The InterDependent

Dan Plesch’s book, “America, Hitler and the UN,” is something of a historical revelation. First school, then university and then four years covering the United Nations itself taught me that it was created by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II, not in the middle. Indeed, when I was the BBC's UN correspondent, I used the Pathé newsreel of the San Francisco Conference, where the UN was said to be founded, in countless broadcasts, with the newsreader solemnly telling cinema-going audiences that the UN had been signed into existence “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

But Plesch reveals that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first used the phrase to a naked Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain at the time, on the morning of Dec. 29, 1941. Winston was emerging from his morning bath when he heard the wheelchair-bound U.S. president calling him -- just weeks after Pearl Harbor and after Hitler's declaration of war against the U.S. -- to say that Roosevelt had hit upon the name “United Nations” to define the countries allied against the Axis powers. The State Department had come up with the more tedious and infinitely less catchy “Associated Powers,” which Roosevelt discarded.

The writer’s thesis is that the January 1942 Declaration by United Nations, which built on Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter of 1941, led to the development of a wartime UN preceding the actual UN created in San Francisco in June 1945. Using documents from the period, Plesch argues that the embryonic UN played a role in rallying U.S. public support, keeping the Allies together and building the ambitious postwar program.

There are various fascinating snippets of information along the way: the creation of the UN flag by 1944; 15,000 mentions of the UN in newspapers before the California conference; and a banner headline in The Brownsville Herald from 1942 proclaiming “United Nations loses 12 ships.”

By looking at the creation of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, which did the spadework for the Nuremberg trials, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, provider of food to the starving of Greece, Plesch shows how the foundations were laid for the postwar UN agencies. The International Criminal Court has its roots in the War Crimes Commission, just as the World Food Program and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs can trace their origins back to the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

UN Photo

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, left, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of England on the Prince of Wales during the Atlantic Charter meeting on Aug. 14, 1941, defining Allied postwar goals. High-ranking British and American staff members socialize behind them.

Plesch’s chapter on justice for war crimes also shows definitively how much the Allies knew about Hitler’s program to exterminate Europe’s Jews. In December 1942, Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, told the House of Commons “from all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettoes established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews. . . . ”

Eden went on to talk about mass executions and cold-blooded exterminations. By using contemporary documents, Plesch challenges the conventional wisdom that the Allies didn’t know about the Holocaust until later in the war. Once again, I found my school history upended by the work of Plesch, whose day job is directing the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

The propaganda use of the term United Nations by Roosevelt’s government, to persuade the isolationist American public of the benefits of allied action, is painstakingly chronicled by the writer. Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to Washington, tells London in April 1942: “The Administration is seeking ways and means of bringing home to American people the existence of United Nations of which this nation is but a part, and it is in our interest that such a campaign should succeed. . . . ”

This is an important and original book, although Plesch may be overstating the extent to which the UN actually existed before 1945. He makes a convincing intellectual case that the world body was created to win World War II, but this reader, at least, was left feeling that “United Nations at War and Peace” was more of an American slogan than a tangible reality. Was the Lend-Lease program, whereby the U.S. supplied weapons and food to allies, including Britain and Russia, really the foundation of UN collaboration, as Plesch states? Or was the UN more of a rhetorical device used by Roosevelt in his struggles with isolationists in the U.S.?

Either way, this is a stimulating read that will reward all scholars of the UN and those who thought they knew their wartime history.