Photo of the Cover of The War Diary of Breckinridge Long
This morning, when I checked my blog statistics, as I always do, I found that the my previous blog post about Breckinridge Long had gotten the most hits.
I wondered why so many people were interested in Breckinridge Long, so I checked the news to find out what is going on. I found this news article with this headline:
Anti-Syrian Muslim Refugee Rhetoric Mirrors Calls to Reject Jews During Nazi Era
Breckinridge Long
A photo similar to the one above is at the top of the news article. This photo allegedly shows Jewish men marching to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Notice the train in the background; they have just gotten off a train.
This quote is from the beginning of the news article:
During the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States resisted accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi terror sweeping Europe, in large part because of fearmongering by a small but vocal crowd.
They claimed that the refugees were communist or anarchist infiltrators intent on spreading revolution; that refugees were part of a global Jewish-capitalist conspiracy to take control of the United States from the inside; that the refugees were either Nazis in disguise or under the influence of Nazi agents sent to commit acts of sabotage; and that Jewish refugees were out to steal American jobs.
Many rejected Jews simply because they weren’t Christian.
In recent days, similar arguments are being resurrected to reject Syrian refugees fleeing sectarian terrorists and civil war.
This is another quote from the same news article:
During congressional debate in 1940, John B. Trevor, a prominent Capitol Hill lobbyist, argued against a proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Alaska, claiming they would be potential enemies — and charging that Nazi persecution of the Jews had occurred “in very many cases … because of their beliefs in the Marxian philosophy.” Trevor had notably helped author the Immigration Act of 1924, a law designed to curb Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, in part because of anarchist Jewish Americans of Russian descent including Emma Goldman.
Rep. Jacob Thorkelson, a Republican from Montana, warned at the time that Jewish migrants were part of an “invisible government,” an organization he said was tied to the “communistic Jew” and to “Jewish international financiers.”
William Dudley Pelley, a leading anti-Semite and organizer of the “Silver Shirts” nationalist group, claimed that Jewish migration was part of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to seize control of the United States. Pelley, whose organization routinely used anti-Semitic smears such as “Yidisher Refugees” and “Refugees Kikes,” attracted up to 50,000 to his organization by 1934.
In a previous blog post, I wrote the following about Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, who tried to escape the Nazis by coming to the United States, but he was denied entry because he had a criminal record (He had been convicted of cheating the customers of a bank that he owned.)
Begin Quote from previous blog post:
Anne Frank’s mother was an Orthodox Jew but her father was not very religious; he was not a Zionist. Besides that, the Franks didn’t qualify for the prisoner exchange camp at Bergen-Belsen because Otto Frank was a fugitive from justice.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Otto Frank was not in danger of being persecuted — he was in danger of being prosecuted. That’s right, Otto Frank and his brother were both indicted for bank fraud in 1933, and were scheduled to be put on trial. Otto Frank tried to get a visa to come to America, but was denied, so he escaped to Holland and entered the country illegally. His family followed him a few months later.
Otto Frank had been preparing a hiding place for months, while he told everyone that the family was planning to escape to Switzerland. In July 1942, Margot Frank received a letter from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration), ordering her to report to a work camp. The next day, the Frank family moved into the annex.
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