Henry Morgenthau’s film depicts American anti-Semitism during World War II

New York filmmaker Hilan Warshaw didn’t intend to start his documentary about Henry Morgenthau with darkness.

But after the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7 last year, he felt he had to speak out on anti-Semitism — the same hatred that haunted his interlocutor, a former Treasury secretary, during World War II.

“Dear Mr. Morgenthau,” which premieres at the Quad on September 13, plunges the viewer into several awkward minutes of darkness, punctuated by angry sound bites of protesters shouting epithets like “Zionists must die” — a refrain Warshaw heard frequently during pro-Palestinian protests in New York earlier this year.

“When I started making this movie, I decided there would be nothing contemporary in it,” Warshaw told The Post.

“I wanted to tell a historical story as engagingly as possible without creating contemporary parallels. But after October 7, I discovered that the subject of my film was standing before me in the world we live in.”

In his Upper West Side neighborhood, posters depicting Israeli hostages, including babies and toddlers, have been daubed with swastikas or torn down, he said.

“Anyone who is intellectually honest has to ask themselves: What the hell is driving the ferocity of these protests,” said Warshaw, an Emmy Award-winning writer and director whose previous films include “Wagner’s Jews,” about the Jewish supporters and fans of controversial German opera composer Richard Wagner.

“Anti-Semitism, the tradition of blaming and hating the Jewish people… has been deeply embedded in Western society and beyond for more than 2,000 years,” Warshaw said. “And it hasn’t gone away.”

Anti-Semitism was present in the upper echelons of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime government, and Morgenthau, a longtime friend of the president, was increasingly frustrated by his failure to save European Jews from Nazi concentration camps.

The film begins with heartbreaking letters sent to Morgenthau by distant relatives in Germany, begging him to bring them to America. Morgenthau’s father, a real estate developer and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, was born in Germany and emigrated with his family to New York in 1866.

He founded a dynasty, and although Morgenthau Sr. became famous as the leader of Reform Judaism in the city, the second generation of the Morgenthau clan was essentially not composed of practicing Jews.

If anything, they were typical Americans—a distinguished family of intellectuals and public servants who liked to spend most of their time on a farm in upstate New York, not far from the Roosevelts’ country estate.

The Morgenthaus family celebrated Christmas every year at their home in Dutchess County, and Morgenthau said he never attended a Passover Seder until he retired from government work after World War II.

“Being Jewish was something that was never discussed in front of children,” his son Henry Morgenthau III says in the film. “It was kind of a birth defect.”

When Henry Morgenthau III was a child and a little girl asked him in Central Park what his religion was, he asked his mother, who said that if anyone asked him again, he should simply reply, “You’re an American.”

Henry Morgenthau III, an author and producer, died in 2018. His younger brother Robert was a longtime Manhattan district attorney who died a year later. Their younger sister Joan Morgenthau, a doctor, died in 2012.

Henry Morgenthau, born in 1891, was a typical American gentleman and bureaucrat who was fiercely loyal to Roosevelt. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and the Dwight School before studying agriculture and architecture at Cornell University.

Although he never earned a college degree, he helped Roosevelt design the New Deal and prepared the U.S. economy for war as Secretary of the Treasury, the second-highest position in the cabinet.

But when it came to saving Jews, his efforts were thwarted. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who oversaw the agency’s Visa Division, put U.S. national security ahead of humanitarian relief and was also a known anti-Semite.

The popular propaganda film “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” fueled war hysteria that helping refugees would enable spies to penetrate the United States.

“There were a lot of obstacles to rescue,” Warshaw said. “The State Department was full of anti-Semites, and public opinion was against accepting refugees.

“The sad fact is that Roosevelt did not act to save more Jews because he did not believe in it. He once boasted to Morgenthau that he was personally responsible for Harvard’s introduction of quotas for Jewish students.”

In 1942, when secret cables reported that the Nazis were killing more than 6,000 Jews a day in Poland, Morgenthau began working with the World Jewish Congress and other aid organizations to help Jews save Europe.

A year later, in 1944, he managed to convince Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board, which sponsored a mission by Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg to Hungary to help Jews leave the country. More than 200,000 Jews were saved.

Despite his efforts, Morgenthau was treated with contempt 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 Truman’s aides, known as the “Jewish boys” — to the Potsdam Conference, where the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union were determining Germany’s future.

Churchill, in turn, addressed Morgenthau as “Shylock.”

Despite opposition, Morgenthau pressed on even after leaving government, becoming involved in humanitarian aid for Jewish nonprofits with the help of his longtime secretary, Henrietta Klotz, a Jewish woman and one of the film’s subjects, who was adamant in her mission to save refugees.

“When push came to shove, he had to face the horrifying knowledge not only of the Nazis but of his own government,” Warshaw said of his film’s subject.

“Unlike virtually everyone else around him, he disregarded the advice of his family, the orders of the president, and… put it all on the line to fight for what was right.”

In later life, Morgenthau devoted his energies to Jewish philanthropic activities and was a financial advisor to Israel. He died of heart failure in 1967.

Dear Mr. Morgenthau will premiere at the Quad on September 13 and run through September 19. Director Hilan Warshaw will be available for Q&A after the screening on September 14 and 15.