Franklin D. Roosevelt, the holocaust, and modernity's rescue rhetorics

This essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the third FDR administration's handling of information on the Holocaust during World War II, and the memories that we have of those events. The author contends that a study of key rhetorical histories shows how President Roosevelt and his advisers had a great deal of information about Hitler's Final Solution, and that they were not as indifferent as we have made them out to be. Between 1940 and 1944, FDR's administrators decided to treat the winning of the war as the ultimate form of rescue, but the purveyors of today's rescue rhetorics contend that Roosevelt's supporters neglected to consider alternate plans for massive rescue missions or negotiations with the enemy.