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What FDR said about Jews in private
L.A. Touches ^ | 4/7/13 | Rafael Medoff

Posted on 04/07/2013 8:00:57 PM PDT by Nachum

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question."

Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) "to spread the Jews thin all over the world." The diary entry adds: "The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that."

Roosevelt's "best way" remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR's support for "spreading the Jews thin" may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government's tepid response to the Holocaust.

(Excerpt) Read more at touch.latimes.com ...


TOPICS: Extended News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: abreachoffaith; allanjlichtman; auschwitz; davidswyman; despicable; fdr; fdrandthejews; fdrholocaust; holocaust; ibnsaud; israel; jews; pages; private; rabbistephenwise; rafaelmedoff; richardbreitman; richardcohen; theholocaust; worldwar2; worldwareleven; wwii; zionism
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To: dfwgator
56 posted on 4/8/2013 1:25:50 AM by dfwgator: “Hitler only tolerated private enterprise to the point where it would help him build his war machine. A lot of Nazi rhetoric was as anti-capitalistic as the Soviet rhetoric was....Once the war was won, there is no question that the Nazis’ next target for liquidation was to be the business class.”

I'd like to see links to documentation. That could be helpful in rebutting those who consider Nazis to be “right wing” ultraconservatives.

I'm quite aware of the Nazi party's roots in socialism — after all, it was the National **SOCIALIST** Workers Party.

However, it does seem as if the purge of the SA (brownshirts) by the SS (blackshirts) reflected an underlying move by Hitler toward corporate “crony capitalism” on an Italian Fascist model, rather than the stronger socialist theme of the SA, or of Mussolini in his younger days. My impression is that Hitler himself changed his views on the role of businessmen as his Nazi Party became more successful, and especially after the German Communists and the Social Democrats were eliminated as political competitors for the loyalty of working-class Germans.

101 posted on 04/09/2013 4:32:02 PM PDT by darrellmaurina
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To: darrellmaurina
Fascinating. Has anything been written on this similarity?

I read about it in a series of historical novels about Britain during the Middle Ages by Bernard Cornwell. Ascent into Valhalla is apparently non-denominational. Warriors who die weapon in hand go there regardless of what gods they believe in. Here's an interesting intersection of history - a 10th century Muslim envoy of the Abbasid caliph of his era wrote a record of a Norse chieftain's burial rites.

102 posted on 04/09/2013 4:39:35 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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To: darrellmaurina
"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

~ Adolph Hitler, May 1, 1927

You should be able to find the full text in the online Propaganda Archive of Calvin College.

103 posted on 04/09/2013 4:40:20 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: darrellmaurina
However, it does seem as if the purge of the SA (brownshirts) by the SS (blackshirts) reflected an underlying move by Hitler toward corporate “crony capitalism” on an Italian Fascist model,

The relative health and global competitiveness of German industries leads me to think that this was out and out capitalism rather Latin American-style crony capitalism. There's a tendency to believe that because Hitler was a mass murderer, he also did everything else in ways diametrically opposite from ours. I think it's a mistake to assume that.

104 posted on 04/09/2013 4:45:29 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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To: RegulatorCountry; dfwgator
103 posted on 4/9/2013 6:40:20 PM by RegulatorCountry: “You should be able to find the full text in the online Propaganda Archive of Calvin College.”

Considering that I'm a Calvin College graduate, I probably need to spend more time reading that archive. I've read a fair amount and quoted from it periodically on Free Republic, but I don't know it as well as I should.

One caution, however — there is a difference between the earlier Hitler who worked with the avowedly socialist leaders of the SA and the later Hitler who authorized the SS purge of the SA. The fact that Hitler was attacking capitalism in 1927 does not necessarily mean he had the same views a decade later.

My read of Hitler is that he certainly believed the state should have a strong hand in organizing all parts of society, including business life. He certainly was not any supporter of “free enterprise” as we would understand it. But on the other hand, he seems to have moved from a strong opposition to the rich elites of Germany in his earlier days to co-opting those elites once the Nazi Party became a major factor in German politics, and especially after he became Chancellor and was in charge of the government and economic policy.

105 posted on 04/09/2013 4:56:36 PM PDT by darrellmaurina
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To: darrellmaurina

A Goebbels speech from 1929, reprinted as a pamphlet and distributed in the hundreds of thousands in 1932:

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htm


106 posted on 04/09/2013 5:02:20 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: darrellmaurina

Hitler, was above all, a pragmatist when it came to such matters, the bottom line is he understood that ideological purity wasn’t going to get him his war machine, and it was that, that triumphed over all else. He needed to use the people that knew how to do it already....That’s why he didn’t just fire all of the old Prussian Generals from the Wehrmacht, even though personally he despised them.


107 posted on 04/09/2013 5:05:46 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: darrellmaurina
One caution, however — there is a difference between the earlier Hitler who worked with the avowedly socialist leaders of the SA and the later Hitler who authorized the SS purge of the SA. The fact that Hitler was attacking capitalism in 1927 does not necessarily mean he had the same views a decade later.

Precisely. What politicians say and what politicians actually do are different things, even in democratic countries. Ho Chi Minh made a lot speeches that made him sound like George Washington. What he did in post-colonial North Vietnam was the complete opposite. Khomeini sad a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think it's safe to say that prior to the Shah's overthrow, Khomeini did not blurt out to the faces of his Communist allies that he would hunt down and kill every last one of them, even though that's what he did after coming to power.

108 posted on 04/09/2013 5:12:45 PM PDT by Zhang Fei (Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always.)
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To: RegulatorCountry

Anyone familiar with the work of Karl Marx will recognize this particular bombastic style.


109 posted on 04/09/2013 5:13:06 PM PDT by jjotto ("Ya could look it up!")
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To: jjotto

Yes, it was just another lethal bout of infighting in a particularly nasty and dysfunctional family, a family to which Americsn conservatism is not related.


110 posted on 04/09/2013 5:18:31 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: RegulatorCountry; Zhang Fei; dfwgator
Thank you for the links and the info on Nazis and on the Islamic scholar and traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan who observed a Viking burial. It is quite interesting. I would be interested in reading more about how Muslims viewed Valhalla.

As for people saying one thing and doing another, or saying different things to different audiences... let's just say it would be far too easy, in the very different worlds in which I live and work, to say things that would make me look better to some people. When posting something, I try to remind myself of a lesson taught my Army Public Affairs — the power of Google to find out things some would like to keep hidden.

Men's words have a tendency to show up at the most inconvenient times, and the internet has made that much easier to do to people.

111 posted on 04/09/2013 5:25:31 PM PDT by darrellmaurina
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To: RegulatorCountry

Yep. American conservatism is simply unrelated to the historic European Right, which is merely a different incarnation of the same authoritarianism craved by the Left on both sides of the Atlantic.


112 posted on 04/09/2013 5:30:17 PM PDT by jjotto ("Ya could look it up!")
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