Posted on 04/20/2015 8:05:33 AM PDT by Olog-hai
The more we learn about the Holocaust, even as it recedes into the “mists of time,” the more my blood boils, the closer I come to tears.
Last night, I traveled far out into Syrian-Jewish Brooklyn, where there are not only Syrian shuls but Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iraqi shuls as well—sometimes two or three on a single block. […]
Retired lawyer and filmmaker Robert Krakow was screening his film Complicit, which is about America’s and FDR’s refusal, in 1939, to allow the Jewish passengers on the German ship, the MS St. Louis, to enter the country. More than 900 Jews were on board the luxury liner that was sent back to the European death camps. […]
According to Robert Krakow, FDR’s “political ambitions won out over humanitarian need.” Roosevelt wanted to “win a third election.” He therefore decided that he had to convince American voters that he was strongly “isolationist and anti-immigration.” He was enabled in this undertaking by his anti-Semitic advisors, including diplomats such as Joseph Kennedy, FDR’s Ambassador to the UK, who hobnobbed with his Nazi German counterpart and conveyed that many Americans shared Germany’s anti-Semitism. …
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
Lest I leave out the soldiers of the Red Army, who did liberate the camps from the Eastern front, despite the antisemitism.
my preference has nothing to with my reporting of what seems obvious
Your argument here is like our Dems claiming: if I don't support their particular Big Government spending program, then I must be "anti-poor" or "anti-woman" or "anti-black", etc., etc. That's a ludicrous accusation.
The truth is that FDR was far from anti-Semitic, indeed, he was arguably the most philo-Semitic president up to his time, and seemingly more supportive of Jews than our current president.
af_vet_1981: "The next argument is that the State Department that worked for FDR was antisemitic so FDR was not responsible for overseeing their work, including whether or not they were lying to him."
In fact, the US State Department did carry out Roosevelt's orders to admit Jews, as allowed by quota, to the exclusion of many others.
But they also lied to FDR, claiming many as "admitted" when in fact, they were only put on a list for future admission.
Point is: Roosevelt thought he had made a bigger difference than, in fact, he did.
That certainly is not "anti-Semitism", FRiend.
af_vet_1981: "The next argument is ostensibly, that Americans disliked, or hated, foreigners in general, and not just Jews.
However, there were 15 million immigrants to the US in the interval of 1900 to 1915, when the total population was comprised of some 78 to 111 million souls, so that first generation immigrants comprised almost 14 percent of the total population."
Sure, and after those years, most Americans (82% in one poll) came to feel that such high immigration numbers were unsustainable, and must be reduced, which Congress did, significantly in the 1920s.
By 1939 Congress increased the quotas somewhat, but not nearly as much as many then, and now, would have liked.
af_vet_1981: "False; FDR reflected his own soul when he turned back the MSS St. Louis to Europe."
Unlike you and our current President, Roosevelt took US laws seriously, and tried to enforce them, while still taking advantage of whatever flexibility they allowed.
Well, FRiend, why not just go full monty, and accuse me of supporting the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, since, after all, it was "the law of the land"?
If you've read my posts here from the beginning, then you'd know that my argument is: FDR did what he could do within US laws, to help European Jews.
For that, he deserves some credit.
Of course, laws passed in the 1920s in no way anticipated mass murders of the WWII Holocaust, however, those who condemn Roosevelt because he didn't break the law (like our current President does), are asking for unconstitutional measures which ultimately cannot end well.
Now you are re-confirmed.
"Saving the Jews, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust" Robert Rosen, 2006
When time permits, there are key passages which should be quoted here...
In fact, revisionist historians' mis-reading of history was nowhere better illustrated than in their failure to describe fairly the resuce of German and Austrian Jewry.
Feingold wrote that 'the failure of Evian [conference 1938] to produce concrete results made Jewish leaders... realize that no Western country intended to be a haven for the Jews of Germany and Austria, no matter how dire the conditions became for Jews in Nazi-controlled territories.'
Rafael Medoff in The Deafening Silence (1987 and Saul Friedman in No Haven for the Oppressed (1973) elaborated on America's and Roosevelt's alleged failings (Medoff's chapter titles include 'As Heartless as It May Seem' and 'However Imminent Be Their Peril') but never informed their readers that 72 percent of German and Austrian Jews found a haven in the Western democracies, including 83 percent of German Jewish children and youth.
According to Rubinstein, it 'constituted one of the most successful and far reaching programs of rescue of a beleaguered and persecuted people ever seen up to that time.'
"World War II began in September 1939.
By then Hitler had power over the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, but not the Jews of Poland and Russia, who later became his chief victims.
The Jewish population of Germany in 1933 was about 500,000 (525,000 if the Saar is included after 1935).
Rubinstein estimated that at most, 24,700 Jewish children and youth remained within the pre-1933 boundaries of Germany in September 1939.
Most Austrian Jews also survived.
Of the 185,000 Jews in Austria at the time of the Anschluss (March 12, 1938), 126,000 emigrated by the end of 1939.
Sixty eight percent of Austrian Jewry fled within 21 months.
The start of the war sealed the fate of those Germans, Austrians, and Czechs who stayed behind.
Rarely in history have so many escaped certain persecution so quickly.
"From 1938 to 1940, the United States responded positively to the crisis.
In that period of restrictive immigration laws and wide-spread anti-Semitism, Jews comprised half of all immigrants admitted to the United States.
The democracies had a small window of opportunity to take in the bulk of the Reich's Jews and they succeeded, even given the difficult circumstances.
While it is true that the United States had a strict quota system established in the 1920s, the quota for Germany (25,957 per year) was the highest for any country other than Britain (65,721).
It was much higher than Italy (5,802), Ireland (17,853), or Spain (252), and ironically, German and Austrian Jews benefitted from the German quota..
It is well to remember that, of the nearly six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 4,565,000 were Polish and Russian and 125,000 were German.
The United States accepted about twice as many refugees as the rest of the world combined, 200,000 of 300,000.
"FDR tried to do even more.
He held his nose and vigorously pursued a ransom scheme, the Rublee Plan, with the Nazis in 1938 and 1939 through the IGCR, which failed only because the Nazis would not agree to let the Jews go.
His willingness to support this scheme came from the fact that he was far ahead of the rest of the world, including the American Jewish leadership, in seeing what might lay ahead if the Jews of Germany were not ransomed..."
Are those numbers the total Jewish refugees rescued at the time of the MSS St. Louis or have you introduced a statistic for a different interval and included Jews from other countries seeking refuge ? Can you break it out by year ?
Seriously, thanks for the link.
I have read it, saved it to my favorites and will refer back to it in the future.
It is very informative.
But let us please look at the bigger picture: since the 1960's "the Left" (writ large, meaning Liberals, Progressives, Democrats, Communists, academia, the media and other such synonyms), the Left has blamed the following for the Holocaust:
I even have some of the books which make these accusations.
In response, defenders of the Pope have launched a vigorous counter-argument saying that not only was he not "Hitler's Pope", he actively opposed Nazism and protected tens of thousands of Jews.
And I have some of those books.
Likewise, distinguished defenders of Winston Churchill have gathered up relevant historical data demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that Churchill too was a great friend & supporter of Jews.
And I have some of those books too.
And likewise, defenders of Franklin Roosevelt.... well... er... I mean, who does Roosevelt have to defend him on this subject?
Apparently, just Rosen.
The rest of the liberal academic elite declares FDR's WWII leadership to be essentially conservative & Republican so fair game for any & all smears, distortions & throwing under the bus.
So, with the Pope and Churchill now excused, that just leaves Roosevelt and us conservatives solely responsible for the Holocaust, after all in those days, weren't 82% of Americans effectively anti-Semites?
Verdict: guilty as hell, and therefore we have to pay, and pay, and pay, and, yes, pay some more.
My opinion is that Rosen did a workman's job trying to defend Roosevelt against any number of scurrilous accusations, and I note his work is supported strongly in comments by Alan Dershowitz, who comes out on the right side of things surprisingly often these days.
Sure, no doubt Rosen made mistakes here or there, but the sum total is a welcome antidote to the Left's relentless guilt-mongering.
What I don't understand, dear sirs, is why you are taking up arms with the Left in this case?
Why shouldn't FDR be given more benefit of the doubt than the Left is offering?
Those laws seemed rational & appropriate to a peaceful, law-abiding world, when they were written in the 1920s.
By the mid-1930s they were becoming untenable, but the vast majority of Americans simply did not want to face reality -- 82% opposed large increases in immigration quotas.
Whether FDR's active leadership on this could change those laws is anybody's guess, but Roosevelt is universally acknowledged as the greatest political mind of his era, and the fact is, he did not risk offending the sensibilities of his fellow countrymen.
Instead, he put uniting Americans in the war against Axis powers as his number one priority.
I personally cannot fault him for that.
Nobody here is “taking up arms with the Left in this case”. Except perhaps yourself. The left has a history of hijacking multifarious true causes for its own exploitation—it is what defines them, even before Marx—but that does not change the causes’ core nature into leftist; only the solutions the leftists propose are leftist.
Nice try, though, especially with the distractive argument of Pius XII (another liberal tactic is changing the subject, albeit there is the incidental relation per the subject, which includes his predecessor—the very notion of even signing a “Reichskonkordat” with Adolf, and upholding it, is just reprehensible beyond words and bespeaks no faith whatsoever in God; the same concord remains in force today, and one must ask why). The Jews on the MS St. Louis were not fleeing an imaginary foe, bottom line.
Obviously, those are total numbers for the period 1933 through 1940, and as you noted, they are disputed numbers.
Indeed, Rosen's critics make much of their claim that whatever numbers the US admitted in those days, far more which lawfully could have been approved, were not, and the quotas left unfilled.
My opinion on this is that we forget today how universally, and how strongly, it was believed then that the US had already accepted more immigrants than we could reasonably absorb, and that a long period of low-immigration quotas was now (1920s & 30s) called for.
Almost nobody in those peaceful days was looking forward to a European war which would kill tens of millions, including millions of Jews.
Sorry FRiend, but the fact is that you have taken up the Left's cause here, guilt-mongering the Holocaust on Roosevelt because he enforced US immigration laws, unlike our current President who ignores any such laws he dislikes.
My question is: why?
No, the left did not originate this cause; repeating the claim that they did will not make that come true.
Never mind returning to the same canard of (allegedly) “enforcing” unjust laws. Remember what Einstein is credited with saying about expecting different results from trying the same thing repeatedly?
Of course it came from the Left, all of it -- "Hitler's Pope", Churchill's alleged anti-Semitism, Roosevelt's supposed callous indifference to the fate of millions.
It's all about the Left's great cause -- to convince us that we are the real Holocaust perpetrators, and that's why they must be in charge and we must pay, and pay and pay...
So, I assume that your problem here is pure ignorance, you just don't "get" it.
Let me try helping out with some paragraphs from Gerhard Weinberg's 2006 forward to Rosen's book:
"It has always seemed both curious and, in a way, reprehensible to me that Franklin Roosevelt is blamed by many scholars for adhering to and continuing to enforce a law that had been placed on the books by the one person who had succeeded in defeating him in a campaign for public office.
In the context of a worldwide depression, Roosevelt knew, when he was president himself, that any congressional review of the immigration law during the 1930s was certain to lead to even further restrictions, if not a complete closure of the country.
When, during World War II, he tried to utilize his power as commander in chief of the armed forces, which allowed the temporary moving into the country of prisoners of war, for the temporary bringing into the country of refugees, as he did with the Oswego experiment, there were immediate calls for impeachment.
It is hardly coincidence that the White House announcement that there would be no further such experiments and the end of impeachment talk came within days of each other.
"If one asks how Roosevelt came to be blamed for the deed of the man he had unsuccessfully opposed, the answer is to be found in the unwillingness of many to look at the Holocaust in the context of the time.
Just as far too many scholars and other writers about World War II treat it as some sort of dangerous chess game with no aim or purpose, so others treat the Holocaust as an event removed from its contemporary setting.
As the Germans initiated World War II to carry out a demographic revolution open the globe -- with the Holocaust as a central element of that revolution -- so the Holocaust and the response to it by others has to be seen in the context of a world depression and a world war.
It is clear today in retrospect that German persecution of Jews after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 did not lead to the sort of restricted life for Jews of the sort with which they had coped for centuries.
These measures were instead a prelude to systematic mass murder.
However, neither most Jews themselves nor those observing the process anticipated anything of the sort during the 1930s or in the early years of World War II.
And many, both Jews and non-Jews alike, found it terribly difficult to grasp the reality when the killing was actually under way in areas under German control or influence...
"...Whether withdrawing the American ambassador from Berlin in protest against the German pogrom of November 1938 -- as the only head of state to do so -- or publicly denouncing the mass murder of Jews while it was occurring, Roosevelt never left anyone in doubt about his position on these issues.
It is only in retrospect that many have ignored this record...
"...There is a curious irony in the fact that the first American president who was comfortable with individuals who openly identified themselves as Jews and who was often vehemently attacked for this should be converted posthumously to the opposite position..."
So, we are talking about condemning Roosevelt for enforcing laws passed by Republican Congresses and signed by Republican Presidents at a time when those laws were supported by 82% of all Americans, both Democrats and Republicans.
I'm merely saying that FDR here deserves credit for what he did more than condemnation for what he didn't do.
Further, I think Weinberg here is being more generous and respectful of the Left's scholars & academics than they seriously deserve.
Those people come with a built-in agenda to mock & destroy everything good about America, to reduce us to slobbering fools, to be putty in their own ruling hands.
I say: resist! It's one reason why we post and support Free Republic.
No, FRiend, shame on you for jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
Yes, I'll agree that Olog-hai's link criticizing Rosen's book is interesting food for thought.
But I do not buy all of it's arguments, am certain its authors are also biased, likely unreliable, and most important, they fail to address the major theme of Rosen's book, namely, that President Roosevelt deserves more credit for his efforts to save Europe's Jews than he us normally granted.
Instead, they engage in endless nitpicking of academic points of little or no interest outside their own hallowed-halls.
So, shame of you, FRiend, if you also fail to "get" the most cogent point here.
Sorry about that, Olog-hai.
And yet you just introduced them into evidence as if they were true ...
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