Product Description

From one of America's most respected historians, The Conquerors reveals one of the most important stories of World War II. As Allied soldiers fought the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt and, later, Harry Truman fought in private with Churchill and Stalin over how to ensure that Germany could never threaten the world again.

Eleven years in the writing, drawing on newly opened American, Soviet and British documents as well as private diaries, letters and secret audio recordings, Michael Beschloss's gripping narrative lets us eavesdrop on private conversations and telephone calls among a cast of historical giants. The book casts new light upon Roosevelt's concealment of what America knew about Hitler's war against the Jews and his foot-dragging on saving refugees; FDR's actions so shocked his closest friend in the Cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that Morgenthau risked their friendship by accusing the President of "acquiescence" in the "murder of the Jews."

After the Normandy invasion, "obsessed" by what he had learned about the Nazis and the Holocaust, Morgenthau drew up a secret blueprint for the Allies to crush Germany by destroying German mines and factories after the European victory. As The Conquerors shows, FDR endorsed most of Morgenthau's plan, and privately pressured a reluctant Churchill to concur. Horrified, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry Stimson leaked the plan to the press at the zenith of the 1944 campaign. Hitler's propagandist Joseph Goebbels denounced the Roosevelt-Churchill "Jewish murder plan" and claimed it would kill forty-three million Germans. Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey charged that by stiffening German resistance, publicity about Morgenthau's plan had cost many U.S. soldiers' lives.

The Conquerors explores suspicions that Soviet secret agents manipulated Roosevelt and his officials to do Stalin's bidding on Germany. It reveals new information on FDR's hidden illnesses and how they affected his leadership -- and his private talk about quitting his job during his fourth term and letting Harry Truman become President. It shows us FDR's final dinner, in April 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, at which the President and Morgenthau were still arguing over postwar Germany. Finally it shows how the unprepared new President Truman managed to pick up the pieces and push Stalin and Churchill to accede to a bargain that would let the Anglo-Americans block Soviet threats against Western Europe and ensure that the world would not have to fear another Adolf Hitler.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #763950 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-29
• Released on: 2002-10-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 377 pages

Amazon.com Review
Long before an Allied victory was assured during World War II, the Big Three--Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--began discussing how to prevent Germany from ever again threatening the world. The fact that Germany today is a peaceful, democratic ally of the U.S. is "one of America's great twentieth-century international achievements," writes esteemed historian Michael Beschloss. How such a transformation was accomplished is the subject of The Conquerors.

Drawing on thousands of previously unreleased documents, secret audio recordings, private diaries, and other information recently made available, Beschloss details the complex diplomacy between the Allied leaders, including their differences over whether to demand Germany's unconditional surrender; how, if at all, to divide Germany after the war; and how to effectively punish Germany without creating the kind of resentment that led to the rise of Hitler. The relationship between the three leaders, and later, Truman, is fascinating, as Beschloss reveals private conversations, ulterior motives, and numerous back-channel deals that took place. Of particular interest is the maneuvering of Roosevelt and Churchill, who were both concerned that the Soviets would attempt a postwar power grab in Western Europe if given the chance. The book also deals with Roosevelt's reluctance to deal with Germany's systematic extermination of the Jews, and the role that his old friend and Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., played in pushing the President into action. After learning of the Holocaust, Morgenthau became obsessed with punishing Germany severely, drafting a plan that called for the complete destruction of their mines and factories as a way of forcing Germany into subsistence farming--ideas that put him at odds with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and many others in the administration.

The Conquerors is a superbly written, if brief, treatment of the political events leading up to the defeat of Germany, with the main players brought vividly to life by Beschloss's keen eye for detail and his ability to expose the human strengths and weaknesses of the participants. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
Beschloss provides an engaging, if not revelatory, narrative of key events leading up to the conferences at Yalta (Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin) and Potsdam (Truman, Churchill, Stalin) and the Allies' decisions about how to prevent future aggression by post-WWII Germany. In his preface, Beschloss makes much of the fact that this study draws on newly released documents from the former Soviet Union, the FBI and private archives. But Beschloss has unearthed nothing to change accepted views of how FDR developed and then began to implement his vision for postwar Germany. The tales Beschloss gathers here are no different from those already told in such books as Eric Larrabee's Commander-in-Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (1987) and Henry Morgenthau III's Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (1991). With reference to the latter volume, one of Beschloss's major subplots traces Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s efforts to interest FDR in a draconian, retributive plan (the "Morgenthau Plan") to destroy what little might remain of Germany's infrastructure after the war. Wisely, FDR demurred. Although breaking no new ground, this book by noted presidential historian Beschloss (who has published a trilogy on Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes) will fill the bill for those who need a readable account of how American officials and their Allied counterparts came to draw the map of postwar Europe. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Beschloss draws on newly opened archives to show how Roosevelt and Truman decided Germany's fate.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

WWII Revisted Yet Again
World War II has been one of the most popular subjects in book publishing in the last few years. But much of those books like Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation series and the late Stephen Ambrose's books focused on the average foot soldier's experiences. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss' The Conquerors looks at the men at the highest ranking of power, most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mr. Beschloss is an obvious devotee to FDR and he considers him the most important world leader of the 20th century, but the book is even-handed in its assessment of FDR's handling of the war and post war Germany. Most notable is FDR's take on the Holocaust and his Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau's efforts to convince FDR to take a more active role in stopping the concentration camps. The fact that FDR was reflecting the views of day toward Judaism is not an excuse in Mr. Beschloss' mind for his passive attitude towards dealing with that most harrowing of situations. Though much of the subject matter has been recounted in far too many other books to note, Mr. Beschloss' writing style is more entertaining than most. While he deals with high-minded subject matter, he presents it in an intelligent, yet ease to digest manner.

Fascinating story--I had no idea that this really happened
I first heard about this book when I read an excerpt from it it Newsweek Magazine in October. The excerpt's big story was that Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked to bomb Auschwitz and other death camps to stop the Holocaust and refused -- almost without thinking about it. I have read many books about this and never knew that he made that decision himself. The book reports why Roosevelt said he would not bomb.
When I bought this book, I could not stop reading it. This book shows a whole new view of how World War 2 was fought against Germany -- why Roosevelt made Stalin and Churchill go for unconditional surrender, even though that strategy ended up killing many more British and American soldiers.
This book shows how for most of the war, Roosevelt resisted pleas to do something to try to save Jewish refugees and stop the killing of the Jews. I heard the author on TV or radio saying that Roosevelt said that the U.S. is a Protestant country and that the Catholics and Jews were only here because they were tolerated. There is a lot of that in the book, as well as Roosevelt saying that if there was a U.S. demagogue who went against the Jews, more blood would flow through New York City's streets than Berlin.
The book also shows how sick FDR was at the end of the war, even forgetting that he had signed certain documents and then asserting that he had not signed them. The book says that when Roosevelt died, he was planning to quit being President and give the job to Harry Truman and then become secretary of the U.N.
It also shows Roosevelt's antipathy toward the Germans, saying that they all should be castrated at the end of the war or that 50 or 100 thousand German officers should be murdered at the end of World War II.
The book tells all about what Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin really said to each other in secret about Hitler and the Nazis and the Jews, and makes you feel as if you are sitting with them and listening to what they are saying. Beschloss got tapes of President Roosevelt's conversations with people around him and makes these talks sound as if they happened today. Roosevelt was oftentimes a cruel man in fighting with his employees and making them fight with each other, but we have to also remember and never forget he was the one who won the war.
This book is more interesting than any recent novel I have read and is really the way people should write history. I had read a lot of World War 2 books before (my wife thinks I have read every book on World War 2 that has ever been printed) and did not understand that, before reading this book, I understood as little as I did about that war. When I got to the end of the book, I was sorry that it ended.

The Battle over Germany's Future
A subject which is not so commonly explored in the history of WWII is the struggle to decide the future of Germany in order to avoid yet another war. This is thr subject of historian Michael Beschloss's latest work. The title is a little misleading in that it does not focus solely or even primarily on Roosevelt and Truman. Rather Beschloss, in a manner similar to David Halberstam and Stephen Ambrose takes a narrative, expositional and non-scholarly linear approach to the subject. One character who plays a major role in this book is Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt's Jewish Treasury secretary. Sickened by what he learns of German atrocities, Morgenthau is convinved to promote a plan that calls for Germany to be turned into a series of agricultural cantons with all its industry destroyed. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry Stimson are opposed to the plan and work to undermine it. Roosevelt is seen as an increasingly distant figure. His method of playing one aid off another while keeping his true thoughts to himself ultimately undermines his successor Truman, who upon taking office knows nothing of Roosevelt's thinking and is forced to improvise, Churchill is reduced to irrelevance, his ideas largely ignored by FDR. I do not fully agree with Beschloss's thesis. As far as I can see, no comprehensive plan for the fate of Germany was ever agreed upon. During the earlier years of the war, through June 1944, Roosevelt was overly concerned with keeping Stalin happy for important reasons. He was afraid Stalin would make a separate peace with Hitler. He failed to foresee the break down of the alliance and the need to check the Soviets. As it turned out, none of the plans worked out as well as the reality. No one foresaw the permanent division of Germany or that Conrad Adenaur would turn West Germany firmly towards the orbit of the United States and away from reunion with the East,thereby destroying forever the old style German nationalism. Beschloss spends a lot of time chronicling the various plans that were proposed and not enough on why none of those plans ever came to pass. The book makes for easy reading and you do not have to know much history of this era to enjoy it. I learned a lot about some figures such as Morgenthau of whom I knew little. I would recommend it but do not take it as gospel.