David Wyman, Scholar of America’s Holocaust Response, Dies at 89

David S. Wyman, who in a forceful, exhaustively documented 1984 book argued that the United States willfully failed to act to save Jews from the Holocaust, died Wednesday at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was 89.

His death was announced by Rafael Medoff, the founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, who said Wyman had been ill for some time.

Wyman’s book was as uncompromising as its title, “The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945.” The opening words of its preface signaled that Wyman was certain he had proved long-standing contentions that the United States had cost tens of thousands of Jews their lives.

“This book has been difficult to research and to write,” he wrote. “One does not wish to believe the facts revealed by the documents on which it is based. America, the land of refuge, offered little succor. American Christians forgot about the good Samaritan. Even American Jews lacked the unquenchable sense of urgency the crisis demanded. The Nazis were the murderers, but we were the all too passive accomplices.”

The book became a best-seller. It also riled some of Wyman’s fellow historians. Especially contentious was its unflattering portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who Wyman concluded did nothing for 14 months after learning in 1942 of the mass exterminations of Jews in Nazi Germany — and, when he finally did act, did so only out of political calculus.

“If you look in a larger context,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. complained in 1994, reacting to an episode of PBS’s documentary series “American Experience” based largely on Wyman’s book, “no one did more to save the Jews in Europe than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by his opposition to Hitler, by changing the United States from an isolationist nation to a nation prepared to go to war.”

Wyman remained unapologetic.

“If it had gone into depth on Roosevelt and the Holocaust,” he said of the PBS program, “it would have been worse. There would have been a couple of more positive things to say, and eight or 10 worse things.”

David Sword Wyman was born on March 6, 1929, in Weymouth, Massachusetts. His father, Hollis, was a mechanical engineer, and his mother, the former Ruth Sword, was a teacher and librarian.

His family attended the Centenary Methodist Church in Auburndale, Massachusetts, where young David was involved with the youth group. He was a grandson of two Protestant ministers, and his later research took on a personal dimension when he documented the failure of American Christians to speak or act on behalf of European Jews during the war.

“I don’t cry easily, but all my life I had been taught to believe in the good Samaritan, yet here were Christians killing Jews in Europe,” he told The New York Times in 1984, describing an emotional reaction to his own research. “And here was The Christian Century, a religious magazine that had always been at the cutting edge of care and concern, failing to raise its voice against the Holocaust.”

He graduated from Boston University in 1951 with a degree in history. He received a master’s degree in education at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire in 1961 and a doctorate in history at Harvard in 1966, taking a job that same year teaching history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He retired there in 1991.

Wyman first began to examine the response to Naziism in “Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941,” published in 1968. “The Abandonment of the Jews” was not the first book to suggest a systemic failure to act on the part of the United States and England, but it was perhaps the most thoroughly researched. Wyman put 15 years into the project, scouring numerous archives. His book was 444 pages long and included 71 pages of footnotes.

In his research he found not only a president and Christian leaders who seemed uninterested in the problem, but also a federal bureaucracy that could be openly hostile to helping Jews, a news media that underplayed the shocking revelations about the exterminations, and a Congress and country where anti-Semitism and anti-immigration sentiment encouraged inaction. Gas chambers and the rail lines leading to them could easily have been bombed, he found, and rescue efforts could have saved at least some of the millions who died.

Despite the complaints by some historians, John Gross, reviewing the book in The New York Times, found Wyman’s conclusions well grounded.

“Where there are allowances to be made, he makes them,” he wrote; “where there are honorable exceptions, he honors them; but in the end he is compelled to hand down a damning indictment.”

In 2003 scholars and others inspired by Wyman’s book founded the Wyman Institute to promote education and research on the response to the Holocaust. Medoff said Wyman had been reluctant to see his name on the letterhead.

“He was an extremely humble person and never would have created an institute named after himself," Medoff said by email, adding, “It took considerable effort to persuade him to let us put his name on it.” Wyman did, however, become chairman of the organization.

Medoff said that Wyman’s book about the failure to rescue European Jews during World War II played a role in rescuing about 800 Ethiopian Jews four decades later. They had been stranded in Sudan when an effort to airlift them to Israel to escape famine and discrimination was halted. A copy of Wyman’s book, then on the best-seller lists, was given to George H.W. Bush, who was then the vice president, and he and his aides were urged by Rep. John Miller, R-Wash., to read it and take action.

"I told them that this was a chance to write a very different history than the history of America’s response to the Holocaust," Miller was quoted as saying in a 2008 article that Medoff wrote about the moment.

In March 1985, American planes took the rest of the refugees to Israel. Wyman later met some of them on a visit to that country.

Wyman’s wife, the former Mildred Louise Smith, whom he married in 1950, died in 2003. He is survived by a son, James; a daughter, Teresa; a sister, Nancy Bissell Spraragen; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

In his landmark book, Wyman posed questions that seem ever relevant.

“Would the reaction be different today?” he asked. “Would Americans be more sensitive, less self-centered, more willing to make sacrifices, less afraid of differences now than they were then?”