Author Topic: FDR HAD HIS KISSINGER, TOO. Jews who refused to help Jews in Europe in WW2  (Read 1128 times)

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Offline Dan193

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http://new.wymaninstitute.org/2010/12/fdr-had-his-kissinger-too/
FDR HAD HIS KISSINGER, TOO
by Rafael Medoff, 2010

Henry Kissinger was not the first Jewish adviser to an American president who urged his boss to refrain from rescuing Jews.

According to transcripts of Oval Office tapes recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library, Secretary of State Kissinger told the president, in 1973, that even “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” Kissinger’s remark is obviously appalling. But it’s equally disturbing to recall that when Soviet Jews were being shipped off to gas chambers –during the Holocaust– two prominent Jews gave then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt similar advice.

But when Jewish organizations urged President Roosevelt to rescue Jews from the Nazis, FDR’s Jewish advisers gave him Kissinger-style advice. More than 1.5 million Jews living in German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, were murdered by the Nazis. Many of them were lined up in front of huge pits and shot; many others were shipped to German death camps in Poland.

One of FDR’s top advisers and speechwriters was Samuel Rosenman, a leading member of the American Jewish Committee. Rosenman, a deeply assimilated Jew, was uncomfortable calling attention to Jewish concerns. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms, he warned FDR that admitting German Jewish refugees to America would “create a Jewish problem in the U.S.” In 1943, when 400 rabbis marched to the White House to plead for a rescue effort, Rosenman counseled Roosevelt to snub “the medieval horde.” Rosenman also tried to undermine the 1943 campaign by rescue advocates and Treasury Department officials for creation of a government agency to save Jewish refugees. The agency, called the War Refugee Board, was eventually established despite his opposition.

In 1944, the leaders of the board asked FDR to issue a statement threatening to prosecute anyone involved in persecuting Jews, and pledging to provide havens for Jewish refugees. Rosenman watered down the declaration, for fear that giving the Jews attention “would intensify anti-Semitism in the United States.” He deleted three of the six references to Jews, removed the offer to shelter refugees in America, and added three opening paragraphs about the Nazis’ mistreatment of “Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, French, Greeks, Russians, Chinese Filipinos – and many others.”

Another prominent Jewish defender of FDR’s policy toward European Jewry was Congressman Sol Bloom, a Democrat and chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Roosevelt administration chose him as a U.S. delegate to its sham refugee conference in Evian, France, in 1938, and to its equally farcical refugee conference in Bermuda five years later. Afterward, Bloom declared, “I as a Jew am perfectly satisfied with the results” – prompting one Jewish periodical to charge that Bloom had been “used as a stooge to impede Jewish protests against the nothing-doers of the Bermuda conference…”

Bloom worked closely with the administration to block congressional resolutions supporting rescue and Jewish statehood. He even backed the State Department’s proposal to ban all public discussion of the Palestine issue for the duration of World War II.

Jewish leaders were furious over Bloom’s actions. A document I recently discovered in the Central Zionist Archives, in Jerusalem, quotes Synagogue Council of America president Dr. Israel Goldstein as saying that “no Jew should ever occupy the position of chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”

The problem was not that a Jew who reached such a position of power might turn against his people. The problem was that in those years, and even in more recent times, the only kind of Jew who could rise to such a powerful post in the first place was one who was willing to cast aside Jewish concerns. The only kind of Jew whom Roosevelt – or Nixon – would take into his inner circle was one who would tell him what he wanted to hear when it came to Jewish issues. Indeed, one State Department official privately referred to Sol Bloom as “easy to handle” – a way of saying he could be trusted never to make trouble on Jewish matters.

On the newly released Nixon-Kissinger tapes, Kissinger remarks that the genocide of Soviet Jewry would be “maybe a humanitarian concern,” but certainly “not an American concern.” Samuel Rosenman and Sol Bloom likewise believed that humanitarian concerns such as rescuing Jews contradicted, or might be seen as contradicting, America’s true interests.

Not everyone saw it that way. A few years ago, my Wyman Institute colleagues interviewed former senator and presidential nominee George McGovern about his experiences as a pilot who flew over Auschwitz in 1944 to bomb German oil plants nearby. McGovern said that if his commanders had told the pilots about the death camp and offered them the option of undertaking a bombing raid strictly for humanitarian (rather than military ) purposes, “whole crews would have volunteered.” They understood, he said, that the war against the Nazis was not just a military struggle, but also a fight for principles and values such as basic human decency and concern for the persecuted. Likewise in Kissinger’s time, there was strong public support for U.S. intervention on behalf of Soviet Jewry. The truth is that the American public has often been much more humanitarian-minded than some of its presidents –and their nervous Jewish advisers– ever recognized.


Offline Dan193

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I saw this which shows how Samuel_Rosenman and Rabbi Stephen Wise did everything to prevent FDR from helping save the Jews in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Rosenman
On October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) organized a march to Washington DC (the famous Rabbis March) by a delegation of some 400 rabbis, most if not all Orthodox and some recent immigrants, to make a public appeal to the United States government to do more to try to rescue the abandoned Jews of Europe. It was the only such protest in Washington during the Holocaust. The rabbis were received at steps of the Capitol by the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the Speaker of the House.

After prayers for the war effort at the Lincoln Memorial the rabbis went to the White House to plead with President Roosevelt and were told that the President is busy all day and Vice President Henry Wallace met them instead. It was later learned that Roosevelt had several free hours that afternoon, but was advised by both Stephen Wise (head of the World Jewish Congress) and Samuel Rosenman (the President's advisor, speech writer and head of the American Jewish Committee) that the protesting rabbis "were not representative" of American Jewry and not the kind of Jews he should meet. Wise also accused the rabbis of "offending the dignity of the Jewish people."

Offline Joe Gutfeld

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Not only that, but FDR kept the Spirit Of St. Louis from coming to the US with thousands of Jews on it.  They were escaping from the Nazis.  They were forced to go back and they all died in the camps.

Offline Dan193

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Even George Mcgovern wanted to bomb Auschwitz.

Former U.S. Senator George McGovern piloted a B-24 Liberator in December 1944, and his squadron bombed Nazi oil facilities less than five miles from Auschwitz. In 2005, he said “There is no question we should have attempted to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the Earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens

According to Senator McGovern, if his commanders had asked for volunteers to bomb Auschwitz, “whole crews would have volunteered.” That was because most American soldiers in World War II understood that the war they were fighting was not just a military struggle but a moral one, as well. In McGovern’s view, they would have recognized the importance of trying to disrupt the mass-murder process, even if it meant endangering their own lives in a risky raid. It seems likely there would be plenty of American soldiers today who would feel the same way.

Offline Nachus

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 :usa+israel:                                                                                                                          :fist:

These Judenrat style kapos are among the
most despicable, lowest beasts that ever lived.