[blind-democracy] Re: FW: WWII was not fought to save anyone from death camps

From: "Andy Baracco" <wq6r@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2020 13:01:09 -0700

Granting that this is true, are you saying that we should have just left Hitler
alone?

Andy

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Miriam Vieni
  To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 6:19 AM
  Subject: [blind-democracy] FW: WWII was not fought to save anyone from death
camps





  From: David Swanson via WarIsACrime.org <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 9:01 AM
  To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Subject: WWII was not fought to save anyone from death camps



                          WWII was not fought to save anyone from death camps

                          By David Swanson, excerpted from Leaving World War II
Behind.

https://davidswanson.org/wwii-was-not-fought-to-save-anyone-from-death-camps/

                          If you were to listen to people justifying WWII
today, and using WWII to justify the subsequent 75 years of wars and war
preparations, the first thing you would expect to find in reading about what
WWII actually was would be a war motivated by the need to save Jews from mass
murder. There would be old photographs of posters with Uncle Sam pointing his
finger, saying “I want you to save the Jews!”

                          In reality, the U.S. and British governments engaged
for years in massive propaganda campaigns to build war support but never made
any mention of saving Jews.[i] And we know enough about internal governmental
discussions to know that saving Jews (or anyone else) was not a secret
motivation kept hidden from antisemitic publics (and if it had been, how
democratic would that have been in the great battle for democracy?). So, right
away we’re faced with the problem that the most popular justification for WWII
wasn’t invented until after WWII.

                          U.S. immigration policy, crafted largely by
antisemitic eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin — themselves sources of
inspiration to Nazi eugenicists — severely limited the admission of Jews into
the United States before and during World War II.[ii]

                          The policy of Nazi Germany for years was to pursue
the expulsion of the Jews, not their murder. The world’s governments held
public conferences to discuss who would accept the Jews, and those governments
— for open and shamelessly antisemitic reasons — refused to accept the Nazis’
future victims. Hitler openly trumpeted this refusal as agreement with his
bigotry and as encouragement to escalate it.

                          In Évian-les-Baines, France, in July 1938, an early
international effort was made, or at least feigned, to alleviate something more
common in recent decades: a refugee crisis. The crisis was the Nazi treatment
of Jews. The representatives of 32 nations and 63 organizations, plus some 200
journalists covering the event, were well aware of the Nazis’ desire to expel
all Jews from Germany and Austria, and somewhat aware that the fate that
awaited them if not expelled was likely going to be death. The decision of the
conference was essentially to leave the Jews to their fate. (Only Costa Rica
and the Dominican Republic increased their immigration quotas.)

                          Australian delegate T. W. White said, without asking
the native people of Australia: “as we have no real racial problem, we are not
desirous of importing one.”[iii]

                          The dictator of the Dominican Republic viewed Jews as
racially desirable, as bringing whiteness to a land with many people of African
descent. Land was set aside for 100,000 Jews, but fewer than 1,000 ever
arrived.[iv]

                          Hitler had said when the Évian Conference had been
proposed: “I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep
sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to
convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all
these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on
luxury ships.”[v]

                          Following the conference, in November of 1938, Hitler
escalated his attacks on Jews with Kristallnacht or Crystal Night — a nighttime
state-organized riot, destroying and burning Jewish shops and synagogues,
during which 25,000 people were sent off to concentration camps. Speaking on
January 30, 1939, Hitler claimed justification for his actions from the outcome
of the Évian Conference:

                          “It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole
democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but
remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to aiding them — which is
surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty. The arguments that are
brought up as excuses for not helping them actually speak for us Germans and
Italians. For this is what they say:

                          “1. ‘We,’ that is the democracies, ‘are not in a
position to take in the Jews.’ Yet in these empires there are not even ten
people to the square kilometer. While Germany, with her 135 inhabitants to the
square kilometer, is supposed to have room for them!

                          “2. They assure us: We cannot take them unless
Germany is prepared to allow them a certain amount of capital to bring with
them as immigrants.”[vi]

                          The problem at Évian was, sadly, not ignorance of the
Nazi agenda, but failure to prioritize preventing it. This remained a problem
through the course of the war. It was a problem found in both politicians and
in the public at large.

                          Five days after Crystal Night, President Franklin
Roosevelt said he was recalling the ambassador to Germany and that public
opinion had been “deeply shocked.” He did not use the word “Jews.” A reporter
asked if anywhere on earth might accept many Jews from Germany. “No,” said
Roosevelt. “The time is not ripe for that.” Another reporter asked if Roosevelt
would relax immigration restrictions for Jewish refugees. “That is not in
contemplation,” the president responded.[vii] Roosevelt refused to support the
child refugee bill in 1939, which would have allowed 20,000 Jews under the age
of 14 to enter the United States, and it never came out of committee.[viii]

                          While many in the United States, as elsewhere, tried
heroically to rescue Jews from the Nazis, including by volunteering to take
them in, majority opinion was never with them.

                          In July 1940, Adolf Eichmann, a major planner of the
holocaust, intended to send all Jews to Madagascar, which now belonged to
Germany, France having been occupied. The ships would need to wait only until
the British, which now meant Winston Churchill, ended their blockade. That day
never came.[ix]

                          British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden met on March
27, 1943, in Washington, D.C., with Rabbi Stephen Wise and Joseph M. Proskauer,
a prominent attorney and former New York State Supreme Court Justice who was
then serving as President of the American Jewish Committee. Wise and Proskauer
proposed approaching Hitler to evacuate the Jews. Eden dismissed the idea as
“fantastically impossible.”[x] But the very same day, according to the U.S.
State Department, Eden told Secretary of State Cordell Hull something different:

                          “Hull raised the question of the 60 or 70 thousand
Jews that are in Bulgaria and are threatened with extermination unless we could
get them out and, very urgently, pressed Eden for an answer to the problem.
Eden replied that the whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very difficult and
that we should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a
country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be
wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take
us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of
transportation in the world to handle them.”[xi]

                          Churchill agreed. “Even were we to obtain permission
to withdraw all the Jews,” he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, “transport
alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.” Not enough
shipping and transport? At the battle of Dunkirk, the British had evacuated
nearly 340,000 men in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of
new planes. During even a brief armistice, the U.S. and British could have
airlifted and transported huge numbers of refugees to safety.[xii]

                          Not everyone was too busy fighting a war.
Particularly from late 1942 on, many in the United States and Britain demanded
that something be done. On March 23, 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury pleaded
with the House of Lords to assist the Jews of Europe. So, the British
government proposed to the U.S. government another public conference at which
to discuss what might be done to evacuate Jews from neutral nations. But the
British Foreign Office feared that the Nazis might cooperate in such plans
despite never being asked to, writing: “There is a possibility that the Germans
or their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of
extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries
by flooding them with alien immigrants.”[xiii]

                          The concern here was not with saving lives so much as
with avoiding the embarrassment and inconvenience of saving lives.

                          In the end, those left alive in the concentration
camps were liberated — though in many cases not very quickly, not as anything
resembling a top priority. Some prisoners were kept in horrible concentration
camps at least up through September of 1946. General George Patton urged that
nobody should “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is
not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”
President Harry Truman admitted at that time that “we apparently treat the Jews
the same way as the Nazis did, with the sole exception that we do not kill
them.”[xiv]

                          Of course, even were that not an exaggeration, not
killing people is a very important exception. The United States had fascist
tendencies but did not succumb to them as Germany did. But neither was there
any all-out capital-R Resistance crusade to save those threatened by fascism —
not on the part of the U.S. government, not on the part of the U.S. mainstream.

                          I tell this and related stories far more thoroughly
in my new book, Leaving World War II Behind.

                          NOTES:

                          [i] In fact, the British Ministry of Propaganda made
a decision to avoid mentioning Jews when discussing victims of the Nazis. See
Walter Laqueuer, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s
“Final Solution.” Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, p. 91. Cited by Nicholson Baker,
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of the End of Civilization. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2008, p. 368.

                          [ii] Harry Laughlin testified in 1920 to the House
Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in the United States Congress that
the immigration of Jews and Italians was damaging the genetic structure of the
race. “Our failure to sort immigrants on the basis of natural worth is a very
serious national menace,” Laughlin warned. Committee Chairman Albert Johnson
appointed Laughlin to be the committee’s Expert Eugenics Agent. Laughlin
supported the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which banned immigration
from Asia and curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. This law
created quotas based on the 1890 U.S. population. Henceforth, immigrants could
not just show up at Ellis Island but would have to obtain visas at U.S.
consulates abroad. See Rachel Gur-Arie, The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, “Harry
Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943),” December 19, 2014,
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/harry-hamilton-laughlin-1880-1943 Also see Andrew ;
J. Skerritt, Tallahassee Democrat, “‘Irresistible Tide’ takes unflinching look
at America’s immigration policy | Book Review,” August 1, 2020,
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/life/2020/08/01/irresistible-tide-takes-unflinching-look-americas-immigration-policy/5550977002
This story is covered in the PBS film “American Experience: The Eugenics
Crusade,” October 16, 2018,
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade For how this ;
influenced the Nazis, see Chapter 4 of Leaving World War II Behind.

                          [iii] Holocaust Educational Trust, 70 Voices:
Victims, Perpetrators, and Bystanders, “As We Have No Racial Problem,” January
27, 2015, http://www.70voices.org.uk/content/day55

                          [iv] Lauren Levy, Jewish Virtual Library, a Project
of American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, “Dominican Republic Provides Sosua
as a Haven for Jewish Refugees,”
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/dominican-republic-as-haven-for-jewish-refugees
See also Jason Margolis, The World, “The Dominican Republic took in Jewish
refugees fleeing Hitler while 31 nations looked away,” November 9, 2018,
https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-11-09/dominican-republic-took-jewish-refugees-fleeing-hitler-while-31-nations-looked

                          [v] Ervin Birnbaum, “Evian: The Most Fateful
Conference of All Times in Jewish History,” Part II,
http://www.acpr.org.il/nativ/0902-birnbaum-E2.pdf

                          [vi] Zionism and Israel – Encyclopedic Dictionary,
“Evian Conference,” http://www.zionism-israel.com/dic/Evian_conference.htm

                          [vii] Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and
Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, (New York: Russell & Russell, 1938-1950)
vol. 7, pp. 597-98. Cited by Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of
the End of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 101.

                          [viii] David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the
Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968),
p. 97. Cited by Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of the End of
Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 116.

                          [ix] Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 18-19. Cited by Nicholson Baker,
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of the End of Civilization. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2008, p. 233.

                          [x] Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “American Jews and the
Holocaust,” New York Times, April 18, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/18/magazine/american-jews-and-the-holocaust.html

                          [xi] U.S. Department of State, Office of the
Historian, “Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Harry L. Hopkins, Special
Assistant to President Roosevelt 55,” March 27, 1943,
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v03/d23

                          [xii] War No More: Three Centuries of American
Antiwar and Peace Writing, edited by Lawrence Rosendwald (Library of America,
2016).

                          [xiii] PBS American Experience: “The Bermuda
Conference,”
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-bermuda

                          [xiv] Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War:
America in the Second World War (James Lorimer & Company Ltd. 2015, 2002) p. 36.

                          ##

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Follow-Ups:
- [blind-democracy] Re: FW: WWII was not fought to save anyone from death camps
  - From: Miriam Vieni

References:
- [blind-democracy] FW: WWII was not fought to save anyone from death camps
  - From: Miriam Vieni

[blind-democracy] Re: FW: WWII was not fought to save anyone from death camps

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