- In the wake of Kristallnacht, humanitarian-minded members of Congress introduced legislation to aid German Jewry. A bill sponsored by Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Mass) proposed the admission of 20,000 German refugee children outside the quotas. Nativist and isolationist groups vociferously opposed the Wagner-Rogers bill. Typical of their perspective was a remark by FDR's cousin, Laura Delano Houghteling, who was the wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration: she warned that '20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.' February, 1939, the Wagner-Rogers bill died in Congress. Roosevelt refused to take a position on it.
- On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba, with 937 passengers. Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. 743 had been waiting to receive US visas. The Cuban government refused to admit them. Some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded.' 254 of the passengers returned to Europe would perish in the Holocaust.
- Four months before Kristallnacht, the Roosevelt administration had organized a conference in Evian, France, and invited delegates from 32 countries to discuss the Jewish refugee problem. But the delegates reaffirmed their unwillingness to liberalize their immigration quotas, and the British refused to even discuss Palestine as a possible haven. One German newspaper's comment on Evian stands out: 'We can see that one likes to pity the Jews"but no state is prepared to " accept a few thousand Jews. Thus, the conference serves to justify Germany's policy against Jewry.'"
On May 18, 1942, The New York Times reported, but on an inside page, that Nazis had machine-gunned over 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland and twice as many in western Russia. By this date, millions had been gassed.
In the June 10,1944 issue of Nation Magazine, Editor I. F. Stone wrote "For the Jews - Life or Death? - regarding a weak proposal to make so called 'free ports' of army camps in the US for refugee Jews.
The longer we delay the fewer Jews there will be left to rescue, the slimmer the chances to get them out. Between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 European Jews have been killed since August, 1942, when the Nazi extermination campaign began."
The most violent persecution, brutal arrests and internment had been done openly in a world basically owned and run by the 'democratically' elected legislatures of white industrialized nations, nations that had earlier used their edge in arms manufacture to conquer, colonize and exploit the whole non white population of the world. When the difficult to believe newsreels and newspaper photos of the indescribably inhuman conditions inside the camps, of heaps of hundreds of naked bodies and of the cremation ovens were seen, they did not awaken a change in the of the long standing fierce antipathy and prejudice toward Jews which sustained an attitude of opposition to the entry of Jews, even as survivors of the Holocaust, into the USA, in spite of the wide open spaces it contained.
The rearming of Germany made possible Hitler's invasions of twenty-two countries and brought world war to Asia, for Japan would not have dared to attack and declare war on the United States of America without it being able to count on an alliance with an awesomely powerful rearmed Nazi Germany, plus Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania, which all declared war on the USA immediately after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The Second World War and the Holocaust, which made the rich speculators of Wall Street owning America the sole world superpower, is estimated to have taken the lives of 60 to 70 million men, women and children. As already mentioned, within this total were the 28 million citizens, men, women and children, of the Soviet Union, which had been the target goal for the rearming of Germany by a consensus of the wealthiest American and European capitalists. A further plus for Wall Street was that half the cities of Wall Street's designated archenemy, socialist model USSR, lay in ruins.
We are fortunate to have Finian Cunningham's excellently written description of the mega great deception that underlies most subsequent deceptions in our post-WW II world. A world of deceit by media managed public ignorance and dis and mis information.
"The Western public, inculcated with decades of brainwashing versions of history, have a particular disadvantage in coming to a proper understanding of the world wars...
A very different 'version' of history has been concealed, a 'version' that puts the Western rulers in an altogether more pernicious category from their ordinary citizens.
European fascism headed up by Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, was not some aberrant force that sprang from nowhere during the 1920s-1930s. The movement was a deliberate cultivation by the rulers of Anglo-American capitalism. European fascism may have been labeled "national socialism" but its root ideology was very much one opposed to overturning the fundamental capitalist order. It was an authoritarian drive to safeguard the capitalist order, which viewed genuine worker-based socialism as an enemy to be ruthlessly crushed.
This is what made European fascism so appealing to the Western capitalist ruling class in those times. In particular, Nazi Germany was viewed by the Western elite as a bulwark against possible socialist revolution inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917.
It is no coincidence that American capital investment in Nazi Germany between 1929-1940 far outpaced that in any other European country, ... The industrial rearmament of Germany (despite the strictures of the Versailles Treaty signed at the end of World War One, which were ignored) was indeed facilitated by the American and British capitalist ruling classes. When Hitler annexed Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, it was ignored. This was not out of complacent appeasement, as widely believed, but rather out of a far more active, albeit secretive, policy of collusion. British Conservative leader Neville Chamberlain and his ruling cohort were intent on giving Nazi Germany a "free hand" for eastward expansionism.
The real target for the Western sponsors of the Nazi war machine was an attack on the Soviet Union in order to destroy, in their view, the source of international revolutionary socialism. In the 1930s, the very existence of capitalism was teetering on the edge amid the Great Depression, massive poverty and seething popular discontent in the US, Britain and other Western countries. The entire Western capitalist order was under imminent threat from its own masses. This is the historical context for the Western-backed rise of European fascism.
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