Posted on 01/28/2012 5:16:30 PM PST by I Hate Obama
One side note. When the Allies divided Germany after the war, the Russkies had to invent for their propaganda purposes some way to refer to their Germans in the East as the good guys, as opposed to the Western Allies’ bad Germans in the Western Sectors. The Soviets understood the critical importance and power of the language to people’s perceptions (unlike many of us here today.) And so, they invented the Nazis. Accordingly, the Nazis were in the West, while Germans were in the East. The meme caught on beyond the Soviets wildest expectations. To this day, and on this very thread, it is the Nazis, not the Germans, who murdered the Jews, while it was the still living Poles, the Ukrainians, the Latvians, etc, who many Americans believe assisted those space aliens, who are no longer with us, “ the Nazis”. One of many successes of the Soviet propaganda machine in the West.
It is absurd and misleading to say that the Nazis did this or that, as not all Germans were the members of the ruling Party.
Soon the Christians will be gone too.
I’m not trying to hang the guilt on anybody.
I simply find history and everything about interesting. At least for me, it’s not about assigning blame to anybody.
And you probably correct that it was inconceivable that any soldier could do that to any populace or that the average German person, at the time, could load people up into cattle cars.
It’s a distant enough past, for all intents and purposes that I can read about it with the same objective viewpoint that I could read about what the Romans did to their conquered populations.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/march.html
...So it was that on October 6, 1943, more than 400 Orthodox rabbis, accompanied by marshals from the Jewish War Veterans of America, marched solemnly from Union Station to their first stop, the Capitol. Vice President Henry A. Wallace and a large bipartisan delegation of Congressional leaders received them. While passersby gawked and newsmen snapped photos, the rabbis recited the Kaddish; sang the traditional Jewish prayer for the nation’s leaders to the tune of the “Star Spangled Banner”; and solemnly read aloud, in English and Hebrew, their petition calling for the creation of a special Federal agency to rescue European Jewry and expand the limited quota on Jewish refugee immigration to the United States. Time Magazine commented that, on receiving the petition, Vice President Wallace “squirmed through a diplomatically minimal answer.” The rabbis then marched from the Capitol to the White House.
On the advice of his aides, FDR, who was scheduled to attend a military ceremony, intentionally avoided the rabbis by leaving the White. House through a rear exit while they marched silently in front. When Roosevelt’s decision not to encounter the rabbis became known to the press, reporters interpreted Roosevelt’s actions as a snub, adding a dramatic flair that transformed the protest rally into a full-fledged clash between the rabbis and the administration...
Major bump.
Decided not to intervene? What exactly do you call our efforts in WWII? I guess we could have sent Hitler a sternly worded letter, but until his military was destroyed, I don't think he would have been inclined to listen.
What would bombing Auschwitz or the rail lines leading there have accomplished? Had we bombed the facility itself, with the "precision munitions" available at the time, we would have just been directly responsible for the deaths of the Jews imprisoned there. Cut rail lines would have been repaired in a day, or two - the nazis were quite adept at that. And even if we had destroyed that particular camp the nazis would have simply gone back to the simple expedient of mass shootings and mass graves.
Hitler wanted the Jews of Europe exterminated, by whatever means, and it only stopped when the Allies broke the back of the nazis. Unfortunately for the Jews and other victims of the nazis, it took us a few years to accomplish.
When Herbert Lehman, Franklin Roosevelt’s successor as governor of New York, wrote the president on two occasions in 1935 and 1936 about the difficulties German Jews were having in getting visas from American consulates, Roosevelt assured him, in responses drafted by the State Department, that consular officials were carrying out their duties “in a considerate and humane manner.” Irrefutable evidence exists in a number of places to demonstrate that, to the contrary, many officials of the Department of State at home and abroad consistently made it difficult and in many cases impossible for fully eligible refugees to obtain visas. One example will have to stand as surrogate for hundreds of demonstrable cases of consular misfeasance and malfeasance. Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, the oldest Jewish seminary in America, had a Refugee Scholars Project that between 1935 and 1942 brought eleven such scholars to its campus. The 1924 immigration act specifically exempted from quota restriction professors and ministers of any religion as well as their wives and minor children. There should have been no difficulties on the American end in bringing the chosen scholars to Cincinnati. But in almost every case the State Department and especially Avra M. Warren, head of the visa division, raised difficulties, some of which seem to have been invented. In some instances the college, often helped by the intervention of influential individuals, managed to overcome them. In two instances, however, the college was unsuccessful.
The men involved were Arthur Spanier and Albert Lewkowitz. Spanier had been the Hebraica librarian at the Prussian State Library, and after the Nazis dismissed him, a teacher at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Spanier was sent to a concentration camp. The guaranteed offer of an appointment was enough to get him released from the camp but not enough to get him an American visa. The president of Hebrew Union College had to go to Washington even to discover why this was the case. Warren explained that the rejection was because Spanier’s principal occupation was as a librarian and because after 1934 the Nazis had demoted the Hochschule (a general term for a place of higher education) to a Lehranstalt (educational institute), and an administrative regulation of the State Department not found in the statute held that a nonquota visa could not be given to a scholar coming to a high status institute in the United States from one of lower status abroad. Lewkowitz, a teacher of philosophy at the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary, did get an American visa in Germany. Both men were able to get to the Netherlands and were there when the Germans invaded. The German bombing of Rotterdam destroyed Lewkowitz’s papers, and American consular officials there insisted that he get new documents from Germany, an obviously impossible requirement. Visaless, both men were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lewkowitz was one of the few concentration camp inmates exchanged, and he reached Palestine in 1944. Spanier was murdered in Bergen-Belsen. If highly qualified scholars with impressive institutional sponsorship had difficulties, one can imagine what it was like for less well-placed individuals.
Apart from creating difficulties for refugees seeking visas, the State Department consistently downplayed international attempts to solve or ameliorate the refugee situation. For example, in 1936 brain trusters Felix Frankfurter and Raymond Moley urged Roosevelt to send a delegation that included such prominent persons as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to a 1936 League of Nations conference on refugees. The president instead took the advice of the State Department and sent only a minor diplomatic functionary as an observer. It was then politic for him to accept the State Department’s insistence that “the status of all aliens is covered by law and there is no latitude left to the Executive to discuss questions concerning the legal status of aliens.” When Roosevelt wanted to do something to he could almost always find a way. Immediately after the Anschluss, he directed that the Austrian quota numbers be used to expand the German quota, and shortly after Kristallnacht, he quietly directed the INS that any political or religious refugees in the United States on six-month visitor’s visas could have such visas extended or rolled over every six months. Perhaps 15,000 persons were thus enabled to stay in the United States. On more public occasions however, such as the infamous early 1939 voyage of the German liner Saint Louis, loaded with nearly a thousand refugees whose Cuban visas had been canceled, he again took State Department advice and turned a deaf ear to appeals for American visas while the vessel hove to just off Miami Beach. The Saint Louis returned its passengers to Europe, where many of them perished in the Holocaust.
After the Nazis overran France, Roosevelt showed what a determined president could do. In the summer of 1940 he instructed his Advisory Committee on Refugees to make lists of eminent refugees and told the State Department to issue visas for them. An agent named Varian Fry, operating out of Marseilles and with the cooperation of American vice consuls, managed to get more than a thousand eminent refugees into Spain and on to the United States. Those rescued by these means included Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall, and Wanda Landowska. But at the same time, Roosevelt appointed his friend Breckinridge Long as assistant secretary of state. A confirmed nativist and anti-Semite, Long was in charge of the visa section and thus oversaw refugee policy. The president eventually became aware of the biases in the State Department, and when he decided in mid-1944 to bring in a “token shipment” of nearly a thousand refugees from American-run camps in Europe, he put Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes in charge.
excerpt from McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Dictionary: immigration
I suppose you have a good excuse for Yalta too?
Defenders of petty politics then, are likely defenders of petty politics now.
Check out the evidence in the books I cited, available in its summaries before you defend the scoundrels with patriotic claptrap.
They did bomb a camp. There were many prisoners who were killed and it wasn’t ever tried again because there was problems with distance AND accuracy.
Your problems begin and end with the decisions of the Roosevelt administration. Take it up with him, but drop this collectivist "we" b.s.
In 1939, the U.S. military was 17th in the world in terms of size. Our troops were literally training with broomsticks for rifles and trucks labelled "tank." Militarily we couldn't do dick to nazi germany at that time. Sorry, you might not like that fact, but it is a fact. When we did finally gear up, we didn't stop until it was over, over there.
You call it "petty politics" but Great Britain lost over 800,000 men in WWI and France lost over 1,300,000 men. Strangely, they really weren't interested in getting into another dust up with Germany just 20 years later. It's crazy, I know.
I noted that you didn't answer my question about the utility of bombing auschwitz - I'll take that as your tacit admission that it would have accomplish exactly nothing.
“But we knew, as governments, about the pogroms and death within the ghettoes. That was not a state secret. We were definitely still guilty of sending Jews back to the ghettoes.”
I agree. Boatloads of Jews whose roots in Europe go back hundreds if not thousands of years were cramming themselves on boats to get away from their homeland. Not something that happens every day and not something that happens for no reason.
One might think that we may might have wondered whether there was a serious problem over there, instead of turning the boats away...
So? What is this? By 1943 the US was already involved in WWII, on their way to invade Europe and end the Holocaust. This incident adds nothing to the argument,one way or the other.
I’m sorry I miscommunicated. The period with my mom I referred to was well after the murder of the Jews in Germany. I don’t know if she knew what was going on in Germany. She was pretty young.
Thanks for the long memory.
Mark for later
Denial? It’s easy to say that almost 70 years after the fact. No one in the West could have imagined what would be discovered in 1945. This nation fought a war to end Hitler. Today Jews face threats as severe as they did in 1933 and the world yawns. Me? I donate to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews(I’m a Catholic) and get in peoples face’s when they start Holocaust denial bs.
I agree bombing the camps, while a nice symbolic gesture, would have been a disaster.
Better to have sent in a team to take out the Camp hierarchy.....but the odds of that succeeding would have been slim to none.
Actually Sobibor was successful because for some reason the Nazis thought it was a good idea to include Red Army prisoners in the population, they were the ones who were able to pull off the operation of taking out most of the Camp bigwigs, and allowing the escape.
I meant ‘’we’’ in the broader sense. An ignorant policy by the Roosevelt Administration and America is responsible for the Holocaust? Please, that’s insulting in the main. In 1942 America had just entered the war. Do you propose we should have marched straight on to Berlin at that time? We fought a war damnit and ended the concentration camps. History is 20/20 in hindsight, isn’t it?
Who said “America is responsible for the Holocaust”? Oh, you did. You’re arguing with yourself. Good luck, here’s hoping you win.
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