Posted on 04/14/2002 7:32:00 PM PDT by Lessismore
I agree. We went to war with Hitler because it was in our interest to do so. But this isn't to say the Jews weren't begging us to enter the war, or that our sacrifice didn't help European Jews.
What I objected to was Masada's contention that we "betrayed" the Jews in WWII and thus their blood is on our hands. And thus the only way Bush can settle this debt is to conduct American foreign policy in a way that best serve's Israel's needs.
WE did act attrociously. During the 1930's local anti-Semites in the State department made sure that fewer Jews were allowed into the US than the quotas allowed for. After the start of world war 2, this policy extended into Nazi occupied countries.
My father's next door neighbors in Poland were a family composed of An american citizen, his wife, and son. The US Consulate refused to allow them to leave in early September claiming that the quota was filled. This was a blatant lie. In this case, teh family was not killed by Nazis but by the NKVD. However, the point is that the State Dept condemned Jews to death by refusing to allow Jews in under the quota even after Nazi atrocities were published in early 1941. (My grand-uncle worked for the State Dept in France and was fired for leaking the policy.)
The US certainly did little to nothing once we entered the war. We refused to bomb camps or transportation to camps, even when it was clear that they were used for German industry.
Fifty million people died during WWII, most of them civilians. There was no way we could let into this country all the people who wanted to come here.
Prior to our entering WWII, neither Roosevelt nor most other Americans gave much thought to European Jews (or to Europeans of any nationality). They weren’t seen as our responsibility. I didn’t know our immigration policy discriminated against Jews. I do know it was calculated to weed out Marxists, socialists, and anarchists to try to prevent what had happened in Russia and the Weimar Republic from happening here.
The US certainly did little to nothing once we entered the war. We refused to bomb camps or transportation to camps, even when it was clear that they were used for German industry.
Entering the war was our contribution. If our war on Germany did nothing to help the Jews one wonders why they considered it so important that we enter the war.
As to whether or not our not-bombing the rail lines was an act of indifference toward the Jews (and everyone else) in those camps or attempt to stay focused on the main goal—Hitler’s defeat--, I don't know. I do know that Benjamin Netanyahu has argued that Washington simply didn’t care. Others have argued that there was no such thing as precision bombing in those days, railroad tracks are both hard targets and easily repairable, the military didn’t want to divert bombers needed for the Normandy invasion. I also expect it would be hard for any American president to try and sell the notion to the American public that it was more important to put the welfare of camp inmates ahead of that of American soldiers fighting the German army.
There’s another thing to remember. Nowadays when we think of WWII, the first thing that pops into our minds are the concentration camps. During WWII, concentration camps weren’t even on the radar. Should we have bombed them, given that we bombed practically everything else? It’s an open question, though one wonders why the issue comes up more often now, 55 years after the end of the war, than it did right after the war ended.
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