| | | FDR thought the US had too many Jews already, worked to keep refugees from Hitler out:
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A maximum of 25,957 German citizens were permitted, by law, to enter the United States each year during that era. (The number increased slightly, to 27,370, after Germany annexed Austria in 1938.) Yet the extra requirements and restrictions imposed by U.S. officials ensured that the quota was filled only once during FDR’s 12 years in office. In most years, the German quota was left three-fourths unfilled. Between 1933 and 1945, a total of about 190,000 spaces from Germany or Axis-occupied countries were never used.
If Roosevelt had been sincerely interested in aiding the Jewish refugees, he could have simply instructed the State Department to quietly permit the quotas to be filled as the law permitted.
Rafael Medoff, Washington
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Richard Cohen argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt “did nothing much” to aid Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it was even worse than that. There were instances in which the Roosevelt administration obstructed efforts to rescue Jewish refugees. The experience of my father, the late Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. diplomat who rejected the administration’s orders, is a case in point.
As an official in the U.S. Consulate in Marseilles, my father surreptitiously worked with U.S. journalist Varian Fry to help smuggle more than 2,000 Jewish refugees and anti-Nazi activists out of Nazi-occupied France. In late 1940, German and French officials complained to the Roosevelt administration about what Fry, my father and others were doing as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee’s efforts. Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the U.S. ambassador in Paris to insist that Fry halt all “activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.” (At that point, the Roosevelt administration was maintaining “friendly relations” with Nazi Germany.) When Fry and my father refused to desist, the State Department in early 1941 revoked Fry’s passport and transferred my father out of France.
The most extensive and successful underground and unsanctioned effort by U.S. citizens in Europe to rescue Jews and other anti-Nazi refugees came to an almost complete halt — at the insistence of the Roosevelt administration with the collusion of Congress.
William S. Bingham, Salem, Conn.
As despicable as was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambivalence to the plight of Jews in Europe, a deeper stain to his legacy was his acquiescence to putting Japanese American citizens — citizens! — in concentration camps at the beginning of World War?II. I served in the Army in California in the 1950s with some of these victims of official racism, and I agreed with them then and still that Roosevelt should never be ranked with such truly courageous presidents as Washington, Lincoln and Truman, the last for racially integrating the military services despite a looming and difficult presidential election.
John Morton, Jessup
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fdr-anti-semite-or-friend-of-the-jews/2013/03/15/7c5b58c6-8bee-11e2-af15-99809eaba6cb_story.html |
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