Posted on 03/08/2012 5:47:26 PM PST by SJackson
The news that a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic recently conducted a posthumous proxy baptism of Anne Frank, the most famous diarist of the Holocaust, undoubtedly will cause some offense in the Jewish community. Evidently the baptizers believe they were saving Anne’s soul. Of greater significance, however, is what Mormons tried to do to save Anne’s life.
Millions of Americans know the story of the German Jewish teenager who hid for more than two years in an Amsterdam attic until she and her family were discovered by the Nazis and sent to the death camps. Anne Frank’s heartbreaking diary is required reading in schools throughout the United States.
What was not known, until a few years ago, is that before they went into hiding, the Franks requested permission to immigrate to the United States but were turned away. Anne’s mother, Edith, wrote to a friend in 1939, “I believe that all Germany’s Jews are looking around the world, but can find nowhere to go.”
Immigration to the U.S. was determined by quotas that had been set up in the 1920s to reduce the number of “undesirable” immigrants – particularly Jews and Italians. Even those quotas were almost never filled because the Roosevelt administration imposed bureaucratic obstacles designed to disqualify visa applicants. As a result, during the Holocaust, only 10 percent of the quotas from Axis-controlled European countries were utilized – and nearly 190,000 quota places went unused.
Most Americans opposed more immigration. Fear of foreigners and the difficulties of the Great Depression hardened many hearts. But there were exceptions. One was the most famous and influential Mormon in America, Sen. William H. King, Democrat of Utah. In early 1939, refugee advocates in Congress proposed legislation to admit 20,000 German Jewish refugee children outside the quota system. One of the children who theoretically could have qualified to come to the U.S. under the bill was Anne Frank. Senator King supported the bill, although that meant defying most of his Democratic colleagues, as well as President Roosevelt.
Laura Delano Houghteling, a cousin of FDR and wife of the U.S. commissioner of immigration, typified opposition to the bill when she remarked that “Twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.”
Unfortunately, Houghteling’s sentiment carried the day. The legislation was buried. On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands and completed its conquest in five days. Trapped under the heel of the Nazi jackboot, the Franks and other Jews in Holland now found themselves in an increasingly desperate position.
Coincidentally, that same week in Washington, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on legislation sponsored by Senator King to open Alaska to European Jewish refugees. This bill, too, might have enabled Anne Frank and her family to come to America.
Sparsely populated and strategically located, Alaska was in urgent need of development. Immigrant laborers could serve a vital national purpose. The Labor Department and the Interior Department endorsed King’s bill. But President Roosevelt told Interior Secretary Harold Ickes he would support only a watered-down version of the plan in which just 10 percent of the workers would be Jews, so as “to avoid the undoubted criticism that we would be subjected to if there were an undue proportion of Jews.”
The State Department and anti-immigration groups strongly opposed using Alaska for the resettlement of any refugees, and Roosevelt soon dropped the whole idea. The bill went nowhere.
Meanwhile, throughout 1941, Otto Frank continued writing to American friends and relatives, and U.S. government officials, in the hope of securing permission for his family to immigrate.
Little did he know the Roosevelt administration was quietly inventing new ways to shut the nation’s doors even tighter. In the summer of 1941, the State Department began automatically disqualifying all visa applicants who had “close relatives” in occupied Europe – on the specious theory that the Nazis might hold the relatives as hostage to blackmail the emigrants into becoming Axis spies. (No such spies were ever discovered.)
The new regulation may have disqualified the Franks, since one of their “close relatives,” Anne’s paternal grandmother, Rosa Stern Hollander, was ill with cancer in late 1941 and probably would not have been able to make the cross-Atlantic journey.
William H. King concluded his Senate service in 1941 and returned to Utah having failed to open America’s doors to European Jewish refugees – but not for lack of trying. His state had few Jewish voters, and his party was largely against more immigration, but King was driven by his Mormon faith to aid the downtrodden. Another Mormon U.S. senator from Utah, Democrat Elbert Thomas, would soon pick up where King left off and help lead the campaign to rescue Jews from the Nazis in the 1940s.
Anne Frank occupies a special place in the hearts of Jews, and any affront to her memory naturally arouses Jewish ire. Some members of the Jewish community have even urged presidential candidate Mitt Romney, today America’s best-known Mormon, to speak out against posthumous baptisms of Holocaust victims.
Before rushing to inject the issue into the presidential race, it is worth recalling that leaders of the Mormon church have already pledged to refrain from posthumously “saving the souls” of Hitler’s victims, and no doubt will remind their Dominican Republic branch and their other followers of that pledge.
And it is especially worth recalling that when the issue was not saving Anne Frank’s soul but saving her life, the most powerful Mormon political figure in America did what he could at a time when too few were willing to do anything at all.
Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. He is also the author of a number of books including the forthcoming “Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Vote’ and Bipartisan Support for Israel,” co-authored with Professor Sonja Schoepf Wentling.
Goes without saying.
It looks very obvious to me that Mitt/LDS Inc have borrowed from David Axelrod.
Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to another political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. The term is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.
Like other advocates, astroturfers attempt to manipulate public opinion by both overt (outreach awareness, etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by an individual promoting a personal agenda, or by organized professional groups for pay, or by activist organizations. Services may be provided by political consultants who also provide opposition research and other services. Beneficiaries are not the campaigners but the organizations that orchestrate the campaigns.
Thanks. As a Scout leader, I’m more familiar with the story of Helmuth Hubener.
Don’t you find it interesting that this story which has to this point been unknown comes out now?
The quota rules imposed in 1921 and 1924 were not directed against Jews and Italians only, but against all the European groups that the WASPs of that day considered undesirable--Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, any Eastern Europeans. It was just that the Jews were hurt the most by the policy because they had the greatest incentive to get out of Europe once Hitler came to power and had a much higher likelihood of being killed if the Germans took control of the country where they lived.
One of my professors was on the last passenger ship that crossed the ocean to America in 1939 before the war started--he was then about 4 years old. His family was lucky to have some American relatives sponsor them.
A relative of mine is marrying a foreigner and they have been consulting with immigration about getting residency, and they said it is an involved process even for an American marrying a foreigner.
That doesn’t mean much. The LDS is known for ‘feeding’ sources and most groups, no matter how good, can’t or don’t independently verify them. IOW, if the original information came from the LDS, it should be suspect.
They have pulled this stunt before, many times.
I would want to see independent (non LDS touched) sources and documentation.
This posted story also illustrates a very underreported and "politically incorrect" aspect of the history of the years immediately prior to the United States entry into WWII: Franklin D. Roosevelt's and his administration's callousness to the plight of European Jewry under ever-increasing peril from Nazi expansionism. Call it antisemitism if you will.
What is mormon-speak for “astroturf”?
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Lying for the Lord. This stinks to high heaven.
Side note - one of the biggest lies the Mormon membership tell each other is that Mormons were rounded up and killed by the Nazi’s like the JW’s, gays, and Jews. It not only isn’t true, the opposite is true, SLC and the Nazi’s enjoyed good relations throughout the war.
The one exception was Helmuth Hubener who was excommunicated for fighting the Nazi’s and then reinstated posthumously.
I will never understand how so many Jews idolize this administration. Their blindness and sloth sickens me. But then I'm not one of them. I'm descended from survivors.
Nancy Pelosi’s father, then a Democrat Congressman, also bucked FDR and tried to encourage the US gov’t to save Jews.
As late as 1943, hundreds of Orthodox rabbis publicly marched on the White House on behalf of saving European Jews. They were rebuffed by FDR.
"MORMON boys! Do you know the country without freedom, the country of terror and tyranny? Yes, you know it well, but are afraid to talk about it. They have intimidated you to such an extent that you don't dare talk for fear of reprisals. Yes you are right; it is SALT LAKE CITY — MORMON SLC! Through their unscrupulous terror tactics against young and old, men and women, they have succeeded in making you spineless puppets to do their bidding."
Why no; Ma'am. We do this willingly."
"Romney enjoys at least much more popularity among American Mormons than he does among the population in general. His apparent dynamism and self-confidence seems to show a way out of the chaos and weakness of the Bush/Obama years...
Welcome to MORMONism!
Hey!
I’m on Pravastatin Sodium, 20 Mg.
(I think...)
I went thru YOUR building a couple years ago.
I've not forgotten THAT, either!
Here is my Sweetie (in brown) looking at your fantastic vista!
Oh?
MORMON
ATTITUDES OF SUPERIORITY
1. I’m Superior; I have a special gift of the holy Ghost -- you don’t!
2. I’m Superior; I have God’s true priesthood power -- you don’t! 3. I’m Superior; I can go in God’s secret Temple -- you can’t! 4. I’m Superior; I’ve been Endowed with special Gifts and Knowledge -- you’re just normal! 5. I’m Superior; I’ll have my family with me in heaven -- you’ll be with strangers! 6. I’m Superior; I’m becoming a God -- you aren’t! 7. I’m Superior; My women know their place as servants of man and yours don’t. 8. I’m Superior; YOUR creeds are wrong because they come from man - mine comes from God (you can find each one printed in our Scriptures). 9. I’m Superior; I don’t HAVE a creed - I’ve got 13 Articles of Faith. 10. I'm Superior; I have 4 "Bibles"-- the standard works (5 if you count the JST) -- you've only got one: in as far as it is translated correctly. 11. I’m Superior; I can lie with impunity about such things as church membership, church growth, church doctrine, church history, church influence, etc. — -- You can’t. 12. I’m Superior; I am right (everybody knows) when I say 'evangelical' Christians are lunatics -- -- You’re a hideous narrow-minded bigot, who is persecuting me by practicing discrimination by saying I'm not a Christian.
13. I'm Superior; I have a testimony about a prophet -- you don't. 14. I'm Superior; I have a Scripture-producing Amos 3:7 prophet -- you don't 15. I’m Superior; I have a Living Prophet who talks to god every day -- you have a dim-witted hireling of Satan who only talks to himself. 16. I'm Superior; I have my calling & election made sure -- you don't. 17. I’m Superior; I have magic underwear to protect me from the bogey man -- you don’t. 18. I’m Superior; I have secret clasps and grips to give the angel so I get admitted to the celestial kingdom -- you don’t ;so you can’t. 19. I'm Superior; I know secret handshake codes for afterlife entrances-- you don't. 20. I’m Superior; I will see Joseph Smith setting on the right hand of GOD, when I get to Mormon heaven, and he will recognize me and judge me favorably -- You’re on your own; when you get to wherever you’re going! 21. I’m Superior; I’m going to hie to Kolob -- you’re going to who knows where. 22. I’m Superior; I get to have a harem and act like a celestial stud for time and all eternity -- you don’t. 23. I’m Superior; I have sun stones, moon stones, sky stones, cloud stones, Saturn stones, and the evil eye of Osirus guarding my temple -- You have nothing but a stupid cross.
24. I’m Superior; My church has billions in assets stashed away -- yours has taken a stupid vow of poverty. 25. I'm Superior; Last - we have the power to keep a whole race out of our priesthood if we wanted to reinsert our 148-year legacy (we ARE still keeping an entire GENDER at bay!) 26. I'm superior; I have the "higher law" -- everyone else "lives under the "lesser law' because I say so...(over and over). Revision 46.5
Semi-Official creed of the EXclusive club of Freeper Flying Inmans.
All rights liable to be abused.
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