Op-Ed: "Complicit": FDR's Refusal to Save the Jews on the MS St. Louis

INN ^ | Sunday, April 19, 2015 7:04 PM | Prof. Phyllis Chesler

[Olog-hai]

The more we learn about the Holocaust, even as it recedes into the “mists of time,” the more my blood boils, the closer I come to tears.

Last night, I traveled far out into Syrian-Jewish Brooklyn, where there are not only Syrian shuls but Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iraqi shuls as well—sometimes two or three on a single block. […]

Retired lawyer and filmmaker Robert Krakow was screening his film Complicit, which is about America’s and FDR’s refusal, in 1939, to allow the Jewish passengers on the German ship, the MS St. Louis, to enter the country. More than 900 Jews were on board the luxury liner that was sent back to the European death camps. […]

According to Robert Krakow, FDR’s “political ambitions won out over humanitarian need.” Roosevelt wanted to “win a third election.” He therefore decided that he had to convince American voters that he was strongly “isolationist and anti-immigration.” He was enabled in this undertaking by his anti-Semitic advisors, including diplomats such as Joseph Kennedy, FDR’s Ambassador to the UK, who hobnobbed with his Nazi German counterpart and conveyed that many Americans shared Germany’s anti-Semitism. …

[Moonman62]

60 million?

That would have been a huge portion of the population back then.

[dfwgator]

were on board the luxury liner that was sent back to the European death camps.

Not true. Many were settled in Holland, France and Belgium, which at the time were safe, who would have known within a year they would all be under the Nazi boot?

[BroJoeK]

Verginius Rufus: "Not to excuse FDR in the least, but I think about half the Jews who were on the ship did survive the war..."

"The United Kingdom agreed to take 288 of the passengers, who disembarked and traveled to the UK by other steamers.
After much negotiation by Schröder, the remaining 619 passengers were allowed to disembark at Antwerp;
• 224 were accepted by France,
• 214 by Belgium, and
• 181 by the Netherlands...

'Of the 620 St. Louis passengers who returned to continental Europe, we determined that eighty-seven were able to emigrate before Germany invaded western Europe on May 10, 1940.
Two hundred fifty-four passengers in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands after that date died during the Holocaust.
Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis.
Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war."

All told, that's about 653 out of 907 who survived the war = 72%.

[BroJoeK]

Hostage: "The death camps were an unconfirmed rumor.
Although witnesses appeared before FDR to attest to the camps..."

Just so we're clear about this: there were no Nazi death camps in 1939, none.
Yes, there were concentration camps, work camps, but no camps yet for the mass extermination of Jews.

Those didn't really get organized until after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941.

Please note my post #23 above.

[beelzepug]

“That would have been a huge portion of the population back then.”

Yes, it would. I was born in 1946. the U.S. population was 141 million.

[LS]

I think academic scholarship has already come around to the position that FDR screwed the Jews. As early as 1984, David Wyman's "The Abandonment of the Jews." (http://www.amazon.com/Abandonment-Jews-America-Holocaust-1941-1945/dp/159558174X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429546887&sr=8-1&keywords=David+wyman) and he concludes "senior American officials could indeed have saved many thousands, if not millions, of European Jews by intervening earlier."

But Wyman isn't alone, and the historians have more or less done their job on this topic.

[Olog-hai]

Is this your opus?

[Hostage]

There were many camps where deaths were taking place from horrible conditions and forced labor.

Yes, you are right that the Nazi organized their killing machine later, or perfected what was already trending. But the camps that existed before 1941 were not like the ‘show camps’ that were opened for viewing.

Hitler explained the camps were necessary to protect Jews and others from anti-semitic pogroms in the East and also from angry Germans who felt betrayed by Jewish bankers in WW I. He allowed them to emigrate but immigration was then, as it is now, a political hot potato as the advanced economic nations had all they could take especially in the backdrop of a worldwide depression.

And there’s nothing wrong with turning off the immigration spigots when economic calamity is the order of the day.

Americans were a tough breed back then and not at all prone to falling for every hard luck story that came along. So when a group of immigrants arrived unannounced with unconfirmed reports of slave camps or death camps, Americans responded “Oh yeah? Well here’s the world’s smallest violin playing my heart bleeds for you”. And that came from Americans who were losing their homes, their farms and were out begging for the first time in their lives, standing in soup lines.

Americans are ordinary people with a gift of liberty. Their generosity or stinginess correlates with good times and bad times. That’s not surprising, it’s simply human nature.

[plain talk]

Good thoughtful post. I don’t like attempts by left or right to rewrite history.

[dfwgator]

Hitler speech January 30, 1939:

“Europe will not have peace until the Jewish question has been disposed of. The world has sufficient capacity for settlement, but we must finally break away from the notion that a certain percentage of the Jewish people are intended, by our dear God, to be the parasitic beneficiary of the body, and of the productive work, of other peoples.”

“Jewry must adapt itself to respectable constructive work, as other peoples do, or it will sooner or later succumb to a crisis of unimaginable proportions.”

“If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

[Olog-hai]

They were already talking about “life unworthy of life” in 1939 though, although only those suffering from physical/mental handicaps back then, i.e. openly. And they pitched it to the public as being “your money” they were saving by not maintaining such people.

[Hostage]

What kind of question is that?

The subject of your thread is not new. These American hating Jews are always coming back trying to revise history.

Now they’re making a movie.

My prediction is they are digging their own hole further.

Jewish filmmakers like Speilberg get a lot more traction and respect by presenting the story of a real mensch like Schindler. That endears Americans to Jews.

This crao about FDR turning away Jews only angers Americans against these American-hating Jews because it’s history embellished by lies.

Was their anti-semitism in America during the Roosevelt era? Uh..yeah...duh.

Was ‘America’ anti-semitic? Not on your life.

It’s one thing for me to say there are some weeds in my garden. It’s another thing for someone to day my garden is a weed patch.

[Hostage]

BS. Those historians you speak of were not in the front lines but rather comfortably ensconced in their academic easy chairs while smoking leftist Utopian weed.

These discussions have been aired out ad nauseum and your love affair with these historian wimps will not change the truth. And the truth is that without the sacrifice of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of American lives far more Jewish lives would have been lost.

[Olog-hai]

Right; cover for all of the Progressives who were “not” anti-Semitic.

But then again, you with your “America-hating Jews” just carries the water for Obama, FWICS; there is no purpose to it at all except something like that.

[Olog-hai]

Your “hero” FDR was “not on the front lines” either. He wouldn’t listen to Churchill until it was almost too late.

[Hostage]

What are you talking about me carrying “water for Obama”?

The author of the subject of your thread, Phyllis Chesler is a ‘progressive’ typical NY Jewish feminist, steeped in anti-capitalist bullshit and self-aggrandizing so much as to make reasonable decent people sick to their stomachs.

She is not representative of the American Jew who loves America.

You want to promote her inane brand of bile, have at it. Just don’t expect Americans such as yours truly to let it go unnoticed.

[mdmathis6]

There were never 60 million Jews in the US....we only have about 5.3 million now..though the number approaches 9 million if you include those who cam from jewish backgrounds but don’t call themselves Jews or those who are converts...ect. Perhaps FDR included evangelical born again Christians who are considered Jews by the spirit of adoption.

[SVTCobra03]

Please leave FR and take your vile opinions with you. Here is a parting gift:

Genesis 12:1-3New International Version (NIV)

The Call of Abram

12 The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

[nothingnew]

"The only concession I might make to him(King Saud) is to give him the 60 million Jews we have in the United States" --Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt

Source?...not that I doubt it....

FMCDH(BITS)

[Hostage]

FDR was not my hero, never has been, not even close.

Reagan was my hero and Cruz is my hero now.

But I know the character of good democrats of the Roosevelt era. They were not progressives. They were blue-collar patriots that no longer exist except in the Perot demographic or in the communities of Reagan democrats.

The Reagan democrats and their parents were in the time of Roosevelt the largest demographic of the democrat party. They were conservative.

The left, the progressives have since taken over the democrat party and kicked their conservatives to the curb.

Roosevelt had been a republican who changed to democrat to offer a ‘New Deal’. Americans were suffering a Great Depression and their suffering was very real. Roosevelt offered them a ‘vision’ or better an ‘illusion’. He did not do this to deceive, he did it because he was weak and incapable of inspiring Americans to embrace their heritage of hard work while at the same time prodding American capitalists to restart the economic engines.

Roosevelt was having troubles securing a second term and was no longer popular into his second term. He swung hard right on immigration in the middle of his second term to reflect the mood of the electorate. The pending war helped him secure a third term.

If I had lived while Roosevelt was President, I would not have liked him. I would have thought he was a weak ineffectual leader, holding his finger in the air to see which way the wind blows.

But I would never have challenged the patriotism of the American blue collar worker that voted for him by the millions. I would have questioned their judgement but never their patriotism.

In 2008, I had some friends that voted for Obama. I tried, in a friend like way, to make them reconsider. One of them was a retired union electrical foreman. He loved America and his 80-year old mother was more patriotic than any American you will ever meet. These were democrats in the towns outside Chicago. Bush had so badly allowed the GOP brand to be damaged that these patriotic Americans thought they were doing their duty to support Obama.

Being patriotic does not always translate to being intelligent. Being unpatriotic does not always translate to being unintelligent.

But being patriotic does translate to being an American that appreciates the heritage.

As for democrat voters these days, yes I question both their common sense and their patriotism. I think a great many of them are lost. I expect Ted Cruz will leave a permanent impression on them as to why America is great. I hope they are ready to learn because they sorely need a good example to follow.