If only Austria had taken this kind of stance in 1938. Nuff said.
That sounds nice and dandy, but this argument would not have worked with Hitler..I know, as I was born and raised right alongside the Blue Danube in Vienna while the war was raging, fortunately the allied forces finally done that bastard Hitler and his henchmen in. I am still surprised I did not get killed in the process, otherwise I would not be here writing this reply.
One can dream about a different past.
All my mother’s (my grandmother) side of the family remained in Lemburg, now Lviv/Lvov -Ukraine, were rounded up one day, taken to a sandpit and executed - men, women and probably babies.
That is why I worked so hard to prevent this in S. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia where I lost a teammate from college (KIA) and new friends in two of those three countries.
And FDR’s anti-Semitic State Department turned away the SS St. Louis and made the Cuban Government do the same.
You know how that ended. It also happened to a good, older friend of mine, a leader of Jewish youth sports clubs, in Vienna. He fought the pro-Nazi Austrian youth in the streets of Vienna, reportedly for his weekly beatings at Gestapo headquarters, and learned that his sister was executed along with over 800 other Jews when their boat was captured y the Nazis in Yugoslavia.
Bill’s wife survived Auschwitz. Her sister didn’t. At least Dr. Mengele didn’t choose them for his experiments when he found out that they weren’t twins, just looked like ones.
If only someone had the guts to do something in 1938, then I would have had relatives to visit in Europe.