New York filmmaker Hilan Warshaw had no intention of beginning his documentary on Henry Morgenthau in darkness.
But after that 7 October terrorist attacks In Israel last year, he felt he must make a statement about anti-Semitism — the same hatred that pervaded the mind of his subject, the former Treasury secretary, during World War II.
,Your Honorable Mr. Morgenthau,”, which premiered at the Quad Cinema on September 13, immerses viewers in several uncomfortable minutes of darkness, including angry snippets of audio of protesters shouting “Zionists need to die” — a chant that Warshaw heard often during pro-Palestinian protests in New York City earlier this year.
“When I started making this movie, I decided I wasn’t going to put anything modern into it,” Warshaw said in an interview with The Post.
“I wanted to tell the historical story as deeply as possible, without drawing contemporary parallels. But after October 7, I felt the subject of my film was right in front of me in the world we live in.”
He said that in his Upper West Side neighborhood, posters of Israeli hostages, some of them babies and young children, were defaced with swastikas or torn down.
“Anyone who is intellectually honest should ask: What is behind the ferocity of these protests,” said Warshaw. Warshaw is an Emmy Award-winning writer and director whose previous films include “Wagner’s Jews,” the story of Jewish supporters and admirers of controversial German opera composer Richard Wagner.
“The tradition of scapegoating and hating the Jewish people … has been deeply ingrained in Western society and beyond for more than 2,000 years,” Warshaw said. “And it hasn’t gone away.”
Anti-Semitism pervaded the highest levels of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wartime government, where the president's old friend Morgenthau became increasingly frustrated by his inability to save Europe's Jews from Nazi concentration camps.
The film opens with heartbreaking letters sent to Morgenthau by distant relatives in Germany, pleading with him to come to America. Morgenthau's father, a real estate developer and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, was born in Germany, and immigrated to New York City with his family in 1866.
He founded a dynasty, and while Morgenthau Sr. was well-known as a leader of Reform Judaism in the city, the second generation of the Morgenthau dynasty had hardly any Jewish followers.
If anything, they were staunch Americans, a renowned family of intellectuals and public servants who preferred to spend most of their time on a farm in upstate New York, near the Roosevelts' pastoral estate.
The Morgenthaus celebrated Christmas in Dutchess County every year, and Morgenthau confessed he never attended a Passover Seder until after he left his government job at the end of World War II.
“Being Jewish was something that was never discussed in front of the children,” his son, Henry Morgenthau III, says in the film. “It was a kind of birth defect.”
As a child, when Henry Morgenthau III was asked by a little girl in Central Park what his religion was, he asked his mother, who said that if anyone asked him again he would simply say, “You're an American.”
Writer and producer Henry Morgenthau III died in 2018. His younger brother, Robert, Morgenthau, Manhattan's longtime district attorney, died a year later. Her younger sister, Joan Morgenthau, a doctor, died in 2012.
Henry Morgenthau, born in 1891, was the archetypal American country gentleman and bureaucrat who was fiercely loyal to Roosevelt. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and the Dwight School before studying agriculture and architecture at Cornell University.
Although he never earned an academic diploma, he helped Roosevelt craft the New Deal and prepare the U.S. economy for war as Treasury Secretary, the second-highest position in the Cabinet.
But when it came to saving Jews, their efforts were stymied. Assistant State Department Secretary Breckinridge Long, who oversaw the agency's visa division, prioritized U.S. national security over humanitarian aid, and he was also an anti-Semite.
A popular propaganda film, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” fueled the wartime hysteria that helping refugees would allow spies to infiltrate America.
“There were many obstacles to the rescue,” Warshaw said. “The State Department was full of anti-Semites, and general opinion was against letting in refugees.
“The sad fact is that Roosevelt took no steps to save more Jews because he did not believe in doing so. He once claimed to Morgenthau that he was personally responsible for Harvard setting quotas for Jewish students.”
In 1942, when secret cables revealed that the Nazis were killing more than 6,000 Jews per day in Poland, Morgenthau began working with the World Jewish Congress and other relief groups to save Jews in Europe.
A year later, in 1944, he successfully persuaded Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board, which sponsored Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg's mission to Hungary to help Jews leave the country. More than 200,000 Jews were saved.
Despite his efforts, Morgenthau was treated contemptuously by his government colleagues, especially after Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Roosevelt's successor, President Harry Truman, refused to send any of Roosevelt's advisers—a group that included Morgenthau and aides whom Truman called “the Jew boys”—to the Potsdam Conference, where the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union considered Germany's future.
For his part, Churchill called Morgenthau “Shylock”.
Despite the opposition, Morgenthau kept moving forward even after leaving the government. He tried his hand at relief work for Jewish nonprofits with the help of his longtime secretary, Henrietta Klotz, who was Jewish and one of the heroines of the film, working tirelessly in her mission to save refugees.
“When it came to that, he was confronted with terrifying information, not only about the Nazis, but about his own government,” Warshaw said of his film’s subject.
“Unlike anyone else in his circle, he defied the advice of his family, the orders of the president, and … risked everything to fight for what was right.”
In his later life Morgenthau donated his energies to Jewish philanthropic efforts and was a financial advisor to Israel. He died of heart failure in 1967.
“The Honorable Mr. Morgenthau” premieres Sept. 13 at the Quad Cinema and runs through Sept. 19. Filmmaker Hilan Warshaw will answer questions following the screenings on Sept. 14 and 15.
