New York filmmaker Hiran Warshaw didn't intend to start his documentary about Henry Morgenthau in the dark.
But after the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel last year, he felt he needed to make a statement about anti-Semitism — the same hatred that plagued his subjects, a former Treasury secretary during World War II.
“Mr. Morgenthau,Premiering at the Quad Cinema on Sept. 13, the film will usher audiences into an uncomfortable few minutes of darkness with angry audio snippets of protesters yelling expletives like “Die Zionists” — a phrase Warshaw heard often at pro-Palestinian protests in New York City earlier this year.
“When I started making this film, I was determined not to have anything modern in it,” Warshaw told The Washington Post in an interview.
“I wanted to tell a historical story in as immersive a way as possible, without drawing parallels to the present day. But after October 7, I realized that the subject of my film was confronting the world we live in.”
On the Upper West Side, posters of Israeli hostages, including some depicting young children, were defaced with swastikas and torn down.
“Anyone who is intellectually honest has to ask what is really behind the ferocity of these protests,” said Warshaw, an Emmy-winning writer and director whose films include “Wagner's Jews,” which portrays Jewish supporters and fans of the controversial German opera composer Richard Wagner.
“Anti-Semitism, the tradition of scapegoating and hating Jews, has persisted in Western society and beyond for over 2,000 years,” Warshaw said, “and it's not going away.”
Anti-Semitism was rife in the upper echelons of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wartime administration, and Morgenthau, a longtime friend of the president, had grown increasingly frustrated with his failure to save Europe's Jews from Nazi concentration camps.
The film begins with a heartbreaking letter from a distant relative in Germany, pleading with Morgenthau to come to the U.S. Morgenthau's father, a real estate developer who served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, was born in Germany and emigrated to New York City with his family in 1866.
He built a dynasty, and while Morgenthau Sr. was a well-known leader of Reform Judaism in the city, the second generation of Morgenthau clan members was largely made up of non-Jews.
If anything, they were ardent Americans, a family of distinguished intellectuals and civil servants who preferred to spend most of their time on a farm in upstate New York near the Roosevelts' country estate.
Although the Morgenthauses celebrated Christmas every year at their summer home in Dutchess County, Morgenthaus confessed that he had never attended a Passover Seder until he left his government job at the end of World War II.
“Being Jewish was never discussed in front of our children,” his son, Henry Morgenthau III, says in the film. “It was a kind of birth defect.”
When Henry Morgenthau III was a child in Central Park and a little girl asked him what his religion was, he asked his mother, who told him that if anyone ever asked him again, he should just say, “You're an American.”
Writer and producer Henry Morgenthau III died in 2018. His brother Robert, the longtime Manhattan district attorney, died a year later. His sister Joan Morgenthau, a physician, died in 2012.
Born in 1891, Henry Morgenthau was a typical American country gentleman and bureaucrat, fiercely loyal to Roosevelt. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and the Dwight School, then studied agriculture and architecture at Cornell University.
Though he never earned a degree, he helped craft Roosevelt's New Deal and, as Secretary of the Treasury, the second-highest position in his cabinet, prepared the U.S. economy for war.
But his efforts to rescue Jews were hampered by the State Department's assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, who oversaw visas and prioritized U.S. national security over humanitarian aid, and was a known anti-Semite.
The popular propaganda film “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” stoked wartime hysteria that helping refugees would enable spies to infiltrate the United States.
“There were many obstacles to the rescue,” Warshaw said. “The State Department was filled with anti-Semites and public opinion was against accepting refugees.”
“Sadly, Roosevelt never took action to save the Jews because he didn't believe in the value of doing so. He once boasted to Morgenthau that he was responsible for Harvard's introduction of a quota system for Jewish students.”
In 1942, after secret cables revealed that the Nazis were killing more than 6,000 Jews a day in Poland, Morgenthau began working with the World Jewish Congress and other relief organizations to help rescue European Jews.
A year later, in 1944, he succeeded in persuading President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board, which helped send Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg to Hungary to help Jews escape the country. Over 200,000 Jews were rescued.
Despite Morgenthau's efforts, he was despised by his government colleagues, especially after Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Roosevelt's successor, President Harry Truman, refused to send Roosevelt's advisors (a group that Morgenthau and Truman called the “Jew boys”) to the Potsdam Conference, where the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union discussed Germany's future.
Churchill, on the other hand, called Morgenthau a “Shylock.”
Despite the opposition, Morgenthau pressed on after he left government, immersing himself in relief efforts for Jewish nonprofits with the help of his longtime secretary, Henrietta Klotz, a Jew who is one of the film's protagonists and whose single-minded mission to help refugees was so strong.
“When the time comes, he's faced with terrifying knowledge not only about the Nazis but about his own government,” Warshaw said of the film's subject.
“Unlike almost everyone else around him, he went against the advice of his family and the orders of the president to risk everything to fight for justice.”
Morgenthau became active in Jewish philanthropy and served as a financial adviser to Israel in his later years. He died of heart failure in 1967.
“Honorable Mr. Morgenthau” will be screening at Quad Cinema from Sept. 13 to Sept. 19. Filmmaker Hilan Warshaw will be available to answer questions after screenings on Sept. 14 and 15.
