
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.
Richard Breitman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at American University. His many books include The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within; FDR and the Jews, coauthored with Allan J. Lichtman; Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew; and The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution.
Richard A. Salomon is a graduate of Carleton College and Harvard Law School. Since 1994, Mr. Salomon has been the founder and CEO of Vantage Point Consultants. Vantage Point Consultants advises corporations on ways to optimize the expenditure of legal dollars, running the gamut from the drafting of Guidelines for Outside Counsel on cost management principles and converging the number of law firms utilized for common geographic and substantive markets to forging alternative fee arrangements with outside counsel and establishing preferred vendor programs for recurring categories of law-related charges. Vantage Point has worked with over 400 of the Fortune 500, including their General Counsel, throughout the world.
Mr. Salomon is involved in numerous philanthropic and social service-related activities. He is a Senior Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights; a co-founder, member of the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center (2008 – present), the 2017 National Museum of the Year; a member of the Advisory Board of Garry Kasparov’s Renew Democracy Initiative; a member of the Hagel Leadership Council of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats; and a member of the Advisory Board for the Visas for Life Foundation (relating to Consul General Chiune Sugihara) since 1996. Mr. Salomon previously served on the Board of New York University’s Of Many Institute and the President’s Council of the Interfaith Youth Core. He has also organized and moderated many events with the 92Y, Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center, the Illinois Holocaust Museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Common Good, and many other venerable institutions.