Roosevelt and the Holocaust Quotes

“In February of 1942, President Roosevelt signed the most damning of Executive Orders: number 9066, the internment of the Japanese.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“At his most prescient, President Roosevelt tried to warn the world, in his Quarantine Speech, of the growing threat to international security. “The peace, the freedom, and the security of ninety percent of the population is being jeopardized by the remaining ten percent who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law,” he announced. The speech caused an uproar. President Roosevelt was accused of trying to circumvent the neutrality laws of America. December—The Japanese Army launched the massacre of Nanking. In a period of six weeks, according to various estimates, over 300,000 people were brutally murdered. Over 20,000 cases of rape were reported.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“This is our world today: divided, contemptuous, hateful, and polarized. More and more, it’s becoming a world of Muslims versus non-Muslims. That is not to say that all Muslims are anti-Semitic, or that anti-Semitism only flourishes in Muslim countries. But from the perspective of this New Yorker, the moderate voices within the Muslim world seem to be shrinking and the radical voices seem to be growing. What happens when the radical voices within the Muslim world reach out and influence those outside the Muslim world? Is this our future?”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“The Jewish communities of Europe are seen by the public as extensions of and advocates for a regime in Israel that is rapidly losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the intelligentsia, the media, the left, and the anti-globalization crowd,” according to David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee. “So the question really becomes, how do you fight anti-Semitism in France or Belgium if the image of their Jewish citizens is inextricably linked to Israel?”6 Israel, with the only freely elected government in the Middle East, with the only free press, with a citizenry still decidedly in favor of a two-state solution with Palestine, has become a pariah.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“I’ve learned a simple though profound truth: Great people are not great all the time.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“The media kept Holocaust stories off the front pages. The New York Times, for instance, from the years 1939 through 1945, printed 1,186 Holocaust stories, or an average of 17 stories per month.11 And yet only 26 stories mentioning the “discrimination, deportation, and destruction” of the Jews made the front pages. And of those stories, only six identified Jews as the primary victims. Six stories in six years. Six stories while six million died.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Other than Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish advisers around Roosevelt did not press for rescue. This makes for a bitter legacy. President Roosevelt appointed more Jews to his Administration than any other President, prior or subsequent, and yet those men did not use their faith to agitate for the Jews in Europe. It’s ironic and devastating.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Whether Pope Pius was anti-Semitic or not, he clearly found it difficult to comprehend and respond to the enormity of the Final Solution. And in that reaction, Pius was like nearly all the leaders of the day.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“The State Department was egregiously anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. Were it not for State Department “bureaucratic bungling and callousness,” Rabbi Wise wrote, “thousands of lives might have been saved and the Jewish catastrophe partially averted.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“David Wyman wrote, “America’s response to the Holocaust was the result of action and inaction on the part of many people. In the forefront was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose steps to aid Europe’s Jews were very limited.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“The record suggests that, at best, Roosevelt was sympathetic to the Jews and, at worst, Roosevelt resorted to political expediency.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“I cannot be silent,” wrote Szmul Zygielbojm (the Polish Jew who went on the BBC and pleaded with the Allied governments to come to the aid of those in the Warsaw ghetto). “I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish population of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing. My friends in the Warsaw ghetto died with weapons in their hands in the last heroic battle. It was not my destiny to die together with them but I belong to them and in their mass graves. By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but as I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to breaking down the indifference of those who may now at the last moment rescue the few Polish Jews still alive.”10 A few weeks after the Bermuda Conference concluded, and four days before the German commander in Warsaw declared the ghetto no longer in existence, Szmul Zygielbojm committed suicide.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Personally, I saw many ships return to the United States during my duties at Gourock and other ports in Scotland. At first, they went back with empty loads. Later, they carried the wounded. Certainly, there was space for refugees.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“but the British had knowledge of the mass murders at an early stage. Beginning in 1939 and escalating in 1940 and 1941, British intelligence services decoded the messages of the German police and the SS. For instance, according to a British report in 1941, a German police battalion “liquidated 1,059 Jews at or near Slavuta [Ukraine] on August 19-22.” Another police battalion “participated in killing 367 Jews on August 23 and another 468 Jews the next day around Kowel [Ukraine]. The German police suffered no losses.” On August 25, another police battalion killed 1,342 Jews in a “cleansing action, while the First SS Brigade shot 85 prisoners and 283 Jews.”5 The British reaction was to seal away the reports under the warning “Most Secret” and “Never to Be Removed from This Office.” Some fifty years later, the British government declassified the files.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Fry wrote, none of those who made their way to America “has ever had his loyalty questioned. All of them know, perhaps even better than we, the true value of democracy. For they once lost it, and only after much suffering found it again.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“I gave them money and advice and tried to give them hope. Those who already had visas I instructed how to cross the frontier [into Spain and eventually on to Portugal]. When they were ready to leave, I shook their hands, and said, ‘I’ll see you in New York.’ Many of them were incredulous, hardly daring to hope. But that short sentence, spoken with conviction, seemed to do more than anything else to restore their faith in the future.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Four days into the St. Louis’s voyage, the British government published the McDonald White Paper on Palestine. The document, named after Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald, limited Jewish immigration in Palestine to a total of seventy-five thousand over a five-year period, with the number of Jews in the country not to exceed one-third of the total population. In repudiating the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the White Paper limited immigration to the one place seemingly most logical. “This White Paper,” Rabbi Stephen Wise would later write, “issued shortly before Hitler was to begin his mass annihilation of European Jewry, was in effect a death sentence for scores of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have found life and safety in Palestine rather than death in Maideneck [sic] and Auschwitz.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Time Magazine believed that due to public opinion the President had been given a “mandate” which he could “translate into foreign policy.” Shockingly, nothing changed in foreign policy. No move was made to liberalize the quota system. Nor did the President instigate an intervention-based coalition of nations. And so, without any serious international interference, Hitler’s government continued along its chosen path.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“My good friends,” Chamberlain addressed the crowd, “this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor [Disraeli returned from the Congress of Berlin in 1878]. I believe it is peace in our time.” The next day, Hitler’s army marched into the Sudetenland.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“In 1938, the year of the Anschluss and the merging of the quota and the Evian Conference, America accepted 17,868 refugees. Ten thousand less than the legal limit. One reason for the unfulfilled quota was a fear of saboteurs. Communists, anarchists, Fifth Columnists (defined as any clandestine faction or group attempting to undermine a nation’s solidarity), the list of possible subversive agents was long and, in Congressional perspective, fearsome. That fear ascended to the highest level of government. Roosevelt would make policy and appoint officials with the fear of Fifth Columnists in mind. Breckinridge Long, who would stultify Jewish immigration during the war years, was one of those appointments.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Walter Lippman, advised his readership not to judge Germany on the basis of Nazi radicals. He argued that people possessed a “dual nature.” He wrote, “To deny that Germany can speak as a civilized power because uncivilized things are being said and done in Germany is in itself a deep form of intolerance.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“the New York Times called the Nazis’ plans for massacre of the Jews “wild rumors.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Roosevelt liked to laugh. He liked to chitchat. One of his favorite amusements was summoning J. Edgar Hoover to the Oval Office and getting the lowdown on Washington gossip.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“He gave orders not to photograph the wheelchair. Most photographs show the President from the waist up. The nation never knew the extent of his vulnerabilities; it was such a well kept secret. The same can be said for the international community. “During”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Just recently, Charles Sweeney (the pilot who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki) died. His obituary told the story of his return to Japan, alongside Paul Tibbets (the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima), many years later. Both men expressed great sorrow for the devastation and the lives lost. But when asked if they felt regret, both men said. “No, dropping the bombs ended the war.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“Great Britain was populated with an abundance of available women. British men were on the continent fighting the war; American men took advantage. The saying then went like this: “The British were underfed, undersexed, and under Eisenhower. The Americans were overfed, oversexed, and over here.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“The surroundings I saw echoed Winston Churchill’s most stirring words, given in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. “. . . We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, ... we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. ...”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“In retrospect, the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans (and the others) was one of the gravest travesties of civil rights. The Japanese-Americans were innocent. There is no way today to justify what happened then. No way to excuse the racial intolerance. No way to defend the horrendous conditions within the camps. No way to rationalize the undermining of the Constitution.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“There was no mass public outcry to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. No huge demonstration in Washington. Even the liberal newspapers barely objected. Columnist Walter Lippmann, the voice of progressive policies and individual liberties during the New Deal days, supported the internment, calling the Pacific Coast a “combat zone.”7”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation

“There was a deep commitment for the American cause, an overwhelming belief in the war effort. There was in fact no dispute within the nation. No debate. This would be the last war in which such unanimity existed.”
― Robert L. Beir, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: How FDR Saved the Jews and Brought Hope to a Nation