Peach
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- Jan 10, 2009
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FDR didn't want to know about Nazi atrosities. Even after his own administration begged him to relax the immigration standards so that Jews could leave Germany he refused. The US had no intelligence network and the State Dept consisted of a bunch of rich liberals who used US embassies for parties. The ambassador to Germany was an honest college professor who was ridiculed by FDR's elite liberals and he was finally relieved of duty when he complained too much about Hitler.
Not true. Morganthau paid for those on The Voyage of The Damned to be accepted in Europe. The Vrba report was key in informing the US*, though FDR began in 1942 to condemn the atrocity:
With the active intervention of the State Department and the Joint, the St. Louis went to England (not Germany), where 288 of the 907 passengers disembarked and survived the Holocaust. The remaining 619 disembarked at Antwerp and went to France, Belgium, and Holland. The leading authorities on the St. Louis estimate that 392 of the 619 who disembarked at Antwerp survived the war. Thus more than 2/3 of the passengers on the St. Louis survived the Holocaust.The passengers knew that Americans had saved them. Our gratitude is as immense as the ocean on which we are now floating, they wired Morris Troper of the Joint. Three years later, after Hitler conquered the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, and initiated the Final Solution, 227 of the St. Louiss 936 passengers became victims of the Holocaust. Of course in June 1939 no one could have foreseen this. The death camps did not even exist in 1939. The Roosevelt Administration had done all it could.
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He denounced the Nazi massacres of Jews in July 1942. He warned Germans of fearful retribution in August of that year. On December 17, 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill issued the United Nations Declaration on Jewish Massacres, denouncing in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.
This was BEFORE the Vrba report.
The only agenda for the US ambassador to Germany was to pressure the Nazi regime for the reparations "owed" to the US after WW1. Other than that FDR didn't want to hear of atrocities which were going on throughout the 30's. There was no condemnation of the Nazi regime until it became politically advantageous after the war started. Jews were "encouraged" to emigrate anywhere but the US.
FDR began to condemn Nazi Germany early on, actually, here is just a few remarks IN THE 1930's:
In 1937 Congress passed an even more stringent act, but when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Roosevelt found various ways to assist China, and warned that Italy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were threats to world peace and to the U.S. When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt became increasingly eager to assist Britain and France, and he began a regular secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, in which the two freely discussed ways of circumventing the Neutrality Acts.
I've read statements he made before then.