[351] In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at Harvard University and helped institute a quota to limit the number of Jews admitted to Harvard.[352] After Kristallnacht in 1938, Roosevelt had his ambassador to Germany recalled back to Washington. He did not loosen immigration quotas but did allow German Jews already in the US on visas to stay indefinitely.[353] According to Rafael Medoff, the US president could have saved 190,000 Jewish lives by telling his State Department to fill immigration quotas to the legal limit, but his administration discouraged and disqualified Jewish refugees based on its prohibitive requirements that left less than 25% of the quotas filled.[352]
Hitler chose to implement the "Final Solution"—the extermination of the European Jewish population—by January 1942, and American officials learned of the scale of the Nazi extermination campaign in the following months. Against the objections of the State Department, Roosevelt convinced the other Allied leaders to jointly issue the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, which condemned the ongoing Holocaust and warned to try its perpetrators as war criminals. 