Franklin Roosevelt and the Jews

Saviors of the Jewish people appear from time to time. Purim is a holiday celebrating the saving of Jews from annihilation in the Persian Empire. The villain Haman, the royal vizier, wanted to destroy all the Jews in the empire but was foiled by Queen Esther, aided by her cousin Mordechai, who refused to bow or show reverence to Haman. The two persuaded King Ahasuerus to save their Jewish people from genocide. The king was a savior: he granted Esther's petition, the Jews were saved, and the evil Haman was hanged.

Some 2,500 years later, another powerful leader of a great nation was reluctant to become a savior of the same people in spite of the urging of his wife, Eleanor. In Jerusalem, the memorial Yad Vashem honors individuals, Righteous among the Nations. So far it includes more than 26,000 who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust and can be regarded as saviors. Regrettably, U.S. president F.D. Roosevelt, in spite of his notable contributions to American life and public affairs, is not one of them.

Since the appearance in 1984 of David Wyman's book, "The Abandonment of the Jews: Americans and the Holocaust, 1941-4", with its argument that the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large numbers of Jews, controversy has raged over unflattering portrait of Roosevelt as doing little or nothing to save Jews for fourteen months after learning of the murder of European Jews.

The release of more documents on the fate of Jews during World War II, and the exhibition on the subject at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, sheds more light on the views and actions of Roosevelt. Most surprising is that he was concerned less with direct action to preserve the life of Jews

Currently reading “The Zion Chronciles” by Bodie Thoene. Five book series from 1988 detailing the trials and tribulations leading up to Israel statehood in the ‘47-’48 time frame. It’s classified as historical fiction and I’ve done some cross checking on some of the characters and they were indeed true life heroes and villains. Both brits and the US are not seen in a good light. Trying to decide which was worse. According to some of the parts of the book, Truman may have worked behind the scenes to help but not publicly. FDR, not so much before he passed.

The basic fact is that racism, like slavery, is easily found in history worldwide. And that only people who have zero power are not subject to the temptation - and people who claim to be immune to the temptation are most likely self-righteous.
There was “white privilege” when I was growing up, and since the “Great Society” there has been black privilege, too.
In the 1930s and 40s American society wasn’t ready for massive new Jewish immigration, and Hitler made propaganda hay out of that fact.
Today “white privilege” is the freedom to “act white.” Tempered by the freedom of blacks to demand black privilege, which is to say the right to demand equality with people who “act white” while rejecting the responsibility entailed in “acting white.”

"He ignored the news about the camps that came to him from Polish resistance fighters."

I've seen this discussed from time-to-time, but I've never heard what good options FDR had that could have effectively helped the Jews in Poland at that time. We had already declared war against Germany, other than bombing the camps and/or the rail lines leading to them, what could we do?

Lt. Jan Karski made his report to FDR in Dec., 1942. The Eighth Air Force didn't even make its first bombing raid against a target in Germany until Jan. 27th, 1943. The idea that American bombers could have flown across occupied Europe, through Germany and half way across Poland (unescorted for almost the entire trip) to hit a rail line in a forest in Poland, seems pretty unlikely. And even if they were successful, what then? The Nazis would have machine-gunned the occupants of any trains headed toward the disabled camp, repaired the damaged railroad and continued the slaughter. The Nazis had already demonstrated, over and over again, that they didn't need organized camps to kill vast numbers of people.

Having said all that, I think FDR was a POS, but the best way to have helped the Jews, and everyone else in occupied Europe, was to destroy Nazi Germany as quickly as possible.

well, before the war FDR could have also done better: . The quota system permitted a maximum of 25,957 German citizens to immigrate to the US each year. Yet during Roosevelt’s twelve years in office, the German quota was filled in only one year; and in most of those years, it was less than 25 percent filled. A total of nearly 190,000 quota places from Germany and Axis-controlled countries sat unused during the Holocaust years. FDR did not have to confront Congress or ignite public controversy over the issue—all he had to do was quietly instruct the State Department (which administered immigration) to permit immigrants to enter up to the maximum number allowed by law.

In 1938, the governor and legislative assembly of the US Virgin Islands offered to open their territory to Jewish refugees. When the refugee ship St. Louis approached America’s shore the following spring, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. proposed permitting the passengers to stay in the Virgin Islands temporarily on tourist visas. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes also urged using the islands as a haven. But FDR personally blocked the proposals for a Virgin Islands haven. The FDR administration claimed that Nazi spies might sneak in, disguised as refugees (even though no such spies had ever been discovered among Jewish refugees).

----------------------------------------

And as to during the war

George S. McGovern, was in 1944 one of the young bomber pilots who flew over Auschwitz, bombing German oil factories nearby. Here’s what he told Wyman Institute interviewers in 2004:

There is no question we should have attempted…to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.

In any event, the Roosevelt administration rejected the bombing requests on different grounds. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy responded to the requests by claiming that the administration had conducted a “study” that had found that such bombing raids were not feasible because they would require “diverting” bombers from elsewhere in Europe.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.