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Title: An Old Battle's Fresh Wounds - Debate Over the U.S. Response to the Holocaust
Source:
Washington Post
URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy ... /09/02/AR2006090200926_pf.html
Published: Sep 3, 2006
Author: Alan Cooperman
Post Date: 2006-09-03 11:00:55 by Morgana le Fay
Keywords: None
Views: 998
Comments: 13
Holocaust history is not a field for academic sissies. It takes a certain sang-froid even to approach the topic. And never mind the crackpots and deniers; even among serious scholars there are epic clashes over who really could have derailed Hitler's Final Solution but did not: Pope Pius XII or Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Ordinary Germans or American Jews? Now, a book defending FDR and a television documentary about Hitler's brand of Darwinism have thrown patriotism and evolution into the mix, and the debate is turning vicious. Fifty-five historians have signed a letter protesting the new book about Roosevelt because, they say, it impugns the patriotism of scholars who think the United States should have bombed Auschwitz, admitted more refugees and taken other steps to lessen the Nazi genocide. In "Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust," author Robert N. Rosen contends that "from Roosevelt's perspective, everything was done that could reasonably be done for European Jewry." FDR's critics, he writes, are indulging in "America-bashing" and promoting an "anti-American" version of history. In their Aug. 29 letter to Rosen's New York publisher, Thunder's Mouth Press, the 55 historians from universities in the United States, Canada and Israel say that Rosen's "name-calling and invective" are "deplorable, false, and have no place in serious discussion of the Roosevelt administration's response to one of the greatest moral crises of the Twentieth Century." And that's the polite response to Rosen's book. The Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which recently moved to Washington from suburban Philadelphia, has issued a scathing 33-page rebuttal to "Saving the Jews" that not only takes issue with Rosen's arguments but also accuses him of plagiarism. It lists 21 passages that appear in the book "without quotation marks to indicate that they are another author's words rather than his." In all cases, however, Rosen does give proper credit to the prior authors in footnotes -- something the Wyman Institute's report neglects to mention. "People should be careful about throwing around a charge like plagiarism," Rosen said in a telephone interview. "This is a very emotional debate, for them and for me. But we can disagree like gentlemen, I would think." The Wyman Institute is named for historian David S. Wyman, the author of a 1984 critique of Roosevelt's wartime record, "The Abandonment of the Jews," that is often considered the definitive indictment of U.S. inaction. Rosen said it's no wonder he is under fierce counterattack, because his book takes on some of the most influential scholars and institutions in the field, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "I'm glad it has generated some controversy. That was the point of it," he said. Rosen added, however, that he did not intend to impugn anyone's personal patriotism, only their historical biases. "The academic world is full of people who really think America is the bad guy -- you know, we were built on slavery, we killed the Indians, we're an imperialist power. There are many left-wing academics who are anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic and don't like America much. I wish I could take credit for that observation, but I'm hardly the first to say it," he said. Rosen, who is Jewish, blames the "Wyman school" of Holocaust historians for what he believes is a giant intellectual fraud. "Most people in America today think we should have bombed Auschwitz and American Jews were begging the government to do it, but the Roosevelt administration didn't do it because John J. McCloy, the undersecretary of war, was an anti-Semite. That's the conventional story in a nutshell," he said. "I think it is totally erroneous." Rosen, 58, is a lawyer with a busy practice in Charleston, S.C., who writes on the side. His last book, "The Jewish Confederates," was a sympathetic look at Jews who fought for the Southern states in the Civil War. He was piqued into writing "Saving the Jews" when he visited Boston's Holocaust Memorial in 2001 and saw an exhibit that said, "By late 1942, the United States and its allies were aware of the death camps but did nothing to destroy them." As evidence that such statements are not only wrong but deliberately deceptive, Rosen cites a similar exhibit at Washington's U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It shows an Aug. 9, 1944, letter from the World Jewish Congress passing on a Czechoslovakian official's request that the Roosevelt administration bomb Auschwitz. "They highlighted that letter, but they ignored one subsequent and two previous letters from the World Jewish Congress saying not to bomb Auschwitz because it would kill the Jews there," Rosen said. "The truth is that American Jewish leaders were divided on what to do, and very few were asking Roosevelt to bomb the camps." Steve Luckert, curator of the Holocaust Museum's permanent exhibition, said he stands by the accuracy of its exhibit. He noted that the main panel on "Why Auschwitz Was Not Bombed" includes this summary: "A few Jewish leaders called for the bombing of the Auschwitz gas chambers; others opposed it. Like some allied officials, both sides feared the death toll or the German propaganda that might exploit any bombing of the camp's prisoners. No one was certain of the results." "We try to show this issue in a nuanced way," Luckert said. "One thing I have learned in my years as an historian is that things are rarely black and white. New documents are always coming out. What you don't want to do is say, 'All the answers are there; we don't need to do any more digging.' " The furious response to Rosen's assertions could backfire, bringing him more attention than he would otherwise have received. The book is "selling steadily," said Michele Martin, interim head of Thunder's Mouth Press. Rosen said it has sold about 6,000 copies. His book has a complimentary afterword by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and blurbs on the back cover from James MacGregor Burns ("an authoritative analysis") and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ("an essential book"). But it received some withering reviews when it came out in May. Publishers Weekly called it a "bloated, repetitious volume" that "reads like one long apology" for FDR. The Jerusalem Post called it "a partisan riposte to the decades of serious work on the subject." Still, the director of the Wyman Institute, Rafael Medoff, said he could not let stand "the ad-hominem attacks and mischaracterizations" of his own and other historians' works in Rosen's "otherwise unoriginal" book. Medoff said Rosen was correct that Jewish leaders in Palestine initially opposed the bombing of Auschwitz. But, he said, that was because until mid-1944, they thought it was a labor camp, not a death factory. By July of 1944, the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem had received the first eyewitness account of the mass-murder process, known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. After that, Medoff said, Jewish Agency officials around the world lobbied the United States and its allies to bomb Auschwitz and other death camps, to no avail. Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, a former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and one of the 55 signers of the letter protesting Rosen's book, said he thinks that Wyman and Medoff are closer than Rosen to the truth about FDR. But he acknowledged that "this is an ongoing, legitimate debate." The whole episode, he added, is a reminder of the "twin dangers" of Holocaust research. "There's the danger you become so objective that you grow cold, and there's the danger you become so full of emotion that you can't tolerate anybody disagreeing," he said. "It really shows the wound is still raw. It hasn't turned to ancient history." While the FDR debate continues to evolve, evangelist D. James Kennedy's Florida-based television and radio organization, Coral Ridge Ministries, has produced a TV documentary and a book linking the Holocaust to the theory of evolution. Called "Darwin's Deadly Legacy," the documentary aired Aug. 26-27 on Christian cable networks and about 200 television stations across the country. It is now being sold on DVD along with the companion book, "Evolution's Fatal Fruit: How Darwin's Tree of Life Brought Death to Millions." Both describe the Nazis' embrace of eugenics and social Darwinism, their attempt to build a master race and to justify racism, slavery and even murder as survival of the fittest. Coral Ridge Ministries spokesman John Aman contended that "Darwinism is a philosophy, it's a worldview, and one of the key things in it is that evolution advances by death, so death is a good thing. Hitler thought he was doing civilization a favor by eliminating lives that were not worth living. We of course think that is an egregious moral tragedy and a consequence of the worldview that was initiated by Darwin and popularized by his followers." Contemporary evolutionists consider eugenics and social Darwinism a perversion of evolutionary theory, not a legitimate extension of Darwin's thought. Some critics have called the documentary a political shot in the battle over creationism, one intended to promote the idea that belief in evolution is a moral slippery slope. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Kennedy of "trivializing the Holocaust" in a "mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war." The Anti-Defamation League also said it had contacted one of the best-known scientists interviewed in the documentary, Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and found that he was misled. Collins speaks in the film about his view that evolution and belief in God are fully compatible, a position he elaborates in his book "The Language of God," published this year. "I would not have agreed to participate if I had understood that the program would promote the concept of a direct connection between Darwin's theory of evolution and the evils of the Holocaust and the massacre at Columbine High School," Collins said in a written answer to questions from The Post. "My own views on evolution and faith are . . . strongly discordant with the perspective put forward by the producers of this documentary." Coral Ridge Ministries said it would remove Collins's interview from any future airings of the documentary and would stop using his name to promote it. "We consider him a fellow Christian and have reached a friendly understanding with him about this matter," Kennedy's organization said. © 2006 The Washington Post Company
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#1. To: Morgana le Fay (#0)
And how many Americans and Brits were on death marches and interned in Japanese POW camps, and nothing was done to save them either. It was a war that we almost did not win! And at Yalta, FDR gave Stalin half of europe, and left tens of thousands of American POWs to his "tender" care. They all died, never to be heard of again. 16 million American men left their families to fight this war. 400,000 or so did not return. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties Enough about the Jewish Holocaust, enough! BTW, when I visited Simon Wiesenthal's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, there was quite a bit of documentation about how American Jewry did nothing! Absolutely NOTHING to help their cousins in europe.
"If there’s another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country." - Daniel Ellsberg Author, Pentagon Papers We didn't win it. Giving half of Christian Europe to atheist Communist Russia for 50 years is not winning the war. Jews moving to the Middle East they could take the land from the original inhabitants and ethnically clease the place -- a war which is going on today and in which we are intimately involved -- is not winning the war. The Communists coming to power in China -- which they still are today -- is not winning the war. We should have stayed out and let the Germans destroy the Communists in Russia. As for aiding Englad, I don't give a damn about the place. They invented the concentration camp during the Boer War, in which they slaughtered one-fourth of the population, slaughtered or expelled one-third of the Irish, and expelled my ancestors from Scotland during the Highland Clearances. We should have stayed out of WWII. As for Jews supposedly being slaughtered, I find it odd that not one of the major players in WWII -- Churchill, for example - - ever mentioned it in their memoirs.
"Benjamin Franklin was shown the new American constitution, and he said, 'I don't like it, but I will vote for it because we need something right now. But this constitution in time will fail, as all such efforts do. And it will fail because of the corruption of the people, in a general sense.' And that is what it has come to now, exactly as Franklin predicted." -- Gore Vidal
Has anyone offered definitive proof that millions of people died in gas chambers? It is a physical science impossibility to kill hundreds of people in a gas chamber and then walk in and start pulling out bodies without gloves, masks and chemically protectice suits. There is proof for the killing of 60,000,000 in the Soviet Union by the Jewish Communists.
The Truth of 911 Shall Set You Free From The Lie
Difficult to argue with your post. But how many ever looked at history this way?
"If there’s another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country." - Daniel Ellsberg Author, Pentagon Papers Foxman and the rest fail to mention that prior to Hitler, there was a battle of socialists going on in Germany, trying for absolute power. There were the Nazis and the communists. The Nazis won, the communists/Jews lost. No one ever considers what would have happened to the German population had the communists won. For those that care to learn, all they have to do is recall what took place in Russia after the communist/Jews took over. Millions of Christians were slaughtered and starved to death, a fact that is never mentioned. Anyone that thinks Germany would have been heaven on earth had the communists won are deluding themselves. After Hitler won, the Jew communists fled to Russia for safety and returned years later with the advancing Red Army. Returned to shoot anyone that wanted to leave. I hope not all have forgotten the pictures of the dead hanging on the East German fences.
Amen.
Anyone that thinks Germany would have been heaven on earth had the communists won are deluding themselves. After Hitler won, the Jew communists fled to Russia for safety and returned years later with the advancing Red Army. Returned to shoot anyone that wanted to leave. I hope not all have forgotten the pictures of the dead hanging on the East German fences. No, we haven't forgotten here. The Stasi and Gulags continued for East Germans long after WWII. And what happened to tens of thousands of German women was finally mentioned during the 60 year anniversary. Even the LA Times wrote a little about the atrocities, which included using broken bottles in unspeakable ways. Thousands were said to have committed suicide. Screams heard all over because the windows were gone. All were raped, and my German professor said, between 2 and 92 years of age. I should add a Hungarian coworker told me the same barbaric Soviet units that were sent into East Germany, and especially Berlin, were also sent into Hungary during the failed revolt in the 50s. Her own sister, aged 9 was gang-raped, her father and neighbor shot when they tried to stop it. She was 7. I think she was raped too, but she never said. Her mother tried so hard to keep them out of sight and even dirtied their faces to make them unattractive she told us.
"If there’s another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country." - Daniel Ellsberg Author, Pentagon Papers The Russians coming into East Berlin is good food for thought. This is what happens to people when an incompetent fascist gets out of control, kills a bunch of people all over the world and then loses the war. Note that Bush has got his ass kicked going into Afghanistan and Iraq - not exactly the mightest nations on earth. And now Bush wants to take on the rest of the world by going into Iran. The wingnut fiction that Russia, China and Europe are going to sit passively by while a hated and incompetent madman runs off with 1/4 of the worlds' oil is just plain silly. The problem is that the US population has no experience with war. No modern wars have been fought here. This allows the Freeper keyboard commandos to glorify it as a sort of enjoyable football game that they will most certainly win. Pounding your chest while sitting behind a keyboard if a fun but dangerous game. Bush might very well follow Hitler's lead to the bitter end - or worse. I personally think Hitler, a self made man, was moderately more competent than Bush.
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Bush might very well follow Hitler's lead to the bitter end - or worse. I personally think Hitler, a self made man, was moderately more competent than Bush. infinitely The idiots on FR cannot look ahead more than one or two steps, their blinders are fit with special glasses too. "If there’s another 9/11 or a major war in the Middle-East involving a U.S. attack on Iran, I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country." - Daniel Ellsberg Author, Pentagon Papers I guess from the "perspective" of a self serving meglomaniac more concerned with his power and "legacy" than with actual human beings that would be true. However, for sane healthy people capable of empathy and normal human emotion it is a lie. First of all, this "debate" about bombing the camps or not bombing the camps isn't the issue. Thats crap and one could debate that till the cows come home. But the fact of the matter is that Roosevelt could have had a damn good chance of seeing Hitler overthrown and a peace made with an interim German government of military officers that would have ended the slaughter in the camps and made a D-Day invasion and slog fight through France into Germany with the shittiest tanks in that war not necessary. Roosevelt was well aware that Admiral Canaris, the head of German military intelligence, had tried repeatedly to contact him to arrange just that sort of coup against Hitler. Roosevelt REFUSED ANY CONTACT WITH HIM OR THE "FRONT OF DECENT PEOPLE"- PERIOD. Indeed- it was the refusal of Roosevelt to offer any support to this group of military officers that was the tipping point for many of them and caused them to NOT support a coup against Hitler. When this group did make their move against Hitler and were all caught and its leaders, including Canaris, given show trials by the Nazi regime Roosevelt actually had leaflets dropped MOCKING these brave men as "Prussian militarists" who were trying to avoid their fate at the last minute (knowing full well that for years they had been trying to contact him). These leaflets were actually read at their trials as proof that even the US considered them to be "traitors". So it wasn't about bombing or not bombing the camps. Roosevelt wanted his "unconditional surrender". During the war Roosevelt all but put a press blackout on the Holocaust- it was barely mentioned in controlled American media. He could have stopped it- and saved millions of lives- Jews, Germans, and American. But he didn't. He wanted his war and his "legacy".
Excellent posts by all. Bookmarking.
"Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief." -- H. M. Kallen (1882-1974)
It's interesting to note that Von Stafilberg, the fellow with the missing eye and fingers who planted the suitcase bomb at the wolfs lair, wrote a letter to a friend bemoaning the loss of Germans soldiers and what a mistake the war was in August 1941 when the Germans were still slying high off their victories in Poland, France, and the early success in Russia. So the "saving thier hides at the last moment" lie whipped up by FDR was just that. FDR, the "D"s and "R"s of old and the neocons today hate officers like Stafilberg. Military men who remember their oath to defend their country and countrymen, not the leadership and are willing to take on all enemies that threaten the nation. I imagine the idea that a modern day Stafilberg might rise up somwhere in the Pentagon keeps the neocons up at night. I guess that's why we don't see our modern day Rommels and Pattons and Zhukovs. The neocons make sure they never get past the rank of Private. P.S. And for the "greatest genertion" out there, this ones for you: "The war was a pity and a great loss of opertunity. Image what we could have done had we worked together. No one could have stopped us." - Stalin talking about Hitler - 1948
"The more I see of life, the less I fear death" - Me.
Full fledged wars are NOT in the interests of standing militaries. The constant threat of war and the occassional quick and easy war against weakling adversaries in which victories are all but assured are in the interests of standing militaries but long drawn out bloody engagements that draw critical glances from the public towards the military and its perfomance are definitely not what the professional ranks of peacocked plummed officers wish to be engaged in. A standing military in peacetime is pure gravy for all involved- from officer to contractor to whore politician. But a real war is a risk that they normally don't like to take. I have little doubt that the officers in the US military are not at all jazzed about Iraq or Afghanistan and certainly about any plans for war against Iran. They like to conduct expensive war games against each other and preen and prattle on with nonsense inspections and go to cocktail parties with bigshots and play politics with weapons contractors. They like their Lear Jets and golf courses (over 400 US military golf courses at last count- all over the world)- and these wars could risk some of that. They don't want to be issuing orders to "kill all the fighting age males" and dirty themselves with these types of wars like in Iraq. They don't want to give briefings on how many "detainees" they have brought in. The dirty little secret of the US military is that its proffesional officer corp is a gaggle of cronies who far prefer sipping scotch at the officers club during a peacetime with the "threats" that keep them up to their eyeballs in those scotch glasses- but they really would prefer not to be in the field having to actually fight. Though the US standing military isn't the prime instigator of these recent elective wars its very existence as a world strattling empire of bases made the starting of such too easy for politicains and their contractor masters and think tank geekers.
#2. To: robin (#1)
(Edited)
It was a war that we almost did not win!
#3. To: Morgana le Fay (#0)
#4. To: YertleTurtle (#2)
#5. To: Morgana le Fay (#0)
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Kennedy of "trivializing the Holocaust" in a "mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war."
#6. To: robin (#1)
Enough about the Jewish Holocaust, enough!
#7. To: Cynicom, Yertle Turtle, jessejane (#5)
(Edited)
No one ever considers what would have happened to the German population had the communists won. For those that care to learn, all they have to do is recall what took place in Russia after the communist/Jews took over. Millions of Christians were slaughtered and starved to death, a fact that is never mentioned.
#8. To: robin (#7)
#9. To: ... (#8)
The problem is that the US population has no experience with war. No modern wars have been fought here. This allows the Freeper keyboard commandos to glorify it as a sort of enjoyable football game that they will most certainly win. Pounding your chest while sitting behind a keyboard if a fun but dangerous game.
#10. To: Morgana le Fay (#0)
"from Roosevelt's perspective, everything was done that could reasonably be done for European Jewry." FDR's critics, he writes, are indulging in "America-bashing" and promoting an "anti-American" version of history.
#11. To: robin (#7)
#12. To: Burkeman1 (#10)
When this group did make their move against Hitler and were all caught and its leaders, including Canaris, given show trials by the Nazi regime Roosevelt actually had leaflets dropped MOCKING these brave men as "Prussian militarists" who were trying to avoid their fate at the last minute (knowing full well that for years they had been trying to contact him).
#13. To: Pissed Off Janitor (#12)
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