Posted on 06/15/2013 6:06:35 PM PDT by IsraelBeach
He implicated the leadership, and misled people to think the leaders ‘knew’ when in fact they were ‘told’ or ‘heard about’. There was no direct evidence.
The UK and the Americans did indeed request an answer from the Nazi government concerning alleged atrocities but the Nazis denied the allegations. International agencies did request tours of the detention camps and were granted ‘show’ tours but nothing could be confirmed.
Netanyahu stepped in it this time. He used the wrong words and ended up implicating leaders in allied governments and the people they represented. Reports of alleged atrocities occurring in detention camps did not come through a vacuum, they were not kept secret. They were simply impossible to confirm with clear direct evidence and one does not launch a military strike against a major power based on rumors.
They could have mounted a massive propaganda offensive.
Better than doing nothing.
It’s called the ‘Samson Option’.
No. Captain Schroeder docked in Antwerp upon his return across the Atlantic and arranged for all of the passengers to be disembarked, and then returned to Germany with an empty ship. The passengers went to England, France, Holland, or stayed in Belgium. Many of those who stayed on the continent later died, but there is some dispute as to the number who ended up in death camps.
Oh yeah. Recommended they put DC on that option list many moons ago. Cannot see any down side at this point in time.
“The arguement is that they could have bombed the rail
lines to the camps and even the camps themselves.
The allies focus was the destruction of the Nazi war
machine, the jews paid the price.
Never have understood why some effort wasn’t made to
interdict.”
I can understand why the camps were not prime targets in the war effort. I’ve never understood why the holocaust was kept secret by our leaders until the camps were being liberated by our troops.
This evidence was not admissible and did not confirm the holocaust design. War is hell and atrocities occur. Karski was a third party making allegations. In 1942 the USA was still in preparation for the longer war. The UK was on its knees.
To think Karski’s flimsy report would compel all the allied forces to attack Nazi detention camps is imbecilic. The allied effort was only getting started and the strategy to defeat Nazi Germany was carefully plotted given the constraints of logistics, men and critical targets.
The bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima/Nagasaki could be construed as war crimes and some still think they are. Does that then mean that Americans at the time of WWII should have deposed FDR and Truman for crimes against humanity? Could any power on Earth defeated the Americans for these confirmable war crimes? The answer is no. There was no power on Earth that could go up against the US military forces. And the same holds in 1942 for the Nazi war machine. They were powerful and dangerous. The Allies had to pick their targets and pick them well. Every bombing mission counted. The priority was to stop the Nazi war machine first.
The holocaust was a rumor until it was proven a fact when American soldiers finally arrived at the concentration camps and found the bodies stacked 20 feet high. Those brave soldiers took photos, movies and made interviews of survivors and surrounding villagers to understand the full extent of the crime and then and only then was it understood that it was by design from Hitler’s SS.
The new face of Holocaust denial. Karski met FDR, by the way. The "brave" American soldiers (who's saying they weren't brav, and what does anyone's bravery have to do with what Netanyahu is saying?) didn't discover the death camps located in the areas "liberated" by the Soviets.
Movies, aka “entertainment vehicle products” are not history. Silly, that one has to state the obvious, but this is Al Gore’s invention to enable every idiot have his say.
> “ I’ve never understood why the holocaust was kept secret by our leaders until the camps were being liberated by our troops.”
The holocaust was kept secret by the Nazis even from their own people. The US government officials who received reports of mass extermination could not say with certainty that the atrocities were confirmed, only alleged. The Nazi government was confronted with reports of alleged atrocities but denied the allegations. International agencies were granted tours to detainment camps but they were ‘show’ camps to show how well those detained were treated. These tours confirmed the opposite of the atrocities. There was nothing that could be done except to defeat the Nazi war machine and then open and investigate the camps.
I don’t take kindly to being called a Holocaust denier. You should apologize.
A lot of people met FDR. Karski had flimsy evidence and no confirmation other than a witness to the horror of war. You don’t issue a verdict based on evidence from one party. The fact that FDR met him is a testament to the US Government’s concern for the allegations.
What would you suggest? That FDR issue a declaration to the Nazis that “I will bomb all your train tracks to detention camps and send assassins to kill your SS because Karski told me bad things about you”? Imbecilic.
American soldiers most certainly did discover the atrocities in those death camps. That is well-documented, and irrefutable. The Soldiers that discovered the atrocities were affected for the rest of their lives at the horror they saw.
The horror of war was bad enough for the soldiers to endure and put behind them but to have witnessed the horrors in the death camps leaving a trauma for the rest of one’s life while the other horrors faded is a testament to how much more horrible it was.
Netanyahu shows himself to be a puny little man who has not one iota of the courage that American soldiers, sailors and marines expressed during WWII.
A puny little man? He served in the Israeli special forces.
He has walked he walk and put it on the line showing
every bit the courage we showed during wwII Not to mention
the last fifty years of terror and intifada.
I am happy to know that Israel has a PM of his quality
and spine. I would go to battle with this man and never
fear his fellowship to die with me.
A time is fast approaching when where our hearts will be
and the course they take will have an effect beyond what
we conceive it to be.
Ams Israel Chai ! The People of Israel LIVE!!!
Bibi is right of course...so why did Israel allow a true psychopath - Yitzhak Rabin - to invite a man who said he wanted to finish Hitler’s “solution”, Yasser Arafat, into Israel and sign a insane “peace” accord with him?
On the one hand the true and stated goal of the US and the allies was to destroy Germany's ability to wage war by pouring US resources and manpower into massive air and land assaults against Germany. By grinding them down, day after day with a relentless pounding of German and associated Axis power industry and transport, did the West hope to stop the Germans.
Did the US and GB have the information about the death camps? Most certainly yes. Did they have the time and resources to divert manpower to bomb “sideline” facilties like concentraton camps? The answer is probably yes but again, they concetranted all their resources on stopping German industry.
Bombing Auschwitz and other killing machine facilites could indeed have been done but it was not a priority target. Divert and risk US aircrews to stop the murder of Jews? Hmmmmm, probable but not part of the plan and too much of a diversion from the main mission - halt German war production capability.
As a Jew, I feel that they SHOULD have bombed these camps but as a student of history, I also understand the lack of desire to divert forces and resources for those missions. In those days, we were less human rights-oriented. As a result of the Holocaust, the world pretends to be more human rights supporters.
It is also probable that the stories coming out of occupied Europe were so horrific, so unprecedented, so unbelievable, that they allies thought these assessments to unreal to believe all the details, even from eyewitness accounts and reports.
It is easy for us to sit back and judge what should have, might have been done but one should be more critical of the allies for not accepting Jews fleeing from Nazi Europe, seeking asylum on boats in the 1930's. This is a shamefull episode in that Jews were forced to return to Germany because nobody would take them in. Moreover, thousands tried to get into British Mandate Palestine where they could have been settled but the Brits were hypersensitized to Arab demands to halt Jewish immigration there. Hundreds of thousands could have been saved, amongst them 1.5 million Jewish children!
U.S. Census Bureau projections ...
1965 – U.S. population was 87.8% white and 10.5% black.
2012 – More U.S. babies were born to minorities than whites.
2012 - D.C., HI, CA, NM, and TX had minority populations >50%.
2012 - U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) began issuing green cards (permanent legal resident) to same sex spouses.
2013 – U.S. population is 63% white, 15% Hispanic, and 13% black. (a 24.8% decrease of whites over 48 years since the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act). Jews make up ~ 1.75% of the population.
2013 - >45% of students in K-12 are minorities.
2013 – Democrats in Congress are attempting to reform U.S. immigration law to provide a path to citizenship for a majority of the ~11-30 million illegal alien Hispanics believed to be in the U.S. If this happens, it will dramatically alter the USCB projections of the racial make-up of the U.S. population. Democrats are also working for a policy change that covers illegal alien homosexuals in the U.S. to provide them a path to full citizenship.
2013 – 40% of live births in the U.S. were out of wedlock. White rate = 33%, Hispanic rate = 50%, Black rate = 72%
2018 - U.S. Census Bureau projects the number of non-white children in grades K-12 will be >50%.
2020 - 8 more states (AZ, FL, GA, MD, MS, NV, NJ, and NY) are projected to become minority majority.
2024 - The white population is projected to peak at 200 million before entering a steady decline in absolute numbers.
2039 - Racial and ethnic minorities will make up a majority of the U.S. work-age population. They will be helping to support a disproportionately elderly white population through Social Security and other payroll taxes. More than 1 in 4 people ages 18-64 will be latino.
2043 – Whites are projected to decline to <50% of the population. Racial and ethnic minorities will collectively become a U.S. majority. Hispanics will drive most of the minority growth, due mostly to high birth rates, jumping in share from 17 % (2013) to 26%.
Let’s rewrite the ending to this.
> “It is also probable that the stories coming out of occupied Europe were so horrific, so unprecedented, so unbelievable, that they allies thought these assessments to unreal to believe all the details, even from eyewitness accounts and reports.”
That’s the truth of it. No confirmation could be made unless an Army was sent into German occupied regions and marched to the death camps to verify the reports. And to do that necessitated stopping the Nazi war machine.
Questions were raised with respect to reports of the death camps but the Nazis denied the reports.
International agencies were given tours of camps that were ‘show’ camps and the reports from the tours were reported in the international press. There was no confirmation of death camps. No matter how highly suspicious one could be there was no way to confirm.
Given that war is Hell, and it is indeed, and given that it would risk the war effort to divert an army to inland regions based on possible atrocities, the reports of unconfirmed death camps could not compel a decision from the Allied Command to enter a dangerous area against a might enemy. The Nazi war machine first needed to be weakened enough to ensure the war effort was not put at risk. It wasn’t a certainty that the Allies would win the war.
There were also atrocities committed by Nazi and Nazi collaborators in the Balkans against Christian Serbs. More than 900,000 innocents were murdered. Those murders were confirmed yet the Allies did not rush to the rescue.
Bibi is clearly wrong and right here. He’s wrong by implicating the Allies as somehow complicit as doing nothing to save more Jews in WWII. Of course they did something! They defeated the Nazi power! Could they have done more? Stupid question given the sacrifices of tens of millions in that war.
He is right in emphasizing that Israel should not depend on others to protect themselves from a nuclear attack. But he is stupid to think he can defend Israel without assistance from the US. He needs the Anti-Missile shield capability badly.
If he or any other Israeli PM were to persuade the Knesset to exercise a premeditated Sampson option, the world would condemn Israel, cut off all travel to and from Israel, lay a siege on all imports and exports, and convene an International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. The Israelis would become pariahs and Nazi-like. No matter how anti-Islam we are, as I am, the wholesale extermination of Muslims by nuclear annihilation without provoked attack would not be tolerated.
Of course if there was a nuclear missile strike on Israel by Iran then it would be too late to respond with a Sampson option. That’s why Israel needs the US anti-missile shield. Bibi can say bad things about Obama and he would have a lot of support from Americans. But to badmouth the Allies of WWII is stupid.
Bibi is a puny brain rattling a saber to show he is a ‘tough guy’. The region has plenty of ‘tough guys’. Tough guys are not always smart, often the opposite. Israel would do better to have a statesman at the helm, not a big mouth who tries to lay the severity of the Holocaust at the feet of the Allies in WWII. What an idiot!
Probably to infer, quite correctly, "...and they're not helping NOW."
As Churchill pointed out, cowardly appeasers hope they'll be eaten sometime later than everyone else.
Thanks for the detailed assessment. Wouldn’t bombing concentration camps have caused massive innocent Jewish deaths too however?
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