Posted on 03/12/2013 4:37:19 PM PDT by presidio9
On April 12, 1945, my grandfather approached me as I played outside and asked where my mother was. He looked stricken, and so I quickly followed him inside and heard him say words that made my mother burst into tears: President Roosevelt had died. My mother’s grief and panic were so palpable — her brother was fighting in the Pacific, her brother-in-law was fighting in Europe — that it scared me. In our house, FDR was not merely the President. He was a god.
He is a god no more. His New Deal is no longer solely credited with ending the Depression — World War II did that — and the war in Europe was not won, as we all once thought, primarily by the United States but more so by the Soviet Union.
Yet these to my mind are trifles compared to the criticism that Roosevelt was passive in the face of the Holocaust. It’s not that he did nothing, it’s rather that he did nothing much.
This accusation of immense moral failure is now being addressed by a new book, “FDR and the Jews,” by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman. It sets out to find a middle ground and instead makes things worse.
It is a portrait of a President who, in the authors’ own words, “did not forthrightly inform the American people of Hitler’s grisly ‘Final Solution’ or respond decisively to his crimes.” This is a Roosevelt who almost always had a more pressing political concern and who stayed mum while a bill to allow 20,000 Jewish children into the U. S. died in Congress.
Roosevelt inattentively also permitted a cabal of heartless anti-Semites in the State Department to control the country’s visa policies. Desperate Jews, fleeing from the Nazis,
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
It probably saved their lives.
I agree with your rejection of that, Dakota.
That is Left Wing historical bunk.
In my opinion, Stalin helped cause World War 2.
In the 1930’s, Stalin allowed Hitler to secretly train German troops and test weapons on Soviet soil.
In the late 1930’s, Stalin attacked Finland, and made a complete hash of it.
What was Hitler's strategic conclusion about the Finland war?
The Soviet army was weak and incompetent!
In 1939, Stalin agreed to divide Poland with Hitler, and also signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler that ended the threat of a two front war.
In the spring of 1941, both Britain and America explicitly warned Stalin that Hitler was going to attack the Soviet Union.
Stalin did nothing, or worse than nothing when he concentrated large troop masses in several areas that were effortlessly flanked and surrounded by the Germans.
Once the War began, America's aid to the Soviets was extraordinary.....
250,000 of the best military trucks in the world.
5,000 of the best military cargo aircraft in the world.
15,000 jeeps, which gave junior combat officers access to every part of the battle field for the first time in Russia's history.
Russia's entire battle field telephone system was built in the USA.
Russia's entire short range field radio system was built in the USA.
In western Europe, America pinned down 25% of Hitler's best troops.
America's strategic bombing campaign pinned down 70% of Hitler's fighter aircraft, more than 10,000 anti-aircraft guns, and 90,000 gunners.
In the Pacific, the Japanese had 500,000 troops in Manchuria, which could have easily seized vast swaths of Siberia after Stalin moved his troops to the German front.
Instead, the Japanese were frozen in place by the American assault on the Japanese homeland.
Without USA assistance, the best Stalin could have hoped for was to fight the Germans to a stand still deep inside Russian territory.
FDR’s total lack of concern of the Jewish plight was well documented in the novel by Herman Wouk, The Winds of War.
My grandfather, a "lunch bucket Democrat" and Al Smith man who thought, in his youth, that William Jennings Bryan spoke directly to God, told my father that he'd voted for FDR "once", as in "one time .... only".
He saw something in FDR during a political trip to DC that led him to distrust and dislike him. Asked about it, he would say only, "look for a crippled mind in a crippled body."
He was an assistant county prosecutor and tough as a hickory stick. He didn't like FDR's bunch -- "bomb-throwing Communists" he called some of them, relating that some of Eleanor's guests for tea on the White House lawn had the Secret Service climbing the drapes.
Some of them were Hermann Goering's pet Luftwaffe troops. They were Luftwaffe not SS, but besides jump training, they were also armed and armored as a tank outfit -- the equivalent of two big Panzer SS divisions (30,000 men, a corps-sized body). My uncle's Big Red One faced and fought them twice -- once in Italy in 1943 where they got away because of the prima-donna elbowing back and forth between Monty and George Patton, and then the fight to the finish in the Huertgen Forest a year later. None of them got away that time. Too bad so many Red One troops got killed grinding them down to nothing.
Yes. I truly fear that, since Obama has tried to emulate FDR's actions to such a degree, he will -- as a last-ditch effort to redeem himself on the economy -- find himself a war to start.
It would be hard to find people who weren't (by today's standards) back then.
People had a hard time believing the stories until they actually saw the gas chambers and bodies (or photographs of them).
There had been a lot of atrocity stories about Germany conduct in Belgium in the First World War that hadn't been true, so people were skeptical about the rumors.
A classic comment of the day occured when Jan Karski delivered his report about Auschwitz:
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, had told Karski: “Young man, I can’t believe you.” Asked if he doubted Karski, Frankfurter replied: “You don’t understand me. I didn’t say he isn’t telling the truth, I said I can’t believe him.”
Germans were technical advisers to the Turks in their genocide of Armenian Christians during World War I.
Despite first-hand reports, skepticism prevailed there too.
The teachers in the public schools that I attended worshipped FDR without reservation.
False. Hitler was never "elected" Chancellor. I don't know why this stupid fallacy survives. Some people must have an unconscious hatred of democratic elective politics.
I don’t think it will take much looking to find one.
Which one, hinckley?
Your economics are imaginative at best.
Oh no, they're not. The economics we've all been brought up with for the past 80 years or so are imaginative. We're seeing living the results of them now.
Define “elected” however you like? Is your position that Hitler was not WILDLY popular in Germany when he took office?
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