Posted on 11/17/2025 6:04:25 AM PST by silent majority rising
The war wasn’t fought - at least on our side - for any reason connected to the Jewish People. But England and France DID declare war on Germany at least partially because the Germans were imposing a dictatorship everywhere they were, and invading Poland was the last straw. They did it to keep Poland free to determine its own fate, which is BITH a geopolitical AND a moral goal. Remember, we and they and the rest of the British Empire were democracies, and you cannot convince the population Ty go to war for just geopolitical reasons, there MUST be a moral component. In line with that, it is no accident that Ike’s memoirs of the war were called, “Crusade in Europe.”
So, if you can accept that there was a moral component to the war - that of motivating Western populations - then it was a huge failure to not bomb the camps. And, no, I do not buy the argument that doing so would have been doing Hitler’s work for him. Yes, you would likely have killed thousands in such bombing raids, but those people were going to die anyway, most literally within hours…but you would have destroyed the literal machinery of genocide (and let’s also remember that Jews were NOT the only ones to be murdered en mass at the death factories).
And not all of FDR-era economic policies were misguided. The Great Depression made clear that you can't let speculators run feral with other people's money. For instance, Glass-Steagall, by separating savings from investment banking by law at least protected people's savings from being gambled away by the banks, until of course it was repealed in the 1990s by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.
I absolutely give him full credit for that. I think a lot of people after the war who said we shouldn’t have used nuclear weapons are just covering their own ass.
They targeted Heydrich, specifically for assassination. The Czechs were trained in Britain for their mission. But after seeing what happened to Lidice, they reconsidered the policy of assassination.
“The decision NOT to divert resources to the trains going to the camps was logical. The overarching goal was to end the war as quickly as possible and the camps stopped.”
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That argument has never set well with me. It smacks of being way too convenient, especially considering that the Jews were not exactly loved very much by the Allied powers (though, very clearly, they were not the genocidal maniacs that the Germans and their collaborators were). The simple fact is that there were literally just six camps that were created as pure death factories. The rest of the camps were Work camps or prisons for political prisoners. Yes, many, many people were murdered, were simply died of starvation or disease at all of those other camps also.But there were six pure death factories, and each of them could have been destroyed with a few bombers on a single night. It wouldn’t have taken very much away from the war effort, and it could have been announced. But there were six pure death factories, and each of them could have been destroyed with a few bombers on a single night. It wouldn’t have taken very much away from the war effort (between us and the British, we had roughly 10,000 4-engine bombers near the end of 1944, at which time they could have performed a round trip bombing run on every single one of the death factories), and it could have been announced to the public all over the Western world, to reinforce that we were on the morally correct side of this war.
Again, I simply do not buy it. It isn’t merely that the Jews were not particularly well liked in the western world, it was that they had very little political influence at that point in time. In other words, there was no political constituency for bombing the death factories. So, it was a political decision, and FDR (as usual when it came to political matters and they’re longer term effects) chose poorly.
FDR was a communist supporter who destroyed much of the nation’s freedoms and liberties...
HST was an American patriot...
The Democrat Party, before it was totally converted to the American Communist Party, was a “big tent” party...
If you did any serious research regarding the amount of war material that was being produced by the US and the UK toward the end of the war, versus that produced by the Germans and Japanese, you would understand that the war could not possibly have been lost, and our leaders knew it. By late 1944, we and the Brits had, between us, roughly 10,000 4-engine bombers, and were producing them faster than the Germans could possibly shoot them down (even if we let them, which we certainly weren’t doing). For crying out loud, we were delivering ice cream to our troops thousands of miles away from our homeland, while the German population was on rationing and the Germans were still carting artillery shells using horse drawn wagons. Their prisoners in the United States a better than their population at home, and it wasn’t even a close comparison. We produced hundreds of times more ammunition than the Japanese did. Once we got into the war, and once six or so months went by, the conclusion of the war was not an issue, only the timing of when we would defeat the Germans in Japanese. It would have been a tiny distraction to the war effort to bomb the six main death factories that the Germans had toward the end of 1944. A very small fraction of those 10,000 bombers could’ve accomplished the task in a single day with ease. We chose not to do that, or, rather, FDR made that choice. Because the opportunity was presented to him, and he dismissed it out of hand.
WRT, the Russians, they had no Air Force to speak of, and absolutely no systematic bombing campaign. They could only reach what the red army could reach on the ground. No, they were not going to make any special efforts for even their own Jews, versus other Russians, or other nationalities within their empire. They were simply interested in defeating the Germans, and they had very little in the way of spare forces until the last few months of the war to do anything other than fight the German army.
FDR was a communist supporter
The US went to war with Germany because Hitler declared war on the US not long after Japan attacked. If that isn't a purely "geopolitical" reason for us to go to war, I don't know what is. Even the UK's decision to go to war against Germany was primarily geopolitical, not moral - Britain didn't want an expansionist Nazi empire for a neighbor. Talk of "morality" is just window dressing used for propaganda after the fact. That's true of almost every modern war.
No, they were talking about bombing the railways that were bringing Jews to the camps. It would have been a futile effort as they would just repair the railways or use other methods.
“Roosevelt knew about Nazi concentration camps since 1942 but refused to bomb them.”
I’m failing to see why Roosevelt was expected to kill the Jews that Hitler hadn’t killed.
Ugh.
FDR and Churchill knew about Auschwitz. They would also have known about the camps in Germany which the Nazis used for their political opponents before the war and about Theresienstadt which was presented as a model resettlement camp for Jews. But did the allies know about the death centers Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibor?
The US went to war with Germany because Hitler declared war on the US not long after Japan attacked.
But even if Hitler didn’t declare, all it would have taken was for one US ship to be sunk by a U-Boat, and there was the Casus Belli, it pretty much was ready to go.
Chełmno was the first camp that was discovered. They used gas vans there. Several prisoners escaped from there and alerted the Jewish residents. Sadly the residents there were taken to Chełmno several weeks later, but that then the word had gotten out.
You are not saying anything different than what I said. I was very clear that the moral component of going to war was necessary in a democracy to ensure the support of the people - but that the Gia political aspects were quite clearly also important. Obviously, for leaders, the geopolitical aspects are where they make most of their decisions. But the average person doesn’t give a damn about geopolitics, but many of them will stand up for what is right. Why do you think that Lincoln made the Civil War about slavery, when it very clearly was not about slavery until support for the war started to drop, due to the heavy casualties? Lincoln made it a moral crusade, because he thought that it was necessary to be able to continue the war to a successful conclusion. We also did the same during World War II, but did not use the moral component to its full advantage, as we most certainly could (and should) have done. If you’ve ever reviewed the domestic propaganda regarding World War II, you would see that we had quite accurately represented the Nazis as being evil, but once we knew about the extreme number of atrocities that had been committed, we could’ve really hammered the point home to our domestic population. I guess that FDR simply didn’t think that that was necessary, and he quite clearly didn’t give a damn about the victims (Jewish and otherwise, and there were Millions of non-Jews who were also mass murdered), so this is why things turned out as they did.
One of the saddest stories was at the Chełmno camp, one of the prisoners, who did escape, was charged with helping to bury the bodies, when he discovered his entire family in the pit. He begged the guards to kill him, but they didn’t.
He survived the war, moved to Israel, and was able to testify at the trial of the camp guards years later.
From a propaganda standpoint, the emancipation proclamation probably did more harm then good. Many more Americans would have been willing to sacrifice their own lives or those of their sons, husbands, and brothers for the sake of preserving the union and defending it against sedition than for the sake of "freeing the slaves." Most Americans at the time were not radical abolitionists.
FDR was an ardent communist supporter with a kill list...
He is how the State Department was infested with communist agents during the 1930s and 1940s...
Something that, to this day, has never been cleaned up...
The long list of Marxist changes he forced onto Americans still reverberates today in our everyday lives...
As I said, it was the war that saved his bacon. It dried up the manpower excess and created a labor shortage. That meant women were called to take the place of the men who would normally hold those jobs.
Then there are the mistakes that didn't perceive the attack on Pearl Harbor.
He could have helped alleviate the depression by using his bully pulpit to help the outgoing president to institute policies to lessen the severity of of the coming depression. It goes on and on.
I’m sure it helped in his support of the Jewish state.
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