ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION
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ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION | ||
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HLC. STORIESThe Last Sermon The Jumper Lovers and Enemies Shlojme the Balagule The Fall of Sevastopol
UNDERSTANDING The Killings Why Jews? Organizers War against Jews Anti-Semitism Victims of Antisem The Worst Camp
HLC. EDUCATIONResearch Topics Nazi Methods Hitler - Syphilitic Hitler the Man Hitler & Jews Perpetrators Himmler Heydrich Goebbels The Victims Hlc. Syndrome The Rescuers Jewish Resistance Church Silence Nazi Revolution Jews Abandoned
HLC PREVENTIONHlc. Legacy Revisionism Jews & Germans Jews & Poles Other Victims Schindler. Courageous Christians Other Genocides
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ABANDOMENT OF THE JEWS"The Holocaust was certainly a Jewish tragedy. But it was not only a Jewish tragedy. It was also a Christian tragedy, a tragedy of the Western civilization, and a tragedy for all humankind. The killing was done by people, to other people, while still other people stood by. The perpetrators, where they were not actually Christians, arose from Christian culture. The bystanders most capable of helping were Christians. The point should have been obvious. Yet comparatively few American non-Jews recognized the plight of the European Jews was their plight too. Most were either unaware, did not care, or saw the European Jewish catastrophe as a Jewish problem, one for Jews to deal with. That explains, in part, why the United States did so little to help." Those are the words of a courageous Christian writer - David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (p. XI,X, XI). Reliable information that the extermination of the European Jewry was made public in the United States in November 1942. The Roosevelt administration tried to conceal the information, and did not take any actions until confronted with political pressures 14 months later. The State Department and the British Foreign feared that Germany might release thousands of Jews and this would put pressure on Britain to open Palestine and on the United States to admit more Jewish refugees. Consequently, they tried to obstruct the rescue possibilities and damped public pressures for government action. The United States created the War Refugee Board (WRB), which although inadequately funded, was instrumental in savings about 200,000 people. Great Britain and Russia did even less. From the 200,000 people rescued only 20,000 were admitted to the United States, although they all could have been admitted under the quota system. In 1944 the United States War Department rejected appeals to bomb the railroads leading to Auschwitz, claiming that such actions would divert essential air power from decisive operations elsewhere. At the same time the industrial complex in Auschwitz was struck twice and heavy bombing was taken place within 50 miles from the crematoriums. American Jewish leaders tried to publicize the European Jewish situation and pressed for government rescue steps but they were unable to mount sustained, united drive for government action wasting energies into infighting between themselves and failing to assign top priority to the rescue issue. President's Roosevelt indifference to the tragic, systematic annihilation of European Jewry emerges as the worst failure of his presidency. The lack of public pressure made it possible. The contributing factories were anti-Semitism and anti-immigration attitudes, both widespread in American society in that era and both entrenched in Congress; the mass media's failure to publicize Holocaust news, even though the wire services and other news sources made most of the information available to them; the near silence of the Christian churches and almost all of their leadership; the indifference of most of the nation's political and intellectual leaders.
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