The War Against the Jews
FDR had several prominent Jewish advisers, including Samuel Rosenman, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Felix Frankfurter, and anti-Semites labeled the New Deal the “Jew Deal.” The 1930s had witnessed a rise of public and vocal anti-Semitism never before seen in America-- more than 100 anti-Semitic organizations emerged in a single decade, while until that time, there had been only five in all of American history, writes historian Leonard Dinnerstein.
"Junius Aryan" wrote in 1912 "the Negro was the principal alien race in this country; but, the changing of the Constitution under adverse circumstances following the Civil War, brought into this Aryan country ... over five millions of the Semitic and Mongolian races, which alien population has brought upon the Aryans of this country, in its most menacing form, a general race question ... miscegenations which are producing mongrels by hundreds of thousands annually'; Negroizations, Mongolizations and Semitizations,(Mongrelizations) which are fast mongrelizing the Aryan race in the United States, and too all of these three races with all of their different branches use Aryan names and unnaturally attempt to use Aryan languages..."
Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.
As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.
On 30 June 1939, William Kunze, public relations director of the German-American Bund, was cheered by a crowd of 1000 at Nazi Camp Nordland when he said that “if President Rooseveit has any character left, he should look for the first hole and pull himself into it.” He said the “Jew Deal” in Washington was “creating a war” and aroused laughter by asking if anyone had “heard of the peace move by our friend Roosevelt.”
The popular priest Father Coughlin’s radio diatribes about “the Jew Deal” and “President Rosenfeld” reached audiences in the millions. Anti-Semitism increased steadily in America in the 1930s and 1940s. In surveys taken between 1938 and 1941, 33-50% of Americans felt that Jews “had too much power in the United States.” War made it even worse—by 1945, the percentage was up to 56%.
Mildred Elizabeth Gillars, known as "Axis Sally" and calling herself "Midge" during her broadcast radio programs, attempted to stir up discontent among American troops overseas by telling them they were fighting a 'Jewish war.' She sad that if the truth were known to the American public, World War II would be called a "Jewish war." On 27 July 1943, she said " the Jews are sending our men over to Europe to fight so that their money bags will get filled." On 25 August 1943 she claimed " the German side is the right side and it is the gentile side. Girls of America don't forget that this is a war of gentiles against Jews. I repeat it, a war of gentiles against the Jews". In a post-War interrogation, she said in 1946 that in her prisoner of war messages broadcasts she "didn't leave much unsaid about the Jewish promoters of the war." In response to an inquiry as to her reasons for broadcasting, she replied, "I never considered a war between America and Germany", as "it was never that kind of war. It was a war between the Gentiles and the Jews."
Rhetoric about a “Jewish war” made mainstream Jewish leaders in the USA hold back, thinking that Americans would not willingly go to war to save the Jews. But more than half a million Jewish Americans served in the US military during World War II. Many Jewish soldiers were shocked at their comrades’ belief that Jews were draft dodgers, cowards and weaklings.
The Führer’s favorite novelist was Karl May, a petty criminal fraudster and hugely popular pulp fiction writer whose various wild-West adventures Hitler absorbed with gusto; though these stories were largely marketed toward teenagers. Hitler admired the ruthless, systematic way in which the US had pushed its railroads, farms, and mines westward through displacement and genocide of the Native Americans. While many view this as perhaps the darkest chapter in the national history, for the Nazis it was the essence of what made America great.
Hitler also believed, in his fanatical and fantastic way, that Jews had taken control of media, business, and government in the US and were rapidly corrupting its people, their morals, and the national identity. That is, Hitler came to view the US as a state in decline; he variously blamed this on racial miscegenation, American religiousness, even jazz music, with the Jews always pulling the puppet-strings from behind the scenes.
From the time FDR first took office in 1933 until America entered World War II in December 1941, the Roosevelt administration’s policy was to pursue cordial, sometimes even friendly relations with the Nazi regime. President Roosevelt, who spoke and read German, felt constrained by the American public’s pre-war isolationism and anti-Semitism in taking a more proactive stance with regard to European refugees.
The US State Department deliberately tried to stop the news of the mass murder from reaching anyone in the United States — and then lied to the Treasury about it. An assistant secretary at the State Department, Breckenridge Long, who had expressed sympathies for Nazi ideology and called Hitler's Mein Kampf “eloquent,” was in charge of granting U.S. visas to those hoping to flee Europe. “Have just finished Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” he wrote in his diary in early 1938. “It is eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism & chaos.” He added, “My estimate of Hitler as a man rises with the reading of his book.” According to the immigration service, of the 476,930 aliens who had entered the United States in the decade since 1933, only 165,756 had self-reported as “Hebrews” — or Jews. Of these, about 138,000 had escaped persecution.
Rafael Medoff noted "the most common theme in Roosevelt’s private statements about Jews has to do with his perception that they were “overcrowding” many professions and exercising undue influence. .... The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements... In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there.... In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”" In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.”
Gerhart Riegner, a young lawyer in Switzerland with the World Jewish Congress, sent a cablegram on 29 August 1942 that warned US officials of “a plan to exterminate all Jews from Germany and German-controlled areas in Europe.” On 22 January 1944, FDR ended the State Department’s obstruction, signing Executive Order 9417 to establish the War Refugee Board. Roosevelt instructed the secretaries of Treasury, State and War “to take action for the immediate rescue from the Nazis of as many as possible of the persecuted minorities of Europe — racial, religious or political — all civilian victims of enemy savagery.”
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