearean "negative capability"-the uncanny ability to examine, with supreme objectivity and disinterestedness, historical personages-to let them, ultimately reveal, and perhaps redeem or condemn themselves. Few, even the most extraordinary historians are fully capable of this expressive insight.

Beschloss nonetheless possesses that particular quality of mercy in regards to his conquerors to a far greater degree than Dower. They are flawed, yet understandable, and oftentimes admirable overlords. What emerges in The Conquerors is that, contra Marx, a handful of men-neither impersonal, blind forces nor abstractions disguised as people ("the working class," "the spirit of democracy," "the Volk," etc.)-drove post-war history. Everything else appears secondary. Even plans and policies

1. MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, THE CONQUERORS: ROOSEVELT, TRUMAN, AND THE DESTRUCTION

   OF HITLER'S GERMANY, 1941-1945 (2002).

2. United States Army, Chief, Military Law Office and Instructor, Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

3. BESCHLOSS, supra note 1, at xv.

4. JOHN DOWER, EMBRACING DEFEAT: JAPAN IN THE WAKE OF WORLD WAR II (1999)

5. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II was awarded, among others, the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award, and the 2000 Bancroft Prize.

   are ephemeral; mere sketches on National Geographic maps, hastily initialed policy letters, or vague directives with rule-swallowing exceptions. But if human beings, and more specifically, personalities, drive history, that means all human foibles, strengths, and weaknesses come into play. Thus, The Conquerors yields the painful lesson that righteous motives may lead to bad ideas, and that mixed motives can achieve good results.

   If one is expecting a "greatest generation" hagiography so popular these days, The Conquerors disappoints. It shows, at the highest levels, the tangled strands of policy and the inner motives of the American decision makers, and the picture is not always flattering. Roosevelt, in particular, emerges as the dominant personality in this book. Beschloss reveals a complex and charming, yet also secret and devious man. A man with a keen, if superficial, intelligence and an effortless grasp of the world's geography, Roosevelt seems to have displayed, at times, a casual, near-Olympian indifference to the fate of nations. A man with greater personal knowledge of Germany than any prior president (he visited there eight times in his youth),6 he retained a Francophile's smug disregard for German culture.7 In a profound way, he misunderstood that culture: he would prattle on about Prussian militarism, but never really peered into the nihilistic vacuum of Nazism.8

   Where Roosevelt emerges in all his contradiction is his dealing with the Nazi plans of Jewish genocide. Beschloss reveals what to some may seem as an extreme indifference of Roosevelt (and the American government as a whole) to the mass murder of Jews in Europe.9 Beschloss, though, does not engage in the moral preening typical of so many contemporary historians or armchair statesmen. He acknowledges that the Holocaust, as a recognized historical event, was not seared into the collective consciousness of the West until decades after the war was over.10 Nonetheless, what Beschloss terms "the terrible silence" of Roosevelt remains. Why did Roosevelt, even after having full and ample knowledge of death camps and the plan to exterminate Jews, do nothing and say nothing to stop

6. BESCHLOSS, supra note 1, at 9.

7. Id.

8. Id. at 9-11, 285.

9. Id. at 98.

10. Id. at 40. Indeed, the use of the term "Holocaust" did not enter common usage in English until the 1960s and 1970s. If one looks at William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, considered the seminal popular English language history on the Nazi regime, the word "Holocaust" is not found in the index or ever referenced. See WILLIAM SHIRER,

    RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH (Simon & Schuster 1990) (1959).

    it for so long? As Beschloss points out, not only did Roosevelt fail to make any speech for over a year-and-a-half, he further failed to set any propaganda machinery in motion to broadcast the crimes.11 The Roosevelt Administration never relaxed immigration policies for...