re: For WWII buffs ... FDR and holocaust

This is laughable.

What could we have done in 1942?

We didn't have the division, navy, or air force to successfully invade Europe. We needed more time to build up and rev up the war machine.

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Is it really killing you to provide some historical reference to support your notion?

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Didja skip right over this?

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read up on Jan Karski and tell me what you think.

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Finding out what the Allies knew at this point is not hard. You wouldn't be making the assertion that the Allies knew about it if you really had an in depth understanding of the way things were. I shouldn't have to hold your hand to lead you to that knowledge.

My point is that even without specifics, one should be able to figure out what the Allies knew. The exterminations didn't occur in a vacuum. Reports were leaking out from local eyewitness and Jews who escaped not long after it started in Russia and eastern Europe. The Germans used Hungarian soldiers in many of their killing squads and those soldier's observations were reported on. The knowledge of the status of Jews in Germany and the occupied countries was not a secret. It was done right out in the open. The knowledge of what went on in the ghettos was widely dispersed. The British in particular had a lot of info on the specifics of the situation.

The Allies had a direct line into Germany's coded transmissions. They even had a line on Hitler's and the upper commands direct communications with the generals and regional directors far afield. Our aerial recon was very thorough, and anything out of the ordinary like a death camp would have been scrutinized closely in order to figure out if it had strategic importance. To say that all the horrors that occurred were able to be effectively hidden, that enough people wouldn't have seen or endured things that they were able to report on, or that such a massive operation that the German's devoted so many resources to would have escaped our spies and intense scrutiny, is a conclusion that no reasonable person would come to.

But you want specifics? O.K.

The first press reports of massacres of thousands of Jewish civilians in western Russia surfaced in July of 1941.

In May of 1942, Polish Resistance workers transmited to London a document summarizing Nazi massacres of Jews in Poland and Russia.

A press conference held by the World Jewish Congress in London on June 29th, 1942, estimated that over a million Jews had been killed by the Nazis.

Then you have what the British knew from their intercepts of German communications.

What the Allies knew

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RICHARD BREITMAN: Yes. Between the first decode in mid July of 1941 and the codes changed every day and so some days they broke the code and some days they couldn't break the code. They couldn't break it more often than they could break it, but they broke it enough between mid July and mid September of 1941 to discern a pattern, because some of these reports talk about 2200 Jews executed in such and such a village, 4400 Jews executed in this city, I mean one report after another, so that the pattern after a while became clear. In mid September of 1941, the chief of the German Order police sent out a very interesting radio warning that the commanders in the field should send ordinary information and confidential information by radio, but that they should not send top secret information by radio because there was a danger that the enemy might intercept and decode, and he specifically said do not send reports of execution totals by radio, send them by courier instead.

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The Riegner Report

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Received alarming report that in Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled Germany numbering 3 1/2 - 4 million should after deportation and concentration in east be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action reported planned for autumn; methods under discussion including prussic acid. We transmit information with all necessary reservation as exactitude cannot be confirmed. Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and his reports generally speaking reliable

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I already mentioned Jan Karski, which you conveniently chose to ignore.

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Jan Kozielewski (he later took on his non de guerre Karski) was born in Lodz. In 1935, he completed demography studies at Lwow University, and embarked on a career of a civil servant at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This was cut short four years later by the war, and when Poland was occupied by Germany, Kozielewski joined the Polish underground – the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). His photographic memory made him ideal for the job of courier between the underground in Poland and the Polish government-in-exile that was seated first in France and moved to London, after the fall of France. In October 1942, at the height of the destruction of Polish Jewry, Karski was ordered to clandestinely go to the West and deliver a report on the situation of occupied Poland to the Polish government-in-exile in London. The situation of the Jews in Poland was to be one section of that report. Since the government in exile was concerned with the internal politics of the Poland’s underground parties, Karski held meetings with the different factions, including the Jewish Zionist and the Jewish Socialist Bund movements. Thus, shortly before his departure, Karski met with two Jewish leaders who asked him to inform the world’s statesmen of the desperate plight of Polish Jewry and of the hopelessness of their situation. Their message was: "Our entire people will be destroyed". The Jewish leaders' appeals touched Karski and he decided to see things with his own eyes in order to make his report. With great risk to his life, he was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto and into a camp in the Lublin area. The horrors he witnessed marked him deeply and propelled him to become not only the messenger of the Polish underground, but to concentrate on giving voice to the suffering of the dying Jews. In November 1942, Karski reached London, delivered the report to the Polish government-in-exile, and set out to meet Winston Churchill, other politicians, journalists, and public figures. Upon completing his mission, Karski went on to the United States, where he met with President Roosevelt and other dignitaries, and tried in vain to stir up public opinion against the massacre of the Jews. In 1944, while in the United States, Karski wrote a book on the Polish Underground (Story of a Secret State), with a long chapter on the Jewish Holocaust in Poland.

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Then, you have the Witold Report

Witold Pilecki., the Polish Captain who got volunteered to go to Auschwitz to find out first hand what was happening. After his escape his report went to the Polish gov't in exile in England, who subsequently gave it to the British.

The report itself (you gotta scroll down just a bit to get to it)

All of this is just part of the story. There's more out there if you care to look. But if you think you already know all there is to know on the issue and your mind is closed to new info, I'm guess I wasted my time. Wouldn't be the first instance that's happened.

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But once we got involved in the war, i think you gotta play to win.

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I've written nothing to suggest our strategy should not have been be based upon defeating Hitler, one could have argued we should have taken care of the japs first, they attacked us, they were occupying our territory and they had over 130K us military prisoners and tens of thousands more of our allies in atrocious captivity.

If a poll were taken in 1942 about which should be a higher priority rescuing Jews in Eastern Europe or American POW's in Japanese captivity first, I think American POW's would have won.

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the Allies could have lost WWII on several occasions.

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Not really. The Nazis lost the war on June 22, 1941.

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the US saved Europe from the evil Nazi's

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Not really. The US saved Western Europe markets from the USSR.

For all the talk about how many Jews were killed by the Nazis, very little is ever mentioned about how many Slavs were killed. I believe it was over four times as many as Jews.

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very little is ever mentioned about how many Slavs were killed. I believe it was over four times as many as Jews.

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Does your definition of 'Slavs' include Gypsies? Because a lot of them were killed but nobody cared because everyone hated them.

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Yep, and FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack back in 1932, he knew that the US would ultimately lose the war in Vietnam, FDR knew that we would land on the moon in 1969, and FDR knew that the 49ers would win Super Bowl XXIX.

The dude knew him some shite.





Doesn't anyone ever get tired of claiming what FDR knew and when? There will never be any way to prove what he knew, not to mention, no one has really defined "knowledge" in this thread. Is "knowledge" 100% certainty? Likelihood? What? Did he have reports of the death camps? What all else did he have reports of that eventually proved to be false?

I don't mind playing 'what if' games with WWII, but trying to ascertain with any certainty what someone knew or didn't know is ridiculous.

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You apply that same "logic" towards Hitler knowing of the Holocaust?

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Does your definition of 'Slavs' include Gypsies?

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No, but it does include Soviet troops.

Although they were close to getting wiped out, there just weren't that many Romani in Europe.

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That's the reason for the OP. The author PROVED that FDR knew. What do you not understand about that? He proved it with DOCUMENTS between State, Treasury, and the National Jewish Council. The documents are from 1942.

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Here's the OP in its entirety:

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I listened to a 1 hour lecture on book TV re: Jews and FDR.

Historian was interesting but a horrible public speaker. Short story:

FDR knew that the Jews were getting exterminated in 1942. But the reason he would not denounce it publicly was because of the US/British invasion of Northern Africa.

He didn't want to piss off the Muslims who were being told by the Germans that US involvement in WWII was being driven by the hated Jews.

The historian also blamed the French.
Your thoughts?

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I'm not seeing any proof there.

Without DIRECT evidence, like seeing it for himself, it's impossible to determine whether or not he KNEW. Yes, State Dept docs could have proven that he felt it was highly likely, but he's still only acting on second hand information. This is something I think a lot of people have trouble with these days. In the information age when data can be directed around the world as an event is unfolding, with graphic video and all, it's hard to understand how information was disseminated back in the 30's and 40's. It was much harder to absolutely verify information than it is today.

Yes, Zach, I know you're as old as Ötzi, I'm just thinking your memory is shot.

what could he have actually done at the time. We didn't have the forces to go into Germany at that time.