JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

05/01/09 04:55 PM

Germany alone does not bear the burden of the death of the 6 million Jews.  The indifference of the rest of the world made it impossible for the Jews to leave their European countries and go elsewhere.  The United States and other Western-hemisphere countries who were distant from the countries occupied or under imminent threat of being occupied by Hitler’s armies, could have made a tremendous difference by allowing European Jews to enter their countries, even if for only a short time.  There were, in fact, a few countries that did allow small numbers of Jews in, among them Spain, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.  But their contribution was way too small in relation to the total numbers.  One place which could have absorbed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, was Palestine, then under British control.  The British greatly limited the number of Jews who could enter Palestine because of the strong opposition of the Arab powers.

The whys and wherefores about why other countries not under Hitler’s grasp denied refuge to the Jews can be explained in many different ways, some which make sense, and some which do not.  Plain old-fashioned anti-semitism was certainly a factor. 

Whatever the justification, the fact that other countries did not allow Jews to take refuge gave Hitler all the fodder he needed to rob Jewish property and then ghettoize and exterminate the Jews.  He concluded that since the rest of the world didn’t care enough about the Jews to give them refuge, the world would remain silent, indeed indifferent, while he exterminated them.  And to a large degree, he was right.  Stories smuggled out of Europe about the extermination camps were kept under wraps by the western powers, and no efforts were made to bomb the camps.  Ms. Levinsohn asked why the Allies didnt bomb the tracks leading to the death camps.  It is unlikely that we will never know the answer.

05/01/09 07:14 PM

In fact, the allied did bomb rail lines leading to the death camps, but not with regularity.  Targeting tiny targets like rail lines at night would have been totally ineffective.  Therefore the lines had to be bombed in the daytime, when the bombers always ran a fearsome gauntlet of german AA fire.  The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Forces in Europe (SHAFE) had a limited supply of trained pilots and bombardiers.  Generals Eisenhower and Tedder had to choose between bombing german armaments facories, and the dams and powerplants that ran them and wehrmacht fortifications, bridges, and ammunition dumps, or other valuable targets that would not significantly aid in destroying germany.  At the time, our generals thought that the horrific loss of fliers to enemy AA fire made it absolutely necessary to deny the germans their ability to produce ammunition and guns.  As a result, the rail lines running to the death camps were only a second priority.  Despite the fact that almost all the bombing missions were charged with attacking germany’s munitions industry and army, allied bombers affected the nazi plans to kill off Europe’s plans, by slowing the flow of victims to the death camps.  This however, only meant that Jewish and Romany victims died of exposure and starvation, locked in the boxcars of stalled trains.

My questions are :  why are a few Jews (and they are few but noisy and annoying) so strongly invested in finding the recuers to have been insufficiently heroic ? 

Why are these few Jews committed to blaming Roosevelt and Churchill for HaShoah, while letting Eisenhower, Stalin, and the anti-immigration Republicans in Congress entirely off the hook ?

05/01/09 07:27 PM

Read Eisenhower’s book, Cusade in Europe, or the last 3 volumes of Churchill’s History of World War II. 

Armchair generals who make blithe comments inferring the ease of shutting down germany’s 400 death camps through air interdiction insult the memory of our gallant Bomber Command crews, and the good men who sent them. Anyone who thinks that bombing railway lines while being shot at in broad daylight is a piece of cake should try it sometime.

05/02/09 01:44 AM

There were heavy AA batteries guarding the death camps?  News to me.  George McGovern was a US B-24 pilot in WWII.  He has commented that he basically passed over the camps to and from other missions, but never got the orders to bomb the camps (forget the tracks, destroy the camps.)
I don’t see that anyone has let the anti-immigration Repubs. off the hook, or Stalin.  But the leaders of the free world surely could have done more.

05/02/09 08:16 PM

This makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody knew in 1938 that the Jew needed to be relocated in order to avoid a holocaust. This includes most European Jews. Most would not have willingly left Europe for Africa or Latin America. So FDRs proposal is highly suspect.

05/02/09 10:37 PM

During the Nazi era, the Chinese city of Shanghai (under Japanese occupation) took in 25,000 Jewish refugees, about the same as Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined. The Evian Conference held in July 1938 at the initiative of FDR was a failure at helping Jewish refugees from Germany. Kristallnacht followed a few months later. For an interesting account of one Jewish family’s unsuccessful attempt to leave Poland for the US in the late 1930’s (where they had close relatives), read Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost”. The US State Department was scrupulous in enforcing the immigration quotas of the day. The quota for Germany was about 52,000 per year, including Austria, but only 6,000 for Poland. During the Nazi era, a violation of the anti-sodomy statute, Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which predated the Nazi era, typically resulted in a German aryan being sent to a nearby concentration camp rather than to an extermination camp in occupied Poland.

05/05/09 04:55 PM

I read the article and found the following most telling:

The summary continues, with Mr. Sweetser quoting Roosevelt: “ ‘Suddenly it struck me: why not get all the democracies to unite to share the burden? After all, they own most of the free land of the world, and there are only ... what would you say, 14, 16 million Jews in the whole world, of whom about half are already in the United States. If we could divide up the remainder in groups of 8 or 10, there wouldn’t be any Jewish problem in three or four generations.’ ”

Roosevelt is calling for the end of the Jewish people.  He is calling for a great dispersion of us and in 3 to 4 generations we would be assimilated, no more Jews.  Is it any wonder that he did not exert himself?

05/08/09 02:52 AM

Mr. Schutz’s interpretation of FDR’s words is exceedingly bizarre, and unabashedly dishonest. Schutz ignores the fact that Europe’s Jews lived dispersed among even more countries than the 8 - 10 into which FDR proposed to move them.  Then he lies by claiming that FDR called “for the end of the Jewish people.” The President said no such thing.

Mr. Dent, I didn’t write that the death camps were heavily defended by german AA.  I wrote that the continent over which our bombers would have to fly to reach the death camps was bristling with german AA.  It was not uncommon for us to lose 1 out of 5 of our bombers to AA, therefore Tedder and Ike chose to send those bombers against german military targets rather than the death camps, which they saw as having no military value.