UK, US, Russia were aware of millions killed by Nazi Germany, but took little action to take in refugees or halt slaughter, new book says
Recently released documents show that the Allied forces were aware of the scale of the Holocaust some two years earlier than is widely assumed, but did little to stop the deaths or rescue the victims.
These United Nations files show that the US, UK and Russia knew already in December 1942 that two million Jews had been massacred and millions more were at risk of being killed, Britain’s Independent newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Despite this knowledge, the Allies did not accept refugees or take action to prevent the slaughter.
“The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-a-half years before it is generally assumed,” Dan Plesch, author of the new book “Human Rights After Hitler,” told the Independent.
Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, University of London, author of “Human Rights After Hitler,” August 2012. (Screen capture: YouTube)
Already in December 1942, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament, in a statement on behalf of the UK, the US and the Soviet governments, that the Nazis were in the process of exterminating the Jews. Eden said that a similar statement was also being read out in Moscow and Washington at the same time.
“The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people,” he said.
Plesch, a University of London researcher, said the Allies presumably learned of Nazi Germany’s actions “when they discovered the concentration camps, but they made this public comment in December 1942.”
This document shows that in 1944 the United Nations War Crimes Commission sought to indict prominent Nazis (UNWCC)
Plesch charged that the Allied powers did very little to save the Jews.
In March 1943, based on reports from Europe, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, head of the Church of England, pleaded with the British government to accept Jewish refugees who were in danger of being massacred.
“In view of the massacres and starvation of Jews and others in enemy and enemy-occupied countries,” Temple wrote to the House of Lords, the government should offer its “fullest support for immediate measures, on the largest and most generous scale… for providing help and temporary asylum to persons in danger of massacre who are able to leave enemy and enemy-occupied countries.”
UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill (l) and Foreign Affairs Secretary Anthony Eden in 1943. (Public Domain)
Yet Viscount Cranborne, a minister in prime minister Winston Churchill’s war cabinet, replied to the motion: “The noble Lord must not regard this as a Jewish problem.” He said that Britain was not in a position to accept large numbers of refugees, and that while the government sympathized with the situation, it had to take care of its own citizens first.
Plesch’s book is based on an archive from the now-defunct United Nations War Crimes Commission which was sealed for 70 years. He said that it was due to the intervention of Samantha Powers, former US ambassador to the UN, that he was able to access the files.
There are other proofs that the Allies knew the extent of the Holocaust already in 1942. For example, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial states in a report to the UN that “During 1942, reports of a Nazi plan to murder all the Jews – including details on methods, numbers, and locations – reached Allied and neutral leaders from many sources.”
However, Plesch said that the new research provides a “cartload of nails to hammer into the coffins” of Holocaust deniers.
Also in this famous liberal Jewish neighborhood — where I was born and raised — there is a Bloomsday tradition. Well known actors come and read from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in an annual marathon event.
http://www.symphonyspace.org/event/8508/Literature/34th-annual-bloomsday-on-broadway
@ Edgar G.:
Related:
Ireland’s only Holocaust victim: the story of Ettie Steinberg
Sean Dunne
@IrishCentral
April 10, 2017
http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/irelands-only-holocaust-victim-the-ettie-steinbergs-story
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN IRELAND
A handful of Jewish Holocaust survivors came to Ireland after WWll. Some were brought here as child refugees from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by Dr Bob Collis who worked there with the British Red Cross in the immediate aftermath of the war. Others came by other means. All of them made their homes in Ireland, eventually marrying and settling down and raising their own children.
http://hetireland.org/programmes/survivors-testimony/holocaust-survivors-ireland/
Irish minister admits for first time that neutrality policy during WW2 was ‘morally bankrupt’
Justice Minister Alan Shatter says ‘doors to state were kept firmly closed to Jews fleeing Hitler’ while UK took thousands
Sorry for way ‘deserter’ Irish soldiers fighting for allies were treated
They were barred from jobs and state pensions on their return
Links two issues and hints at upcoming official pardon
By Lee Moran
UPDATED: 11:42 EDT, 26 January 2012
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092138/Irish-minister-admits-time-Jews-fleeing-Nazis-denied-visas-1930s-morally-bankrupt-regime.html#ixzz4efbiWzl8
The four ‘controversial’ words banned at Ireland’s Holocaust event
BY ADAM LEVICK ON DECEMBER 18, 2014 •
“Further to our post on December 15th about the Master of Ceremonies (MC) for the Holocaust Educational Trust Ireland’s (HETI) Holocaust Commemoration event being forbidden to say the word ‘Israel’ or the phrase ‘the Jewish State’, we now have the closing part of 2014 MC Yanky Fachler’s draft speech which evidently so upset HETI trustees.
It seems that (according to our sources) objections were raised over Fachler saying “And we owe it to the victims, to the survivors, and to ourselves, to prevent the memory of the Holocaust being cynically distorted and hijacked by a vicious campaign that denies the Jewish people and the Jewish state – our past and our future.”
Fachler gave in and omitted the phrase “and the Jewish State” because he did not want to cause trouble. Hence the letter – signed by HETI Chair Peter Cassells – dated October 7th to Fachler, saying that in future, MCs would not be allowed to mention ‘Israel’ or ‘the Jewish State’.
https://ukmediawatch.org/2014/12/18/exclusive-the-four-controversial-words-banned-at-irelands-holocaust-event/
“IRELAND can no longer escape the “inconvenient truth” that it turned its back on the suffering of the Jews during World War Two.
In a hard-hitting speech delivered at the opening of a new Holocaust exhibition in Dublin last night, Justice Minister Alan Shatter said the Irish State lost its “moral compass” during and after the war.”
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/state-did-nothing-for-jews-in-wwii-26814252.html
“Other examples of Irish attitudes towards Nazi Germany found expression in mid-1940 in de Valera’s Chargé d’Affaires in Berlin, William Warnock, ‘whose “unquestionable” hostility to Britain could easily be interpreted as sympathetic for National Socialism.'[42] Academic J.J. Lee questioned just how much of Warnock’s zeal towards Hitler’s Reichstag speech on 19 July was genuine enthusiasm for the ‘international justice’ that could be expected after Germany’s victory, as opposed to an adherence to the instructions of Dublin to please oneself to the potential victors.[citation needed] Three years later, by 1944, the orientation of the war and of Irish relations to Germany had turned about-face, with the likelihood of a German victory now remote. In that climate the Irish Government, once so ready to ‘say agreeable things’, Hempel remarked, had become ‘unhelpful and evasive’.[43]
The United States Ambassador to Ireland, David Gray, stated that he once asked de Valera what he would do if German paratroopers “liberated Derry”. According to Gray, de Valera was silent for a time and then replied “I don’t know”.[44]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality_during_World_War_II
Eye of the Needle (1981)
“A ruthless German spy, trying to get out of Britain with vital information about D-Day, must spend time with a young woman and her crippled husband.” Played by Donald Sutherland as an Irish Nationalist working for Nazi Germany in Britain.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082351/
Jews have done a lot for Ireland since the 12th Century and gotten repeatedly beaten up for it.
Excerpt from longer Aish.com article:
“The Great Potato Famine – the catastrophic failure of crops in Ireland spanning six years between 1845 and 1851 – caused the death of over a million people in Ireland. Amid the horrific suffering, some of Ireland’s greatest relief came from Jews around the world.
The British Jewish politician Baron Lionel de Rothschild was one of the first to help, setting up the British Relief Association to raise and distribute funds. A Dublin newspaper in 1850 pointed out that Rothschild and his family had “contributed during the Irish famine of 1847… a sum far beyond the joint contributions of the (great British families) Devonshires, and Herefords, Lansdownes, Fitzwilliams and Herberts, who annually drew so many times that amount from their Irish estates”.
Rabbis in New York came to Ireland’s aid, too, raising funds for emergency food. Official recognition of the part New York Jews played in Ireland’s national disaster finally came in 2010, when the then President of Ireland Mary McAleese visited Shearith Israel synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side, formally thanking the congregation for its generosity 153 years before.”
”
“One of the best-kept secrets of the Emerald Isle is the vibrant Jewish culture that has flourished in Ireland for hundreds of years. Here are six little-known facts about Jewish Ireland.
1. Medieval Visitors
The earliest Jewish visitors to Ireland were Medieval merchants: “Five Jews came from over the sea with gifts to Tairdelbach (the King of Munster), and were then sent back again over the sea,” records The Annals of Innisfallen, a chronicle of Irish history started in the 12 Century by monks in Ireland’s Innisfallen Abbey. Historians speculate the Jewish visitors most likely came from the French area of Normandy, which then had a thriving Jewish community.
The 12th Century Calendar of Documents Related to Ireland records a Jewish doctor named Joseph living near Dublin in 1171, and by 1232, there seems to have been a well-established Jewish community in Ireland. King Henry III issued a grant that year, naming a man named Peter de Rivall the new position of Treasurer and Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, the king’s ports and coast, and also “the custody of the King’s Judaism in Ireland.”
This Medieval community was short-lived. When Jews were expelled from England in 1240, it is likely they were forced out of Ireland, as well. Two centuries later, Ireland’s Jewish community was reestablished when Spanish and Portuguese Jews, fleeing expulsion orders in those countries, made their way to Ireland. These early Sephardi arrivals settled in Ireland’s scenic south coast, and quickly integrated into Irish society. A Sephardi Jew, William Annyas, was even elected Mayor of Youghal, in County Cork, in 1555.
2. Jewish Aid and the Irish Potato Famine
The Great Potato Famine – the catastrophic failure of crops in Ireland spanning six years between 1845 and 1851 – caused the death of over a million people in Ireland. Amid the horrific suffering, some of Ireland’s greatest relief came from Jews around the world.
The British Jewish politician Baron Lionel de Rothschild was one of the first to help, setting up the British Relief Association to raise and distribute funds. A Dublin newspaper in 1850 pointed out that Rothschild and his family had “contributed during the Irish famine of 1847… a sum far beyond the joint contributions of the (great British families) Devonshires, and Herefords, Lansdownes, Fitzwilliams and Herberts, who annually drew so many times that amount from their Irish estates”.
Rabbis in New York came to Ireland’s aid, too, raising funds for emergency food. Official recognition of the part New York Jews played in Ireland’s national disaster finally came in 2010, when the then President of Ireland Mary McAleese visited Shearith Israel synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side, formally thanking the congregation for its generosity 153 years before.
3. Irish Shtetl
Ireland’s Jewish community began to grow in the late 1800s. In 1871, there were 258 recorded Jewish residents in Ireland; by 1881 that figure had nearly doubled. When Russian pogroms targeted Jews in the late 1800s, Jewish immigrants began arriving in Ireland from Eastern Europe, particularly Lithuania. By 1901, there were an estimated 3,771 Jews in Ireland, and by 1904 there were approximately 4,800. Most of these immigrants lived in Dublin, giving Ireland its first-ever ethnically diverse neighborhoods.
Perhaps the most famous Irish Jew is fictional: Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and the son of a fictional Jewish immigrant to Dublin. Bloom was based on Joyce’s real-life Jewish friend and student Aron Ettore Schmitz. Each year, June 16 – the day Leopold Bloom’s adventures take place – is celebrated as “Bloomsday” in Dublin, whose “Little Jerusalem” neighborhood where Bloom might have lived still exists, testament to the thriving immigrant community that once clustered there.
4. Irish Independence and the “Sinn Féin Rabbi”
Jews have a long history of aiding moves promoting Irish independence. England’s King Henry II feared that a proposed 12th Century quest to explore the Emerald Isle might lead to the establishment of an independent kingdom and forbade the expedition. British nobleman Richard Strongbow went anyway – financed by “Josce,” a “Jew of Gloucester”. (In punishment, Strongbow lost his estates, and his Jewish backer was fined 100 shillings: an enormous sum at the time.)
In modern times, Robert Briscoe, the son of Jewish refugees from Lithuania, who served as Lord Mayor of Dublin twice, in 1956-7 and 1961-2, started his political career as a member of the IRA, smuggling arms to fighters during Ireland’s War of Independence. (He was known during World War II a passionate Zionist, lending support to Israel’s underground military forces.) Other Jews who aided the Republican cause include Michael Noyk, a lawyer who defended IRA suspects, and Estella Solomon, whose Dublin art studio became a center of IRA activity.
Rabbi Yitzhak HerzogPerhaps no Jewish figure was most closely associated with Irish nationalism than Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Ireland and, later, First Chief Rabbi of the Jewish State. Born in Poland, Rabbi Herzog moved to Ireland as a young man to take up a rabbinical post. In Dublin, he met Irish nationalist and Sinn Féin founder (and later Irish President and Prime Minister) Éamon de Valera. De Valera turned to the rabbi for advice, and urged Rabbi Herzog to study Gaelic. Rabbi Herzog became a fluent speaker of Ireland’s historic tongue, earning the nickname “The Sinn Féin Rabbi.” Ireland’s nationalist rebels appointed him Chief Rabbi of Ireland in 1919, even before they achieved independence from Britain.”
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Jews-and-Ireland.html
And to think I once went to demonstrations in support of the Irish Independence Movement.
I now think that Southern Island should be re-colonized by England and the Irish should once again be treated as little better than slaves.
Sebastien’s Basic Law Number One: People and Peoples who oppress Jews, themselves, deserve to be oppressed. People and Peoples who murder Jews deserve to die screaming.
Here’s one constructive proposal for disposal of the Irish Question
A Modest Proposal
For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland
From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and
For Making Them Beneficial to The Public
By Jonathan Swift (1729)
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
Irish?
Feh!
See what you’ve done? You’ve made me look this stuff up and now I hate the Irish, too, on top of the growing list of other peoples I can’t stand and don’t wish well. (Though, on an individual basis, I treat everybody as they treat me, not better no worse, taking nothing else into consideration. That’s Sebastien’s basic law number 2. “Some of my best friends are [anti-semites.]” Needless to say, I won’t hold any other prejudice or behavior against them either as long as they comport themselves in a friendly and civilized manner around me. Wow, maybe I should be a UN diplomat?)
Thanks a lot.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
But, seriously, N. Korea may be getting ready for its own version of Iran’s Green Revolution that Obama turned his back on. Maybe they are inspired by Trump, this is a first.
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/04/17/north-korean-soldiers-face-death-penalty-for-mocking-kim-jong-un/
—
“Debi: How come you never learned that it was wrong? That there are certain things you do not do, you do not do in a civilized society?
Marty: Which civilizations are we talking about?
Debi: Oh, shut up!
Marty: I mean, history…
Debi: Shut up!”
quote from “Grosse Point Blanke” (1997) John Cusack, Minnnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Akroyd
“Martin Blank is a professional assassin. He is sent on a mission to a small Detroit suburb, Grosse Pointe, and, by coincidence, his ten-year high school reunion party is taking place there at the same time.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119229/quotes
Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations Against Extermination of the Jews
Dec. 17, 1942
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Joint_Declaration_by_Members_of_the_United_Nations_Against_Extermination_of_the_Jews
I repeat: Where’s this guy been, not to mention his uniformed TOI STAFF reviewers.
Is this another gem courtesy of the “oh, thas before my time” generations?
p.s.
Oh, yes. one more thing about chemical weapons. I recently read somewhere — online, you can google it — that Roosevelt also threatened to use them on Japan if Japan didn’t stop using them on Chinese civilians. I read further on, that before they became aware of the Nuclear Bomb option, the original plan to avoid millions of American Casualties in what was anticipated to be what would later be known as a Vietnam quagmire was to hit Japan with Chemical Weapons. And the leading General, I forget which his name, still opposed Nukes and wanted to use chemical weapons after he was made aware. Hey, Sherman burned his way across Georgia with Grant and Lincoln’s approval.
“Throw Everything you have at the enemy and keep moving.” General Robert Sherman
“In war, the object is not to die for your country but to make the poor sonofobitches on the other side die for theirs.” Gen. Patton.
Sound advice.
A liberal who works at a store around the corner asked me what I thought about N. Korea. I said, “Nuke em. Throw everything we have at em, chemical, biological.. They can’t threaten us if they aren’t there.”
She said, “I’d be afraid to vote for you.”
I replied, “Well, aren’t you grateful we have President Trump in office, then?
He’s a sweetie compared to me.”
Have to remind myself not to order freshly made food there in future. Just in case.
How is this news? Where’s this guy been?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/news/150th-anniversary-1851-2001-turning-away-from-the-holocaust.html
“https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/arthur-morse/while-six-million-died/”
This was on our shelf when I was in elementary school:
And since we were talking about chemical weapons and Spicer saying Hitler didn’t use them. He didn’t use them on the battlefield because Roosevelt threatened to carpet bomb Germany with them in retaliation if he used them on Soviet troops or on any allied troops or civilians.
When the Bergson Group’s Hebrew Committee of National Liberation asked the military to ask Roosevelt to make the same threat concerning the gassing of the Jews in 1944, they refused on the grounds that they would probably have to use them and Jews, not having a state, could not be an ally (this, despite the fact that the Haganah as the Palestine Brigade of the British Army had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat for them in the Middle East. See “The Forgotten Ally” by Pierre Van Paassen (another Christian Zionist hero, a pastor and famous journalist. Dial Press. New York. 1943) Got that anti- or “non” (I just love that one) Zionist Jews? No State, no Ally, No Ally and it’s Good-bye Charlie.
Google Books excerpt from: Fatal Airs: The Deadly History and Apocalyptic Future of Lethal Gases that …
By Scott Christianson
https://books.google.com/books?id=sH7DBd8XLMcC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=hebrew+committee+of+national+liberation+germany+chemical+weapons&source=bl&ots=8pOqO4_mmo&sig=wvG9P3grSOzU6Wj43Mypp67tAng&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvqtvl8K7TAhVH0WMKHYISC04Q6AEILjAC#v=onepage&q=hebrew%20committee%20of%20national%20liberation%20germany%20chemical%20weapons&f=false
Amazon has the Forgotten Ally by Pierre van Paassen. It’s an absolute must-read.
https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Ally-Pierre-Van-Paasen/dp/0977102106
Jabotinsky understood:
“I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our “state” will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefilte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way) and I’ll take it”
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/warrior-of-zion/
He was frantically trying to bring Jews to Eretz Israel, he knew what was about to happen. This from a letter written around 1940, I think. Jabotinsky, Moishe-like, never lived to set foot in the promised [state].
So what exactly does all this knowledge of the World War 2 Nazi horror show do for the Jewish nation? Nudging the rest of the human race to feel sorry for us?
I’m not interested in soliciting sorrow for the 6 million murdered Jews.
The only thing I want is for Jewish souls to harden like tempered steel, and to develop and carry out Jewish nationalism as if it were the only thing that counts in this world.
Because nationalism and conquest of a national territory large enough to protect the Jewish nation against all potential enemies, is in fact the only possible outcome that counts in the long run.
Conquer or die. That has been the true will of HaShem right from that incredible day in the northeastern reaches of the Sinai, when the Jewish nation was ordered to kill and expel all the Amelekites — with the clear-cut threat that if the Jewish nation did not carry out the will of HaShem, then He would do unto the Jews that which they had been too timid to do unto the Amelikites.
And why should acknowledgement of these basic rules for life fill any of you with sorrow? Save that kind of crap for the Jewish liberals.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
xx
There was and still is, in existence, an “famous” 1942-43 (?) letter from Dublin Chief Rabbi Herzog to his “close friend” Prime Minister De Valera) who actually used to regularly visit his “friend” at his home in Bloomfield Avenue Dublin, (just across the road from my own family house) a letter begging him to allow refugee Jews into Ireland, detailing what the Nazis were doing and etc. He refused, although it was brought up in the Dail, (Parliament) and a leading member of the opposition Party Fine Gael, Oliver J. Flanagan, a notorious Anti-Semite, said, (all documented) that even a single Jew is too much that there were already too many (long-time)Jews in Ireland (about 3000). So De Valera refused his “great friend”. I believe that about 7-8 Jews were eventually smuggled into the country-total.
Flanagan’s first speech in the Dail was all about “chasing all the Jews out of Ireland”…..
The only Irish Jew to die in the Holocaust was Esther Steinberg whom I actually, as a little boy, knew. They lived about 3 blocks away from us. Her brother Myer was a close friend of my elder brother, and was often in our house, and always on the verge of marrying my big sister. Up to a couple of years ago I know that Myer was still alive in his middle 90s, and occasionally visiting my sister.
I recall Esther’s wedding to a Belgian, and it was a HUGE Dublin Jewish event, I was looking through the railings of the synagogue at the crowds etc.etc and of course my beloved parents and older siblings were guests. She went to live in Belgium with her new husband and they were both murdered. The attempts to get her home and the refusals etc. were heart-rending.