Posted on 02/20/2007 5:43:48 AM PST by SJackson
I stand corrected, thank you. My feeling on FDR remain the same.
Story I heard, and request your clarification on:
by the end of WWII, 80% of France's Jews were dead.
80% of Italy's were alive.
There certainly was a quota system before the 1930's. My mother and grandmother had to wait for six years in Romania (under intense police supervision) after escaping Russia in order to enter the USA in 1928. They had been running, hiding and were shot at for years. They crossed the river between Russia and Romania in the middle of the night.
They were not burdens on the state - family here was waiting to take care of them. They learned English, got jobs, and became citizens. My mother's proudest moment was when she got her US citizenship papers. She ran around and told the entire neighborhood in Philadelphia - I remember that.
In the very early war years of the 1940's my mother's cousin, living in Cechoslavakia, was unable to come because of the quota - but someone remembered that though living in Cechoslavakia, he had been born in Russia. So, under the quota from Russia he was a able to come.
He was 18 yrs old and immediately upon entering the United States, he signed up for the military and went back to Europe to serve in the Armed Forces. He was a medic and a translator in the US Army.
He tried desperately to save his aged parents who were still in Cechoslavakia - but Hitler got to them first and they were hauled off and killed. His father was a doctor and his mother a chemist.
This cousin, after the war, became a doctor too. Till his dying day - not a day went by - that he didn't mourn his parents.
As for what someone said above of Roosevelt doing everything he could to stop the genocide - well not quite. He was asked by Jewish groups to bomb the railway tracks to the concentration camps - and he refused.
Hindsight is 20/20. One can argue FDR knew as early as 1941. Certainly he knew all about Auschwitz by 1944, and did nothing. The problem is that we could never have taken in 6 million Jews. The solution was to stop Hitler before 1939. Want to blame a single man? Then blame Joe Kennedy, who empowered Hitler by doing everything possible to impede our efforts to stop Hitler. His family certainly looks like one which has been paying for his sins ever since.
That is the key point here. It is easy to forget what filthy sons of bitches the British were in places like "Palestine" and India in those days. It is gratifying to read how brutally the Israeli rebels dealt with the British troops there after the war. They certainly deserved it.
I think a much better case can be made for using the unused slots during the 1930s. Once the shooting started transportation was obviously problematical. And given our support for the Brits, we might have been able to exert pressure to have the 1939 White Paper rescinded, transport obviously still being problematical.
That sounds reasonably true. The reasons for it are pretty self-evident. Whatever you say about the Italian fascists, they weren't for the most part anti-Semites. In fact, many prominent Italian fascist leaders were Jews. Mussolini's first government basically refused to hand over Jews, and it was only the short-lived second government (with Mussolini as a figurehead) that was little more than a German puppet that started deportations.
Italian Jews, therefore, were only deported for about a year (compared to three years+ in the case of France).
It's believable. Mussolini was not anti-semitic and only grudgingly acquiesced to Hitler's demands to implement anti-semitic laws in Italy, but they were not followed rigorously.
Most of the Italian Jews that were killed were killed when the Nazis occupied parts of Italy after Mussolini was deposed.
FDR knew about the Holocaust before the Holocaust began? I've heard many accusations, but I've never heard of him being a soothsayer.
Certainly he knew all about Auschwitz by 1944, and did nothing.
And what could he have done? For better or worse, the US government decided that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war as quickly as possible. I think they were right on that point. The only suggestion offered was bombing the rail lines, but that would have been an ineffective and counter-productive solution for a number of reasons that I'm sure we'll get into.
Want to blame a single man? Then blame Joe Kennedy, who empowered Hitler by doing everything possible to impede our efforts to stop Hitler.
That's just silliness. What did Kennedy have to do with the Holocaust?
You are forgetting that most Americans are (and were in the 1930s and 1940s) of German origin. Much of the espionage and sabotage came from home-grown German-Americans, not immigrants.
Most people think that most Americans are probably of English heritage - but not so. It's German. English runs a close second, with Irish, Italian, Polish & Scottish all in the top ten.
We operate under different immigration laws today.
Under todays laws, post 1933 any German Jew able to reach the US would be granted asylum.
It would be more difficult for Kurd, Iranian, Libyan, or Iraqi to make the case of institutionalized persecution. I think Christians from those nations could. At least one palestinian muslim has successfully, 9th circuit decision.
However we have brought over 700 or 800 Iraqis who have aided us, and approval was given within the last two weeks to bring in the first 8,000 refugees without qualification. We currently have 70,000 slots for refugees, I think you'll see those filled. At least one legislator, Ted Kennedy I believe, has suggested a number in the 200,000 to 300,000 range. The State Department has established a task force to enable the US to do it's part in solving the refugee problem.
America is evil, America is evil, America is evil... keep repeating the mantra, people!!!
Harry Truman was the one to start the foreign policy decision of drawing lines and fake borders.
Again, I think you have to look at the outcomes. Every German and Austrian Jew who wanted to leave Germany and Austria in the 1930s did. Including Anne Frank's family. This was well before extermination crossed anybody's mind.
The Western democracies embraced the Jews with open arms. Some of those Western democracies later fell to the Germans, but nobody could have anticipated that. Now you can argue that more Jews should have come to the US and the UK instead of France and the Netherlands, but that's a judgement we can only make with the benefit of hindsight. Nevertheless, a great many Jews did go to the US and the UK.
I'm an Israeli Jew. I wear a kippa. I'm about as obvious a Jew as you can be without being Hasidic. Anti-Semitism is nowhere near as bad now in Europe as it was then.
Give 'em hell Harry didn't like Jews either.
The Jews, I find are very, very selfish, he wrote. When they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog.
Perhaps, but it was not really possible for the US to do so. A much better question is why Britain and France didn't move more aggressively against Hitler in the 1930s. Much has been written on that subject, and I don't have much to contribute beyond regurgitating what I've read. I would just caution you to avoid blaming the Allies for the crimes of their enemies.
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