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1939 letter found, plea to FDR to save Jewish kids
CBS News ^ | 5/18/14 | Staff

Posted on 05/18/2014 10:06:43 PM PDT by Nachum

Last month, 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon told the remarkable story of Sir Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker in London who saved 669 Czech children-- most of them Jewish--from the Nazis during WWII. England took in almost all of the 669 children. Winton, now 104 years old, told 60 Minutes he had made a desperate plea for help to the United States back in 1939. He said he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, describing the plight of the Czech children and asking that America grant refuge to a number of them. "But the Americans wouldn´t take any,

(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...


TOPICS: Germany; Israel; Japan; News/Current Events; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: democrats; demonkkkrats; devilcrats; fdr; germany; israel; japan; jewish; jewishrefugees; letter; munichagreement; nazis; nicholaswinton; plea; unitedkingdom; worldwar2
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1 posted on 05/18/2014 10:06:43 PM PDT by Nachum
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To: Nachum

Bump


2 posted on 05/18/2014 10:11:48 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar (Resist in place.)
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To: Nachum
Langbart also found another memo from the Department of State that instructed the U.S. Embassy in London to “acknowledge receipt of Mr. Winton’s letter” and “advise him that the United States Government is unable, in the absence of specific legislation, to permit immigration in excess of that provided for by existing immigration laws.” …
Wrong kind of “immigrants” for the Democrats even back then. Incredible. Of course, the Dems in a turn of hypocrisy may now use this to push for their “amnesty”, even though this is all on them.
3 posted on 05/18/2014 10:18:37 PM PDT by Olog-hai
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To: Nachum

That was in 1939, as was the St. Louis, FDR won 82% of the Jewish vote in 1932, 85% in 1936, 90% in 1940, and 90% in 1944.

Catholics voted for FDR 85% in 1932, 81% in 1936, 73% in 1940, and 73% in 1944.

Protestants barely voted for him in 1932 and 1936 and voted against him in 1940 and 1944.


4 posted on 05/18/2014 10:25:59 PM PDT by ansel12 ((Ted Cruz and Mike Lee-both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Comm as Ginsberg's importance fades)
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To: Nachum
I'm not in the habit of defending FDR, but I will here. No American in 1939 (or in 1944, for that matter) could have grasped just exactly what the Holocaust was about.

The were certainly warnings. And pleas. But the horror of it all was just too great to be understood by any rational person.

5 posted on 05/18/2014 10:38:16 PM PDT by Leaning Right (Why am I holding this lantern? I am looking for the next Reagan.)
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To: Leaning Right

Jews that understood what was coming got out before it was impossible to do so.


6 posted on 05/18/2014 10:44:17 PM PDT by Jack Hydrazine (Pubbies = national collectivists; Dems = international collectivists; We need a second party!)
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To: Leaning Right
I'm not in the habit of defending FDR, but I will here. No American in 1939 (or in 1944, for that matter) could have grasped just exactly what the Holocaust was about.

FDR wasn't just any old American, he was President of the United States and had access to all kinds of intelligence that average American did not have.
7 posted on 05/18/2014 10:50:16 PM PDT by SoConPubbie (Mitt and Obama: They're the same poison, just a different potency)
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To: Nachum

FDR was a Jew-hating bastard, yet so many Jews who are liberal idiots worship him for his Socialism.


8 posted on 05/18/2014 10:55:22 PM PDT by montag813
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To: Jack Hydrazine
Jews that understood what was coming got out before it was impossible to do so.

That's right, but it wasn't all that many. I wish I could remember where I read it, but awhile back I read the story of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor.

He didn't get out when he could have. And that's because he just couldn't accept that Germany - the land of Luther and Beethoven - had turned into a society of monsters.

9 posted on 05/18/2014 10:57:06 PM PDT by Leaning Right (Why am I holding this lantern? I am looking for the next Reagan.)
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To: Nachum

Henry Morgenthau
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007408

Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (1891–1967) served as United States Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations from January 1, 1934, until July 22, 1945. Morgenthau was born into a prominent Jewish family in New York City; his father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was a prominent real estate investor and diplomat who served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Morgenthau was the only Jew in Roosevelt’s cabinet. While showing some concern for the plight of Germany’s Jews, he did not become actively involved in the issue until the late 1930s. In 1938, aware that the US immigration quota system was insufficient to accommodate the number of immigrants who wanted to come to the United States, he proposed to Roosevelt that the United States acquire British and French Guiana in order to use these territories as a place of refuge for immigrants from Nazi Germany. Roosevelt did not favor that particular proposal; but Morgenthau continued to bring various rescue plans to his attention.

In 1943, months after the US State Department confirmed the existence of a German policy and practice aimed at annihilating the Jews of Europe, Morgenthau became involved in the debate over rescue at the urging of some of his staff at Treasury. Disappointed with the lack of tangible results of the Bermuda Conference in the spring of 1943, and suspecting that US State Department officials had delayed issuance of a license to finance the attempt to provide for the relief and evacuation of Jews in France and Romania, Treasury officials John Pehle, Randolph Paul, and Josiah DuBois presented Morgenthau with an 18-page memorandum entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of Jews” on January 13, 1944. Three days later, Morgenthau, Pehle, and Paul met with President Roosevelt. Warning of future negative assessments of the will and actions of Roosevelt administration with respect to trying to rescue European Jews, they urged the President to agree to a more focused effort by the US government to provide relief and, if possible, rescue Jews and non-Jews threatened with death in German-occupied and German-influenced Europe. The president issued an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board (WRB) on January 22, 1944.


10 posted on 05/18/2014 10:58:50 PM PDT by Jack Hydrazine (Pubbies = national collectivists; Dems = international collectivists; We need a second party!)
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To: Leaning Right

I must say, your defense of FDR is absolutely absurd.

He was the president. He knew exactly what was happening to the Jews.


11 posted on 05/18/2014 10:58:53 PM PDT by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: SoConPubbie
FDR wasn't just any old American, he was President of the United States and had access to all kinds of intelligence that average American did not have.

That's true. I'm no historian, but I wonder how much of that intelligence was incomplete and contradictory. The "fog of war", and all that.

12 posted on 05/18/2014 11:01:33 PM PDT by Leaning Right (Why am I holding this lantern? I am looking for the next Reagan.)
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To: reasonisfaith
He (FDR) was the president. He knew exactly what was happening to the Jews.

Kindly see my post #12. But if you are correct (which I doubt), then FDR really was a monster.

There is a rule of thumb. Do not to ascribe to evil that which is better explained by incompetence. I think that rule applies here.

13 posted on 05/18/2014 11:07:03 PM PDT by Leaning Right (Why am I holding this lantern? I am looking for the next Reagan.)
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To: Leaning Right

In FDR you have an extreme leftist with access to the highest levels of intelligence, back when intelligence worked.

It’s about as hard to believe he didn’t know what was going on in Germany as it is easy to believe he was anti-Semitic.


14 posted on 05/18/2014 11:13:37 PM PDT by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: Leaning Right

It will get better. That’s what they believed. Rather than leave penniless and turn their assets over to the Nazis, they bet their lives on optimism and paid in blood.

But here’s another point. Many who left Nazi rule ended up in German hands anyway. Jews thought they were smart going to France. Yet France was conquered and the French became rabid Jew haters, making the term “Juif” all the rage. There was almost nowhere to go to. Austria and Poland hated them. Czechoslovakia dissolved and was occupied. The Balkans were a basket case and Hungary had the Soros family betraying their own. Nearly all of Europe was conquered or influenced by the Nazis at one point in the war.

England was the only place in Europe that a Jewish refugee could be safe, and that’s if they weren’t killed in the bombings. Switzerland guarded their borders and Sweden took in some Danish Jews in 1940, but that’s about it.

FDR should have let them in. That was an abominable decision, but no one knew the extent of what the Nazis would do to the Jews. Even the Nazis themselves hadn’t decided. The gassing methods of the Final Solution weren’t formally arrived upon until early 1942 at Wannsee. Himmler and Heydrich unleashed the first true brutality during the Russian campaign with mass shootings and graves a few months earlier in 1941.

So this all arrives back at America bashing. We dropped the bomb, interned the Japanese Americans, and didn’t take in the world’s Jews while our country was in a depression. Bad America. Terrible America. Know who believes all that? Oliver Stone.


15 posted on 05/18/2014 11:17:36 PM PDT by Luke21
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To: Luke21

It seems to me that “FDR didn’t know the extent of what the Nazis would do to the Jews” is one of those lines that gets repeated so much people believe it without really thinking.

I find it very hard to believe FDR didn’t know what was going on.


16 posted on 05/18/2014 11:20:41 PM PDT by reasonisfaith ("...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." (2 Thessalonians))
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To: reasonisfaith

FDR was no friend of Jews

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/07/opinion/la-oe-medoff-roosevelt-holocaust-20130407


17 posted on 05/18/2014 11:22:49 PM PDT by bunnie911
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To: Luke21

Good post.


18 posted on 05/18/2014 11:26:29 PM PDT by SpaceBar
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To: reasonisfaith

That letter from the article was sent in 1939. The Nazis to that point in time had instituted the Nuremberg Laws, the early concentration camps, and the Kristallnacht pogrom, which the people here apparently thought to be just another European pogrom. It was far more.

If your point is that those actions by the Nazis were enough to influence an FDR decision to increase Jewish immigration, I would agree with you. It was certainly the moral thing to do.

But if your point is that through intelligence or otherwise, FDR knew the full fury of the Holocaust to come, that simply isn’t true. No one, not even the Nazis themselves, had yet decided on their full methods of systematic cruelty, death, and killing in 1939, even as the war began. They were still actually considering banishing German Jews to the island of Madagascar, as incredible as it seems.


19 posted on 05/18/2014 11:37:33 PM PDT by Luke21
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Comment #20 Removed by Moderator


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