Franklin D. Roosevelt seems to have been exposed to conflicting views, from Hitler's former intimate friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengel's description of top Nazi behavior in terms of “Jewish self-hatred” to images of threatening, corrupt, and almost criminal elements among the European Jews who might be allowed entry into the United States. Hanfstaengel's view of Nazi Germany was that of a “dynamic chaos” caused by power-obsessed, cynical exponents of lower middle-class degeneration, some of them allegedly Jewish in origin, such as Hans Frank (Governor General of occupied Poland), whose great-grandfather was supposedly Jewish. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was accordingly “close” to rich Jewish circles before he discovered the “Nordic soul” and moved away from them. Nazi “chief ideologue” Alfred Rosenberg was allegedly 95% Jewish. “One could ascertain indeed certain Jewish characteristics among aggressive anti-Semites.”

But usually the president deferred everything related to the rescue of Jews to the State Department, which he in fact did not trust very much but used now to take the heat of criticism at home, loudly made in some key media and in the rally at Madison Square Garden against the administration's inaction on rescue matters.

Matters related to the rescue of Jews and refugee problems usually fell into the hands of Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who worked behind the scenes to curb Jewish immigration to the country by arguing that there were dubious elements among the would-be immigrants.