An Old Battle's Fresh Wounds

Still, the director of the Wyman Institute, Rafael Medoff, said he could not let stand "the ad-hominem attacks and mischaracterizations" of his own and other historians' works in Rosen's "otherwise unoriginal" book.

Medoff said Rosen was correct that Jewish leaders in Palestine initially opposed the bombing of Auschwitz. But, he said, that was because until mid-1944, they thought it was a labor camp, not a death factory. By July of 1944, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem had received the first eyewitness account of the mass-murder process, known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. After that, Medoff said, Jewish Agency officials around the world lobbied the United States and its allies to bomb Auschwitz and other death camps, to no avail.

Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, a former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and one of the 55 signers of the letter protesting Rosen's book, said he thinks that Wyman and Medoff are closer than Rosen to the truth about FDR. But he acknowledged that "this is an ongoing, legitimate debate."

The whole episode, he added, is a reminder of the "twin dangers" of Holocaust research. "There's the danger you become so objective that you grow cold, and there's the danger you become so full of emotion that you can't tolerate anybody disagreeing," he said. "It really shows the wound is still raw. It hasn't turned to ancient history."

While the FDR debate continues to evolve, evangelist D. James Kennedy's Florida-based television and radio organization, Coral Ridge Ministries, has produced a TV documentary and a book linking the Holocaust to the theory of evolution.

Called "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," the documentary aired Aug. 26-27 on Christian cable networks and about 200 television stations across the country. It is now being sold on DVD along with the companion book, "Evolution's Fatal Fruit: How Darwin's Tree of Life Brought Death to Millions." Both describe the Nazis' embrace of eugenics and social Darwinism, their attempt to build a master race and to justify racism, slavery and even murder as survival of the fittest.

Coral Ridge Ministries spokesman John Aman contended that "Darwinism is a philosophy, it's a worldview, and one of the key things in it is that evolution advances by death, so death is a good thing. Hitler thought he was doing civilization a favor by eliminating lives that were not worth living. We of course think that is an egregious moral tragedy and a consequence of the worldview that was initiated by Darwin and popularized by his followers."

Contemporary evolutionists consider eugenics and social Darwinism a perversion of evolutionary theory, not a legitimate extension of Darwin's thought. Some critics have called the documentary a political shot in the battle over creationism, one intended to promote the idea that belief in evolution is a moral slippery slope. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Kennedy of "trivializing the Holocaust" in a "mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war."

The Anti-Defamation League also said it had contacted one of the best-known scientists interviewed in the documentary, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and found that he was misled. Collins speaks in the film about his view that evolution and belief in God are fully compatible, a position he elaborates in his book "The Language of God," published this year.

"I would not have agreed to participate if I had understood that the program would promote the concept of a direct connection between Darwin's theory of evolution and the evils of the Holocaust and the massacre at Columbine High School," Collins said in a written answer to questions from The Post. "My own views on evolution and faith are . . . strongly discordant with the perspective put forward by the producers of this documentary."

Coral Ridge Ministries said it would remove Collins's interview from any future airings of the documentary and would stop using his name to promote it.

"We consider him a fellow Christian and have reached a friendly understanding with him about this matter," Kennedy's organization said.