Imagine if part of the US had been occupied by the Germans and liberated by the British, only to leave Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh (two notorious pro-Nazis) to run the government. That's exactly what happened in 1942 , Raphael Medoff explains in the David S Wyman journal of Holocaust Studies when the Allies liberated North Africa, leaving Jews without their rights for a whole year. (with thanks: Eliyahu)
Writing in The Forward on Oct. 21, 2011, former district attorney Robert Morgenthau and law professor Frank Tuerkheimer claim to have discovered that President Franklin D. Roosevelt "saved the Jews of North Africa and the future State of Israel" by invading Axis-occupied North Africa.
It was a stroke of good fortune that the Allied victory in North Africa in 1942 happened to stop the Nazis from, among other things, massacring the Jews of Palestine. But for Morgenthau and Tuerkheimer to suggest that it was Roosevelt's intention to rescue those Jews is misleading, to put it mildly. It would be like saying that Stalin "saved the Jews of Moscow" when the Soviets stopped the advance of the German Army at Stalingrad, or that Churchill "saved the Jews of London" when the German attack on England was repulsed.
But what makes the Morgenthau-Tuerkheimer thesis especially ironic is that it fails to mention the explosive controversy over the anti-Jewish policies that FDR permitted in Allied-liberated North Africa.
On November 8, 1942, American and British forces invaded Nazi-occupied Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and, in eight days, defeated the Germans and their Vichy French partners.
For the 330,000 Jews of North Africa, the Allied conquest was heaven-sent--or so it seemed. The Vichy regime that had ruled since the summer of 1940 had stripped the region’s Jews of their civil rights (originally granted back in 1870), severely restricted their entrance to schools and some professions, confiscated Jewish property, and tolerated sporadic pogroms against Jews by local Muslims. In addition, thousands of Jewish men were hauled away to forced-labor camps.
President Roosevelt, in his victory announcement, pledged “the abrogation of all laws and decrees inspired by Nazi governments or Nazi ideologists."
Or so he said.
Behind the scenes, Roosevelt had cut a deal with Admiral Francois Darlan, a senior Vichy official who happened to be Algiers at the time of the Allied invasion. In exchange for persuading some of the local forces to surrender, Darlan was named High Commissioner for North Africa. Nearly all of the top officials of the local Vichy regime were permitted to remain in the new government. The Vichy “Office of Jewish Affairs” continued to operate, as did the forced labor camps in which thousands of Jews were imprisoned.
Charles de Gaulle and the anti-Nazi French resistance were of course outraged. And so were many prominent Americans. Mr. Morgenthau's father, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was "apoplectic," FDR biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin reports. She quotes Secretary of War Henry Stimson's observation: "Poor Henry was sunk. He was almost for giving up the war which he said had lost all interest for him." An editorial in The New Republic urged its readers to imagine how they would feel if the Germans had occupied part of the United States, and then when the British liberated the area, they permitted Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh to run the government.
Darlan and company claimed that rescinding the anti-Jewish laws would cause local Arabs to riot. Secretary of State Cordell Hull agreed. So did General George Patton, who warned from Morocco that "local Jews" would "try to take the lead here," thus angering the Arabs.
President Roosevelt, too, seemed to subscribe to Patton's "pushy Jews" theory. FDR discussed the question of rights for North African Jewry at a January 17, 1943 meeting in Casablanca with officials of the new "non-Vichy" regime. According to the official U.S. government transcript of the conversation, Roosevelt said: "The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population...The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews." (It is not clear how FDR came up with that wildly exaggerated statistic.)
American Jewish leaders did not know of FDR's private comments about Jewish professionals. Undoubtedly they would have been shocked and horrified if word had leaked out. (The transcript was not made public until 1968.) But they did know that the promised restoration of the rights of North African Jewry had not taken place, and as the weeks turned into months, they started wondering why.
Although reluctant to take issue with the Roosevelt administration, by the spring of 1943, Jewish leaders began speaking out. The American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress charged that “the anti-Jewish legacy of the Nazis remains intact in North Africa” and urged FDR to eliminate the Vichy laws. Leaders of the American Jewish Committee met with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to press for abrogation.
Purim 1943: US resisted repeal of Vichy laws
Did FDR save Jews?
This is a good article based on solid research. However, Medoff missed one important point. He forgot to point out the immense ingratitude in Roosevelt's attitude since the American troops were enabled to land at Algiers in November 1942 without firing a shot or being shot. This was due to a coup d'etat in the city on the eve of the American landing in which an underground of several hundred men, in coordination with the US consul in Algiers, Robert Murphy, took over the vital points in the city, such as the telephone exchange & the villa where Admiral Darlan was staying. The rebels were 80-85% Jews. Medoff does not mention this fact. Further, the American historiography of WW2 almost entirely overlooks the Algiers underground. Murphy in his memoirs makes a brief, misleading mention of the underground, omitting that the rebels were mostly Jews. We should also point out that the post-Vichy govt in Algiers headed I believe by General Giraud, had Jose Aboulker, a Jewish leader of the coup, arrested despite his great services. And Murphy essentially left Aboulker in jail despite being very much aware of these services.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, although there is little about the event, the coup, in English, there is a lot in French.
One source is the book by
Gitta Amipaz-Silber, available in English, French and Hebrew.
another source is an article by
Elliott A Green in Midstream magazine, January 1989. I don't believe that Green's article is on the Net, unfortunately.
Medoff has written on this subject before. See link:
ReplyDeletehttp://ziontruth.blogspot.co.il/2011/03/liberal-franklin-roosevelt-urged.html