Franklin Roosevelt and the Holocaust

In "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss, the author struggles to find explanations for some of Roosevelt's behaviors. For example, Roosevelt's silence about the holocaust during the war. " Franklin Roosevelt began receiving information as early as 1942 that Adolf Hitler, under a veil of secrecy, was carrying out his threats to" annihilate the Jewish race." One might expect the President to have gone on the radio and told Americans in stirring language exactly what his government was learning about the Nazi death camps, adding that this unimaginable crime was exactly what the Allies were fighting to banish from the world.

But Roosevelt made no such speech. Nor did he command the American propaganda organs to publicize everything the government knew about the extermination of the Jews. Instead, through at least the early months of 1944, the President's references to the subject were vague and seldom."

" In July 1942, the president of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise, asked the President for a statement that could be read to a Madison Square Garden rally against Hitler's oppression of Jews. -- But the president did not mention extermination or Jewish victims. Instead his statement said that Americans "sympathize with all victims of Nazi crime' and would hold the perpetrators "to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come."

In December 1942, Wise asked Roosevelt to tell the world about Hitler's war against the Jews and to try to stop it. The President replied that while his government knew many of the facts, it was hard to know what to do. Pressed for a statement, he advised Wise and the Jewish leaders to reissue the Madison Square Garden statement that he had issued in July. He insisted that that statement be quoted precisely.

In July 1943, at the White House, Lieutenant Jan Karski of the Polish underground army told Roosevelt about the mass murder of Jews that he had seen take place in a Polish concentration camp:"Our underground authorities are absolutely sure that the Germans are out to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe." The President listened intently but when Karski implored Roosevelt to intervene, the President replied, "Tell your nation that we shall win the war."

"As the historian Richard Breitman has written, Roosevelt's government "did not match Adolf Hitler's single-minded frenzy to wipe out the Jewish race with corresponding determination to save those Jews who could be saved."

"As Hitler's war against European Jewry raged on, Franklin Roosevelt maintained his silence. Before 1944, he avoided discussing the matter."

" By early June 1944, the Nazis had deported over 1/3 of Hungary's Jews in only three weeks, Jacob Rosenhein and other Jewish leaders wrote to American and British officials, imploring them to bomb the railway lines from Hungary to the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland." This was not done. Initially, Undersecretary McCloy's view was that diverting bombers and crews from bombing German industry and other strategic targets might have postponed VE day." Thanks to new information, however, we may conclude that the man who ultimately refused to bomb Auschwitz may not have been John McCloy but Franklin Roosevelt." Liddel Hart in his book "Strategy" stated that the war would probably have ended much sooner had the bombing targets not been shifted from millitary and industrial ones to civillian ones. We must ask ourselves why the bombing emphasis was shifted to civillian targets and why Roosevelt refused to bomb the concentration camps and the rail lines leading to them? To answer those questions, we must ask what the actual, not the stated war aims of the Allies were? The actual war aims of the Americans were stated succinctly by Eisenhower as he was about to cross the German border when he stated that his intent was to "kill as many Germans as he could." Michael Beschloss is too dimwitted and too infatuated with Roosevelt to look into actual American war aims.

During the war, most of the German men were in the armed forces and were not in danger of the American bombing of civilian neighborhoods. The primary inhabitants were women and children and these were the obvious targets because they were the future of Germany and Germany was to have no future. All the other Allies had become American client states who became dependent on Lend Lease. Even the Soviets had become a client state of the Americans because they still continued receiving Lend Lease aid into 1948, well after the beginning of the Cold War (as per James Bacque in Crimes and Mercies). Yes I know that Lend Lease formally ended in 1946 but commitments made under Lend Lease before it's formal termination were still made as late as 1948. The Soviets were the prime agents in the ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe's German population in which 18 million men, women and children were thrown out of their homes without food and shelter. Millions were murdered in the process, often with bestial cruelty that far exceeded the Nazis at their worst. As long as the Soviets continued this "good work", they were rewarded with Lend Lease. When Churchill balked at some of the American's demands, he was threatened with withdrawal of Lend Lease aid.

Now as to the reason that the Allies refused to bomb the concentration camps and the rail lines leading to them, I suspect that it was the result of a private agreement between Roosevelt and Stalin where Stalin asked Roosevelt not to interfere with the concentration camps because the removal of it's Jews would make Poland far more manageable after the war. Neither Roosevelt nor Stalin had any love for Jews. During the war, the safest place to be was probably along the railway lines leading to the concentration camps. Roosevelt was just another mass murderer alongside Hitler and Stalin. It is to Roosevelt and to the American Oligarchs whom he represented, that we can attribute responsibility for the murder of 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans during the period of 1945 through 1950. This figure is also from James Bacque's Crimes and Mercies. Bacque estimates that if the plans to fully implement the Morgenthau Plan had not been reversed, the death total among ethnic Germans after the war would have gone as high as 40 million. I would probably have been one of them. This mass murder of ethnic Germans is also part of the Holocaust but no one ever speaks about it.

Beschloss documents Roosevelt's hatred of anything German quite well. Roosevelt shrieked about how Germans were a race of militaristic beasts who had three times plunged the world into war. For the first time, he must have referred to the Franco-Prussian war. The French in that case had attacked Germany. The second time would have been WWI. I read with interest on the Web that the group of Serb assassins and their handlers (who assassinated Franz Ferdinand and his wife) met in Toulouse a month or so before the assassination. Why would they meet in Toulouse? I suspect that they were there to receive assurances of support from high level French and Russian officials that these countries would go to war if Austria-Hungary contested the outrage militarily. And that is precisely what happened. Primary responsibility for starting WWI lies with the French. And WWII? Britain had signed a treaty with Poland. However, there was an unpublished codicil to that treaty that Britain would go to war only if Poland was attacked by Germany, not by any other country. Thus, the fact that Poland was simultaneously attacked by the Soviet Union had no effect in triggering Britain's treaty obligations. Poland was there obviously only there  to draw Germany into war.

Beschloss mentions that Roosevelt entered into diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1934 seeking allies against Germany. This seemed entirely natural to him. I guess he argued with himself that didn't the Nazis inaugurate the Holocaust? This would be true. However, the Nazis of 1934 were not the Nazis of 1942. In 1934 they were no worse than the vicious nationalists who governed Poland and Czechoslovakia who would come in their pants at the thought of driving out their German and Jewish minorities.The true monster mass murderers of 1934 were the Soviet communists. I suggest that there would have been no Holocaust had the Allies not rejected any offer at negotiating peace with Germany. It would be interesting to be able to read the notes of the Wannsee conference at which the Final Solution was decided on. I suspect that the idiot Nazis concluded that yet again the Jews were responsible for a war that they could increasingly see they could not win. After all, weren't there many Jews in Capitalist America and in Communist Russia?

Germany did send out Rudolph Hess to negotiate an end to hostilities with Britain. A very generous offer was made to Britain. Germany would pull out of France, the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway in return for a free hand against the Soviet Union. A very generous offer and one that I would think tempted Churchill severely. I suspect though that he may have received threats from Roosevelt that the US would take Canada and other British possessions into "protective custody" if he made peace with Germany. A fateful decision because Britain lost it's empire anyway as a result of a refusal to make peace. Britain was so weakened by the war that the empire slipped away.

Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time at the Tehran conference. Roosevelt was reportedly as jubilant as a schoolboy at meeting "Uncle Joe". Tehran was occupied by the Soviet Union and the compound in which they met was 100% under the control of the NKVD. The NKVD were the supreme poisoners of their day. On the first day there, Roosevelt became severely ill. His staff at first thought that he had been poisoned. Then they concluded that he had gotten a case of Grippe. However, he got steadily worse and a few months later, died. It seems highly probable to me that he was poisoned by Stalin. I think that the World owes Stalin a vote of thanks for getting rid of a fellow mass murderer