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How the press soft-pedaled Adolf Hitler

by Mojambo ( 173 Comments › )
Filed under Germany, History, Media, World War II at January 30th, 2013 - 2:00 pm

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler being appointed Chancellor of Germany. Contrary to may beliefs, Adolf Hitler never seized power, in fact he was handed power right after the Nazi Party lost 3 million votes in the 1932 elections. Hitler obtained total control over Germany in 1934 when after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, he combined the office of President and Chancellor into the title of Fuhrer. There are eerie parallels in today’s world between the attempts to pass off Islamofascists such as Mohammad Morsi, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, and Sheik Nasrallah (Hezboallah) leaders as “moderates”, with the way the press whitewashed Hitler.

by Rafael Medoff

“There is at least one official voice in Europe that expresses understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt—the voice of Germany, as represented by Chancellor Adolf Hitler.”

That incredible statement was the opening line of a flattering feature story about the Nazi leader that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 1933, and was typical of some early press coverage of Hitler, who rose to power 80 years ago on Jan. 30.

Hitler’s ascent caught much of the world by surprise. As late as May 1928, the Nazis had won less than 3 percent of the vote in elections to the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, and the Nazi party’s candidate for president received barely 1 percent of the votes in March 1929. But as Germany’s economic and social crises worsened, the Nazis garnered 18.3 percent of the vote in the parliamentary election of July 1930. They doubled that total two years later, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag.

Negotiations between the Nazis and other parties then produced a coalition government, with Hitler as chancellor. […….]

A ‘moderate’ Hitler?

Relatively little was known in America about Hitler, and many leading newspapers predicted that the Nazis would not turn out to be as bad as some feared.

An editorial in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin on Jan. 30 claimed that “there have been indications of moderation” on Hitler’s part. The editors of the Cleveland Press, on Jan. 31, asserted that the “appointment of Hitler as German chancellor may not be such a threat to world peace as it appears at first blush.”

Officials of the Roosevelt administration were quoted in the press as saying they “had faith that Hitler would act with moderation compared to the extremist agitation [i]n his recent election campaigning… [……..].”

A wave of terror

In the weeks following, however, events on the ground contradicted those optimistic forecasts. Outbursts of anti-Jewish violence were tolerated, and often encouraged and assisted, by the Nazi regime.

In early March, for example, the Chicago Tribune published an eyewitness account of “bands of Nazis throughout Germany carr[ying] out wholesale raids to intimidate the opposition, particularly the Jews.” Victims were “hit over the heads with blackjacks, dragged out of their homes in night clothes and otherwise molested,” with many Jews “taken off to jail and put to work in a concentration camp.”

The following month, the New York Evening Post reported that the Nazis had launched “a violent campaign of murderous agitation” against Germany’s Jews: “An indeterminate number of Jews… have been killed. […….] All of Germany’s 600,000 Jews are in terror.”

The Hitler regime was determined to eliminate the Jewish community from German society. During the Nazis’ first weeks in power, violence and intimidation were used to force Jewish judges, attorneys, journalists, university professors, and orchestra conductors and musicians out of their jobs.

A law passed on April 7 required the dismissal of Jews from all government jobs. […….] The government even sponsored a one-day nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, with Nazi storm troopers stationed outside Jewish-owned stores to prevent customers from entering.

Hitler’s ‘sensitive hand’

Nevertheless, in July 1933, nearly six months after Hitler’s rise to power, the New York Times ran a front-page feature about the Fuhrer that presented him in a flattering light. For Hitler, it was a golden opportunity to soften his image by praising President Roosevelt as well as a platform to deliver lengthy justifications of his totalitarian policies and attacks on Jews.

The article, titled “Hitler Seeks Jobs for All Germans,” began with Hitler’s remark that FDR was looking out “for the best interests and welfare of the people of the United States.” He added, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.”

The story was based on an interview with the Nazi leader by Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick. She gave Hitler paragraph after paragraph to explain his policies as necessary to address Germany’s unemployment, improve its roads, and promote national unity. The Times correspondent lobbed the Nazi chief softball questions such as “What character in history do you admire most, Caesar, Napoleon, or Frederick the Great?”

McCormick also described Hitler’s appearance and mannerisms in a strongly positive tone: Hitler is “a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller… [………]… Herr Hitler has the sensitive hand of the artist.”

Whatever her intentions, articles like McCormick’s helped dull the American public’s awareness of the dangers of Nazism. The image of a pro-American moderate undermined the chances for mobilizing serious international opposition to Hitler during the early months of his regime.

Read the rest – How the press soft-pedaled Hitler

Tags: Adolf Hitler, Rafael Medoff
Posted in Germany, History, Media, World War II | 173 Comments »

Why Obama’s Jewish support is decreasing

by Mojambo ( 62 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Elections 2012, History, Holocaust, Israel at June 20th, 2012 - 5:00 pm

Rafael Medoff always has interesting stories concerning the dark days of the Holocaust when some people thwarted rescue and others tried to do whatever it took to save Jewish lives. FDR (the patron saint of liberal Jews) was no friend of the Jewish people either in America or in Europe. In my opinion, Barack Obama has taken the measure of the Jewish community (what Israel Zangwill in the 19th century once referred to albeit the British Jewish community, as a bunch of “trembling Israelites“) .

by Rafael Medoff

Anyone wondering why President Barack Obama’s 30-point lead over Mitt Romney among Jews in New York has shrunk to just eight points need look no further than the president’s meeting last week with a delegation of Jewish leaders.

According to the latest survey by the Siena College Research Institute, one of the top polling agencies covering New York State, Obama’s previous 62-32 edge over Romney among the state’s Jewish voters has dwindled to 51-43. That’s the lowest Jewish support for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1980.

A few days before the poll came out, a delegation of Orthodox Jewish leaders met with the president at the White House. In a memo to his congregants this week, Rabbi Dr. Haskel Lookstein of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue described the meeting.

“When asked about the perception that Israel is being pressed on the peace process more than are the Palestinians,” Rabbi Lookstein wrote, “the President indicated his belief that both sides need to compromise and that he has pressured both sides. However, in truth, he only cited pressure on the Israelis with respect to stopping settlement activity. He indicated that all of the United States assistance to Israel on security issues is problematic for the Palestinians, but, of course, that doesn’t constitute pressure on them to do anything. The one thing the Palestinians have to be pressured to do is to sit down at the table and negotiate without preconditions. The President has not done this and he avoided giving a clear response to the question of how he is specifically pressuring the Palestinians.”

Although the president and his advisers had plenty of time to prepare for the meeting, and even though the meeting was, as Rabbi Lookstein put it, “carefully scripted,” President Obama “avoided giving a clear response” regarding pressuring the Palestinians. One would think he would have come up with at least one example, even if it was more rhetorical than substantive, to soothe the concerns of the Jewish delegation. No such luck.

Rabbi Lookstein, the author of Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers?, an important book on American Jewry’s response to the Holocaust, has a keen sense of history. He recalled, in his memo, how some prominent Jews with access to President Franklin Roosevelt hesitated “to ask the hard questions or raise the tough issues.”

In December 1942, after the US had verified that mass murder of Europe’s Jews was underway, Jewish leaders were granted half an hour with the president. He spent the first 23 minutes telling jokes and commenting on other subjects. Then FDR spoke in generalities about the Nazi genocide for a few moments. And then – one participant later wrote – he “pushed some secret button, and his adjutant appeared in the room” to usher the Jewish leaders out.

In his diary, Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, wrote about an incident in March 1944, in which FDR met with Jewish leaders and “caused [them] to believe that he was in complete accord with them…” The very next day, Roosevelt boasted to his cabinet that he had told the Jewish leaders “where to get off” and had warned them that their agitation for Zionism was “going to be responsible for the killing of a hundred thousand people.” “Enraged Arabs” would retaliate by attacking Americans in the Middle East, FDR claimed.

[……]

American Jews in the 1940s had no way to know President Roosevelt’s true feelings on these issues, and Jewish leaders were reluctant to speak up. “Thank God, we live in a very different world today,” Rabbi Lookstein wrote this week. Today’s Jewish leaders are much more willing than their predecessors to ask the president the difficult questions that need to be asked.

At the end of the meeting with President Obama, Rabbi Lookstein gave the president’s Jewish chief of staff, Jack Lew, a copy of his book, which he inscribed, “May you, unlike American Jewish leaders during the Holocaust, speak truth to power when the opportunity presents itself.”

[……]

I hope so, too. But unfortunately, so far President Obama evidently prefers to “avoid giving a clear response” regarding pressuring the Palestinians. If that continues to be his policy, then the president may well find his Jewish support decreasing even further.

Read the rest – Why Obama’s Jewish support is slipping

Tags: Rafael Medoff
Posted in Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Elections 2012, History, Holocaust, Israel | 62 Comments »

The Bergson Group – Heroes of the Holocaust get belated recognition

by Mojambo ( 125 Comments › )
Filed under History, Holocaust, World War II at August 15th, 2011 - 8:00 pm

Hillel Kook (aka “Peter Bergson” 1915 -2001) was one of the unsung heroes of World War II – even though he himself always said that his mission was a failure. Unlike the Establishment American Jews (Congressman Sol Bloom and Rabbi Stephen Wise in particular) , Bergson a young Jew from “Palestine”, came to America to arouse public opinion to do something to save the Jews of Europe. The official American line was that the quickest way to save the Jews of Europe was to win the war quickly – an idea that would guarantee that few Jews would be left to cheer the final victory. The Bergson Group (as they became known) established the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry which lobbied hard for America to grant more exit visas. They put on a play organized by Kurt Weill and Ben Hecht which appeared in several cities called “We Will Never Die” (Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni appeared in the program) and Eleanor Roosevelt attended one night. The craven American Jewish Establishment tried to have Bergson drafted because he was embarrassing the White House and The British Embassy did all it could to have him deported or drafted as well. On October 6, 1943 the Bergson Group sponsored the March of the Rabbis (400 Orthodox Rabbis) in Washington, D.C. which tried to meet with F.D.R. Roosevelt’s secretary claimed he was too busy that day although later perusals of his appointment log showed that his afternoon was free. Eventually through the clever use of newspaper adds and effective propaganda and despite the hostility of the FDR government and their allies (actually cronies in my opinion) in the American Jewish Establishment, a small group in the Treasury Department lead by senior aides to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., such as Josiah E. DuBois, and John Pehle, as well as Congressman Will Rogers, Jr. , discovered that State Department officials lead by Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long , had been blocking the transmission of Holocaust-related information to the United States ans well as sabotaging rescue chances. Eventually the pressure exerted by these righteous men lead to the creation in early 1944 of the War Refugee Board . Historians credit the WRB with helping save 200,000 Jews and 20,000 non Jews – particularly in Hungary. Of course Peter Bergson was treated as an outcast, a radical, a “trouble maker” by the American Jewish and even the Israeli Establishment and for decades was barely mentioned in books and documentaries about the Holocaust. The 1994 PBS show “The American Experience” America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference finally lifted the veil of secrecy on the courageous man and his heroic efforts. One further note – the fact that FDR knew that he would automatically get 90% of the Jewish vote no matter what, probably doomed many, many European Jews, both before and during the war. If FDR could only count on for example 60% of the Jewish vote and had to fight for the other 30 -40%, he might have been more amenable to rescue efforts. This a lesson we should all learn – make the politicians earn your vote and not take you for granted.

Hillel Kook aka “Peter Bergson”

by Isabel Kershner

When 20 people gathered for a modest ceremony in the tranquil cemetery of this kibbutz in central Israel last month, the intimacy and quiet dignity of the event belied the tumultuous historical forces coursing beneath it.

The occasion was the reinterring of the remains of Samuel Merlin, a founder of a small but brazen band of militant Zionists and Holocaust rescue activists who shook America and challenged the Jewish establishment in the 1940s, but who until recently have been largely excluded from official Holocaust history.

The activists, known as the Bergson group, have been credited by modern historians with playing a pivotal role in rescuing hundreds of thousands of European Jews.

But the group was rejected by the Jewish establishment it challenged, both in the United States and in Israel, where its militant tactics and right-wing Zionism clashed with the mainstream. Mere mention of the group stirs up old passions and painful questions about what America did or did not do to save European Jewry, and the extent to which schisms within Jewish ranks hampered more effective action.

More recently, prominent historians have begun to recognize the group’s achievements. On July 17, Yad Vashem, the official Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem, which had ignored the Bergson group in its exhibits, held a symposium on it for the first time.

For those attending the reburial of Mr. Merlin a few days earlier, including some widows and children of the group’s members, the event was a symbolic start of a process of reconciliation.

[……]

The Bergson group formed in 1940 when about 10 young Jews from Palestine and Europe came to the United States to open a fund-raising and propaganda operation for the Irgun, the right-wing Zionist militia. The group was organized by Hillel Kook, a charismatic Irgun leader who adopted the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson. Mr. Merlin was his right-hand man.

The group began by raising money for illegal Jewish immigration to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and promoting the idea of an army composed of stateless and Palestinian Jews. But the mission abruptly changed in November 1942 after reports of the Nazi annihilation of two million European Jews emerged. Like earlier reports of the mass killing of Jews, the news barely made the inside pages of major American newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Bergsonites were appalled by what they saw as the indifference of the Roosevelt administration and the passivity of the Jewish establishment, which staunchly supported the administration and largely accepted its argument that the primary American military objective was to win the war, not to save European Jews. The group embarked on a provocative campaign to publicize the genocide and to lobby Congress to support the rescue of Jews, roaming the hallways of Capitol Hill and knocking on doors, displaying a degree of chutzpah that made the traditional, pro-Roosevelt Jewish establishment uncomfortable.

The group took out a series of fiery, full-page advertisements in The New York Times and other major dailies highlighting the mass murder, soliciting donations at the bottom of each one to pay for the next. With help from celebrity supporters like the director and writer Ben Hecht, the impresario Billy Rose and the composer Kurt Weill, they staged a flamboyant pageant called “We Will Never Die,” filling Madison Square Garden twice before sending the show on the road.

In October 1943, the Bergson group organized a march of 400 Orthodox rabbis on the White House, most of them in traditional black garb, a spectacle the likes of which had never been seen in Washington.

Finally, in January 1944, under heavy pressure from the Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board by executive order, leading to the rescue of 200,000 Jews.

“Without Hillel Kook and the Bergson group,” said David S. Wyman, author of the book “The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945,” which first re-evaluated the role of Bergsonites, “there would have been no War Refugee Board.”

Yet the American Jewish leadership at the time fought the newcomers, saying their tactics would lead only to increased anti-Semitism. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the Jewish community’s chief representative, wrote to a colleague in 1944 that the Bergsonites “are a disaster to the Zionist cause and the Jewish people.”

Jewish American leaders were apparently afraid of making waves, and of losing their own prominence.

“This was an era in which militant civil action was just not done, certainly not by Jews,” said Charley Levine, an Israeli-based international communications and public relations expert who has studied the Bergson group. “This was before Vietnam.”

[……]

The dissension led to the Bergson group’s being blanked out of the early histories of the Holocaust. “My father and his group went against the grain of those writing the narrative of the war,” said Mr. Kook’s daughter, Rebecca Kook, now a political scientist at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

But with the perspective of time and the opening of additional Holocaust era archives, including Mr. Merlin’s, the Bergson group has begun to be reworked into Jewish history. After years of campaigning by Mr. Medoff and others, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington included a small exhibit on the group in 2008.

[……]

In a foreword to the book, Seymour D. Reich, a veteran leader of major Jewish organizations, wrote, “The time has come to acknowledge, unequivocally, that Rabbi Wise and his colleagues were wrong.”

Instead of attacking Mr. Bergson, they should have focused on the rescue mission, he wrote, adding, “That was their obligation, and they failed.”

Read the rest – Belatedly Recognizing Heroes of the Holocaust

For further information on the two fights of the Bergson Group (one against the Holocaust and the other against the American Jewish Establishment), this excellent article from 2007 should be read.

The Bergson Group vs. the Holocaust – and Jewish Leaders vs. Bergson by Rafael Medoff

Tags: Isabel Kershner, Rafael Medoff
Posted in History, Holocaust, World War II | 125 Comments »

There have been other Kissingers in the past

by Mojambo ( 264 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, History, Holocaust, Politics at December 20th, 2010 - 1:30 pm

Sol Bloom (a congressman from New York City and chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee), and Samuel Rosenman (I once worked in the law firm he founded) were two Jews who turned their backs on persecuted Jews. Those two (another one was Rabbi Stephen Wise) collaborated with FDR’s State Department in preventing rescue of Jews in Europe facing genocide. If Roosevelt were not so sure in his knowledge that he was guaranteed 90% of the Jewish vote, he might have been more susceptible to pressure regarding rescue efforts.

by Rafael Medoff

Henry Kissinger was not the first Jewish adviser to an American president who urged his boss to refrain from rescuing Jews.

According to transcripts of Oval Office tapes recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library, Secretary of State Kissinger told the president, in 1973, that even “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” Kissinger’s remark is obviously apalling. But it’s equally disturbing to recall that when Soviet Jews were being shipped off to gas chambers – during the Holocaust – two prominent Jews gave then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt similar advice.

More than 1.5 million Jews living in German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, were murdered by the Nazis. Many of them were lined up in front of huge pits and shot; many others were shipped to German death camps in Poland.

But when Jewish organizations urged President Roosevelt to rescue Jews from the Nazis, FDR’s Jewish advisers gave him Kissinger-style advice.

One of FDR’s top advisers and speechwriters was Samuel Rosenman, a leading member of the American Jewish Committee. Rosenman, a deeply assimilated Jew, was uncomfortable calling attention to Jewish concerns. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms, he warned FDR that admitting German Jewish refugees to America would “create a Jewish problem in the U.S.” In 1943, when 400 rabbis marched to the White House to plead for a rescue effort, Rosenman counseled Roosevelt to snub “the medieval horde.” Rosenman also tried to undermine the 1943 campaign by rescue advocates and Treasury Department officials for creation of a government agency to save Jewish refugees. The agency, called the War Refugee Board, was eventually established despite his opposition.

In 1944, the leaders of the board asked FDR to issue a statement threatening to prosecute anyone involved in persecuting Jews, and pledging to provide havens for Jewish refugees. Rosenman watered down the declaration, for fear that giving the Jews attention “would intensify anti-Semitism in the United States.” He deleted three of the six references to Jews, removed the offer to shelter refugees in America, and added three opening paragraphs about the Nazis’ mistreatment of “Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Dutch, Danes, French, Greeks, Russians, Chinese Filipinos – and many others.”

Another prominent Jewish defender of FDR’s policy toward European Jewry was Congressman Sol Bloom, a Democrat and chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Roosevelt administration chose him as a U.S. delegate to its sham refugee conference in Evian, France, in 1938, and to its equally farcical refugee conference in Bermuda five years later. Afterward, Bloom declared, “I as a Jew am perfectly satisfied with the results” – prompting one Jewish periodical to charge that Bloom had been “used as a stooge to impede Jewish protests against the nothing-doers of the Bermuda conference…”

Bloom worked closely with the administration to block congressional resolutions supporting rescue and Jewish statehood. He even backed the State Department’s proposal to ban all public discussion of the Palestine issue for the duration of World War II.

[…]

On the newly released Nixon-Kissinger tapes, Kissinger remarks that the genocide of Soviet Jewry would be “maybe a humanitarian concern,” but certainly “not an American concern.” Samuel Rosenman and Sol Bloom likewise believed that humanitarian concerns such as rescuing Jews contradicted, or might be seen as contradicting, America’s true interests.

Not everyone saw it that way. A few years ago, my Wyman Institute colleagues interviewed former senator and presidential nominee George McGovern about his experiences as a pilot who flew over Auschwitz in 1944 to bomb German oil plants nearby. McGovern said that if his commanders had told the pilots about the death camp and offered them the option of undertaking a bombing raid strictly for humanitarian (rather than military ) purposes, “whole crews would have volunteered.” They understood, he said, that the war against the Nazis was not just a military struggle, but also a fight for principles and values such as basic human decency and concern for the persecuted.

Likewise in Kissinger’s time, there was strong public support for U.S. intervention on behalf of Soviet Jewry. The truth is that the American public has often been much more humanitarian-minded than some of its presidents – and their nervous Jewish advisers – ever recognized.