Who Knew?
Page 13
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1. Rafael Medoff, Jewish Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 40; Jewish Virtual Library, “Henry Ford Invents a Jewish Conspiracy,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford1.html.
2. Joseph W. Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Policies of the US Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 121–66.
...US immigration laws doomed six million Jews
In 1921, alarmed by the flood of immigrants entering the United States, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, sometimes referred to as the Johnson Act. This law established a quota for each nationality group seeking entry to the country. The quota limited the number of immigrants to 3 percent of the number of people from each country in the United States as of the 1910 census.1 The total number of immigrants was limited to 356,000.2 In 1924, the Johnson Act was replaced by the National Origins Act. The new law limited the total number of immigrants to 2 percent of the number of people from each country residing in the United States as of the 1890 census. By changing the base year from 1910 to 1890, the law favored the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant population of America, since most of them had come before 1890, while the bulk of the immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe took place after 1890.3
The Jewish immigrants had come mostly from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and other Balkan states. This meant that they fell into the nationality groups having the fewest eligible immigrants.4 When the Nazis began to put pressure on the Jews in the 1930s and to physically exterminate them in the 1940s, the Jews were ready to flee. However, the National Origins Act was rigidly enforced, and only the miniscule quota numbers were allowed to enter the country. The rest were left to their fate under the Nazis.
Today, the United States still has laws that regulate the flow of immigrants into the country. However, when people’s lives are in danger, they are declared refugees and are permitted into the country outside of the numbers fixed by law. Tragically, this legislation was not there to benefit the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
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1. Adalberto Aguirre, Racial and Ethnic Diversity in America: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 22.
2. T.J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 185.
3. US Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Immigration Act of May 26, 1924 (43 Statutesat-Large 153),” http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/Legislation%20from%20 1901-1940.pdf.
4. Jewish Virtual Library, “Emanuel Celler,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ biography/Celler.html.
...a Jewish athlete helped Nazi Germany get the Olympic Games
In 1931 the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 games to the democratically elected German Weimar Republic. When the totalitarian Nazi regime took power in 1933, many people began to regret the choice of the site of the 1936 games. Both the American ambassador to Germany and the head of the US Legation in Vienna opposed the Berlin Olympics. The National Council of the Methodist Church and the American Federation of Labor voiced opposition, and ten thousand people protested at Madison Square Garden. Seventy-five thousand German-American members of the German-American League for Culture asked for the removal of the games from Berlin, and the American Athletic Union (AAU) received more than 100,000 individual protests. But after a three-day argument, the convention voted by a narrow majority to keep the games in Berlin.1
Two people are credited with this decision: Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Organization, and Helene Mayer, the German-born Olympic gold-medal winner in the 1928 games, whose father was Jewish. Brundage worked for two years to get the Nazis to conform to world opinion and permit the German team to include at least one Jewish athlete. Helene Mayer, for her part, sealed the deal for Germany by agreeing to represent Germany in the games.
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1. Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 77.
...a Jewish athlete represented Nazi Germany
The 1936 Olympic medal ceremony in women’s fencing was an exercise in irony. The gold medal went to Ilona Schacherer-Elek of Hungary, whose father was Jewish. The silver medal went to Helene Mayer of Germany, and the bronze went to Ellen Preis of Austria.1 Who was Helene Mayer?
She was born in 1912 of a Jewish father – a physician – and a Christian mother. Helene was registered as Jewish and the family attended a synagogue. Their next-door neighbors were also Mayers and Helene’s family was known as “the Jewish Mayers.”
Helene Mayer was a natural athlete. By the age of twelve, she had proven her mettle in horseback riding, skiing, swimming, dance, and her ultimate arena, fencing.2 In 1928, Helene, at the age of seventeen, won the gold at the Amsterdam Olympic Games. In 1932 Helene came in fifth at the games in Los Angeles and stayed on to study at the exclusive Scripps College. In 1933, after the Nazis had assumed power in Germany, her stipend was withdrawn, but Scripps immediately gave Helene a scholarship.3
Helene had studied law at the Sorbonne and had ambitions to work in a German foreign embassy. Realizing that the Nazis would never hire her, she switched her major to foreign languages.
Under an order from the International Olympic Committee, Germany had to agree not to discriminate in its selection of athletes for their 1936 team. This meant that they had to field at least one Jewish athlete. Helene Mayer was selected.
Having been deprived of her citizenship and kicked out of the Offenbach Fencing Club in absentia, because she was Jewish, Helene bargained with Hitler’s government, indicating that she would accept the invitation to the German team in exchange for having her citizenship reinstated, a move supported by the German consul in San Francisco.4
As the medals were placed around the necks of Schacherer-Elek and Preis, the two women stood immobile. Not so Helene Mayer, who proudly offered the Nazi salute and later shook hands with Hitler.
Helene Mayer continued to compete in fencing and in 1937 defeated Schacherer-Elek to win the world title. As her train stopped in Frankfurt on her way home, Helene asked a friend if the press had carried news of her victory. When the friend replied in the negative, Helene finally faced reality and said, “Then I have to remain in America.”1
The tragedy of Helene Mayer was her failure to face the reality early on. She slept through the loss of her citizenship, the loss of her membership in the fencing club, the loss of her college stipend, and the steady degradation of her fellow Jews. What finally woke her up was the refusal of the Nazi press to acknowledge her latest athletic achievement!
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1. There is a photograph of the three of them receiving their medals in Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, The Olympics at the Millennium: Power, Politics, and the Games (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 58.
2. Milly Mogulof, Foiled: Hitler’s Jewish Olympian; The Helene Mayer Story (Oakland, CA: RDR Books, 2002), 30.
3. Ibid., 71–72.
4. Ibid, 221–22.
1. Carol Levy, “The Olympic Pause: 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany,” The Jewish Magazine (autumn 2000), http://www.jewishmag.com/36mag/olympic/olympic.htm.
...the Jewish catcher was also a spy
Morris (Moe) Berg was born to a Jewish family in New York in 1902. He grew up to be a gifted athlete with a precocious intellect. He was a star baseball player for Princeton and graduated cum laude with a degree in modern languages. He studied Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Sanskrit. After college, Berg signed a contract to play professional baseball and soon after enrolled in Columbia University Law School.
Although he was admitted to the bar and briefly practiced law, Berg’s first love was baseball. His playing career lasted over fifteen years, and in 1932 he was one of three major-league players to go to Japan to teach baseball.1
/> In 1934 Berg made a second trip to Japan with an all-star team of American League baseball players. He acted as interpreter for the players, made speeches in Japanese, and carried with him a letter of introduction from President Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull requesting that Berg be given every courtesy by the ambassador. The ambassador, however, had other plans for Berg.
The story goes that one day Berg was absent from the baseball field. Dressed in a kimono, Berg went to the hospital where the ambassador’s daughter had just given birth. He was carrying a bouquet of flowers and asked the location of the patient. Instead of going to her room, Berg proceeded to the top floor carrying a camera hidden under his kimono.
Since the hospital was one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo, Berg was able to film “industrial complexes and armament plants, oil refineries and railroad lines...the Imperial Palace and warships in Tokyo Bay.”2
Four months after Pearl Harbor, Berg’s films were used to help guide the carrier-based bombers that made the first air raid against the Japanese home islands. The films were also used in subsequent raids.3
After retiring from baseball, Berg was recruited for another mission. With World War II raging, the Americans were hard at work on developing an atomic bomb. Thinking that perhaps they were in a race with Germany to see who would get the first bomb, the Americans turned to Moe Berg to try to find out the status of the German project.
Working through Swiss physicist Paul Scherrer, Berg was able to arrange for the eminent German physicist Werner Heisenberg to deliver a talk in Switzerland. Berg’s instructions were to attend the lecture and to kill Heisenberg if he felt that the scientist was on the verge of supplying the Nazis with the bomb.
With his knowledge of German and having studied atomic physics in preparation for his assignment, Berg was able to understand the technical nature of the lecture. Berg also attended the dinner party following the lecture carrying a pistol in his pocket.1
During the course of the evening, Berg concluded that that the Germans were indeed far behind the Americans in their progress toward an atomic bomb, in spite of Nazi propaganda promising a new super weapon very soon. The German physicist Heisenberg would live to see another day.
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1. Peter C. Bjarkman, Diamonds around the Globe: The Encyclopedia of International Baseball (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 123.
2. Louis Kaufman, Barbara Fitzgerald, and Tom Sewell, Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 27.
3. Nicholas Dawidoff however refutes claims that Berg’s films were used and says there is no evidence that Berg was involved in espionage in 1934. See Dawidoff ‘s book The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (New York: Random House, 1994), 135, 386.
1. Kaufman, Fitzgerald, and Sewell, Moe Berg, 196.
...Germany’s best high jumper didn’t get to jump
When the Nazis took power in Germany, every facet of German life, including sports, was pressed into service to promulgate Nazi ideology. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels announced on April 23, 1933, “German sport has only one task: to strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle for its existence.”1
Germany then began the systematic exclusion of non-Aryans, i.e., Jews, gypsies, and others, from athletics in Germany. Among those affected was world-class high jumper Gretel Bergmann. She was expelled from her sports club in Ulm in 1933, because she was Jewish.
In May 1933, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 games to Germany to be held in Berlin. As the games approached, Propaganda Minister Goebbels had to deal with the problem of the half-Jewish fencing star Helene Mayer. He issued the following order to the press on February 19, 1936: “No comments should be made regarding Helene Mayer’s non-Aryan ancestry or her expectations for a gold medal in the Olympics.”2 On July 16, 1936, two weeks before the start of the games, he again addressed the non-Aryan issue: “Press coverage should not mention that there are two non-Aryans among the women: Helene Mayer [fencing] and Gretel Bergmann [high jump and all-around track and field competition].”3
Bergmann’s name appears as a competitor, because she had attained a height in the high jump identical to that which was to win the Olympic gold medal. Shortly after Goebbels’s order to the press, Bergmann was informed that she would not be permitted to compete. By dismissing Bergmann, Germany sacrificed an almost sure gold medal.
In 1937 Gretel Bergmann immigrated to the United States to avoid further persecution in Germany.
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1. Quoted in Anton Rippon, Hitler’s Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games (Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK: Pen and Sword, 2006), 17; see also Jewish Virtual Library, “The Nazi Olympics,” http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/olympics.html.
2. Quoted in Jeremy Schaap, Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 154.
3. Ibid.
...a Jew saved Winston Churchill’s political career
One of Winston Churchill’s favorite Americans was Bernard Baruch. In addition to being a wealthy financier, Baruch served for a long time as a trusted advisor and confidant to President Roosevelt. Another of Baruch’s attributes was the ability to discern that Winston was a great statesman but an extremely inept investor.
On a trip to America in 1932, Churchill paid a visit to Baruch in his office. While there, Churchill decided to do some trading on his own. At the end of the day, a distraught Churchill sought out Baruch and told him that he was a financially ruined man. He had squandered so much of his family fortune that he would have to sell everything, including his beloved estate, Chartwell. He bemoaned the fact that his ill-fated foray into the market would mean that he would have to resign from the House of Commons to enter business. No longer a young man, Churchill would probably have to spend the rest of his life paying back the enormous losses he had incurred.
Baruch gently informed Churchill that he had lost nothing. Knowing how notoriously bad an investor Churchill was, Baruch had left instructions to his employees to watch Churchill’s transactions as he went about his trading. Every time Churchill sold, Baruch’s employees were to buy the same securities. Every time Churchill bought, Baruch’s people were to sell. By the end of the day, Churchill was back where he started. Baruch’s firm had even absorbed the commissions.
Thus it was that Winston Churchill was able to stay in politics and to guide England and much of the free world through the difficult times that lay ahead in World War II.1
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1. William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, vol. 2, Alone, 1932–1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 14–15.
...206,000 Jewish soldiers fought for Hitler
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, they inherited an army that contained tens of thousands of Mischlinge, men of mixed Jewish-German marriages. According to historian Bryan Rigg’s research, about 140,000 quarter-Jews served in the Wehrmacht between 1935 and 1945. Added to this were another 60,000 half-Jews and another 6,000 full Jews.1 How did this situation come about?
When the Nazi hierarchy began to debate the issue of what to do about these Mischling soldiers, it was argued that if the government labeled half-Jews as Jews, the Wehrmacht would lose about 45,000 soldiers.2 Hitler himself never got around to declaring half-Jews as Jews, possibly out of reluctance to alienate the Aryan families of the Mischling.3 Even the Jewish families of these soldiers received much favorable consideration because of the service being rendered by their sons. Indeed, many soldiers remained in the army specifically to protect their families. More amazing still is the fact that Hitler himself intervened to help the families of part-Jews.4
Another factor in the retention of part-Jews in the armed forces was the unwillingness of commanders to discharge experienced soldiers in their units. When a soldier trains for months and
even years in the same company, a certain loyalty develops and the unit becomes a sort of surrogate family for the soldier. Even after discharge from the service, a mechanism was established whereby half-Jews could petition to remain in the army.5
Finally, distance from the headquarters sometimes played a role in the non-implementation of the racial policies. General Rommel, fighting fierce battles in North Africa, apparently did not concern himself with the racial decrees, and Admiral Raeder was tardy in implementing the racial laws on ships at sea.6
It must be pointed out that most of the racially motivated discharges were directed at half-Jews. Nevertheless, many half-Jews remained in the armed forces by simply lying about their “Aryan” status, and the bureaucracy was too far stretched to do the necessary research to expose the half-Jews. Quarter-Jews were far less affected, although many were denied promotions and/or medals on account of their ancestry.7
In a sea of racism, the German army stands out as an island of tolerance.
Part of the Nazi concentration camp system intricately involved supplying slave laborers for the German war effort. A typical inmate was first examined by a doctor to determine his fitness for work, and a medical file on him was established. Then his registration form was completed including all pertinent information. The third step would be to check his name against the indices of the Political Section (lists of people associated with political groups incompatible with Nazi philosophy) to see if he should be subjected to special tortures. Finally, the prisoner would be assigned a five-digit number coded to correspond to the worker’s particular skills.
In the Auschwitz complex, each prisoner’s forearm was tattooed with this number; it would follow the inmate from one work assignment to another and was tracked by the SS Economic Administration, which oversaw all slave labor assignments. In this way the prisoners who were to be kept alive for work were efficiently tracked and assigned to areas where their services were most needed.