Posted on 11/22/2008 6:47:32 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
OK, maybe a win-win-not exactly win situation.
you forgot that the TRIBES of Africa might resent the Jews for intruding on their hunting grounds..or whatever.
Please add me to your real-time ping list. Thanks.
No way Himmler and company would have gone for this. The argument would have been that had they let the Jews leave, they eventually would have become a threat to the "Thousand Year Reich". Extermination was always their only solution, and even then, they intended on carrying it out.
You are on the list. Thank you for your interest.
From the article note that it was going to take years to set up this colony. In the meantime England would take many children with the final idea that they move to this colony.
It is very hard to understand the mind set of the German leaders and also hard to understand some of the thinking of the times. The world had just gone through some very difficult time and someone (just like today) had to be blamed. Dad always said on the farm “when one pig squeals, the rest gang up on it”, and if you watched the feedlot, it was true.
From the article this area was a former possession of Germany so that may not have sat well with the Germans.
From the article this area was a former possession of Germany so that may not have sat well with the Germans.
It was a solution only for the Nazis. Could peace have been maintained if this plan had gone forward? And what kind of peace would it have been? After Kristallnacht England, France and the U.S. should have realized that there was a rotten apple among them that would have to be removed to save the rest. This relocation plan is a craven sort of appeasement. It is incompatible with civilization.
I think you are all mistaken in your debate of the “quality” of the offer...what is interesting from the article is that there was an offer. For a very long time, we have been led to believe that nobody did anything. Obviously, some did something...so the US government didn’t offer plush Park Avenue apartments to German Jews (but they ended up getting them anyhow)...you can’t say that the German Jews didn’t have options. Einstein among others,left. I did a report in college and found that upwards of 70% of the Jews in Germany actually left before the death camps got into full swing. As a result, the Jews that died in higher percentages were from Poland and elsewhere. Some Did Some...that’s the take-away!
Ever hear of "Voyage of the Damned"?
Or refuge in California or Texas or New Jersey. At any rate, while offering political asylum to oppressed groups is virtuous, it does not address the root problem. The resettlement plan in the article was intended as a solution to the problem facing the democracies. But the problem facing the democracies was not the presence of Jews in Germany. It was the presence of Nazis in Germany. They should have confronted that fact.
This relocation plan is a craven sort of appeasement. It is incompatible with civilization.
The only solution is shining light on evil and standing up to it, but it will COST you and me................
I am in the midst of reading The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Winston Churchill's history of WWII. To hear him tell it all they had to do was listen to him and much of the unpleasantness would have been avoided. Alas, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were the only national leaders in position to have their personal will translated directly into national action. We need to elect leaders who understand the dangers we face and how to deal with them and are capable of communicating that to the voters. Doesn't seem to happen very often.
Tanganyika (now Tanzania), not Rhodesia. If they had been relocated to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), they would probably have ended up like the other whites—being dispossessed, driven out, or killed by black socialist Robert Mugabe.
Plus about half the Jews of Austria managed to escape before all the doors closed in September 1939. But the Nazis never made it easy for them to emigrate -- basically they had to leave everything behind.
We hear about families pooling their resources in order to send the children away. I think we can assume, those Jews still in Germany in September 1939 were mostly poor & elderly.
But the bigger problem turned out to be: the vast majority of those Jews who left Germany didn't go NEARLY far enough!
They went mainly to places like Holland, France, Poland and Hungary, and when the Nazis took over those countries, German Jews were among the first rounded up and shipped off to camps. France especially tried to negotiate to save its French Jews by shipping out non-French Jews living there.
Bottom line: my guess is, this particular offer from Britain proved empty because, A) very few Jews could afford the trip, B) even fewer understood how far away they must go to escape the Nazis' clutches. C) NONE could foresee the Holocaust that was about to come down on them.
Yet the offer also shows that those in power who claimed to have been unaware of German plans and shocked by what happened were likely full of crap. This is a pretty extreme solution unless there was reason to believe there was likely to be widespread violence well beyond Kristalnacht.
Well, now.... of course it was well known the Nazis intended to make Germany "Judenfrei." And international efforts were being made -- including by President Roosevelt -- to find new homes for those being expelled.
Yes, all those efforts proved woefully inadequate, compared to the huge scale of the problem.
But it's not accurate to say that ANYONE in 1938, beside Hitler himself and a few top Nazis, had any real idea what was in store for Jews, once the next war began.
Indeed the Holocaust, the "Final Solution" as we know it today with all its horrors, did not fully get under way until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
On my list of books to read is:
Rosen, "Saving the Jews -- Franklin D Roosevelt and the Holocaust"
I have it here. If we get into a big debate over what America coulda, woulda, shoulda, mighta, oughta, maybe, possibly, conceivably or theoretically have done, I'll make a point to stock up on more facts about what actually DID happen, & why. ;-)
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