MovieChat Forums > The War (2007) Discussion > Some things Burns never told you

Some things Burns never told you


Here are some items that Ken Burns forgot to mention in his film "The War" concerning America's "Greatest Generation" and their exemplary conduct during the war and shortly afterwards:


1.) Operation Paperclip:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Nazi scientists who worked on the German V-2 rocket were welcomed into the United States and later would go on to form the core of NASA. Their leader was Wernher von Braun who had the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer in the SS. He led the German V2 effort which involved slave labor by approximately 60,000 inmates at a place called Mittelbau-Dora. 20,000 of the prisoners were worked to death. None of the Operation Paperclip scientists were ever prosecuted for war crimes. This includes Dr. Hubertus Strughold who conducted medical experiments on Jews at Dachau concentration camp and who later on became the chief scientist of the NASA medical department.


2.) Shiro Ishii and Unit 731
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiro_Ishii
In a similar vein, Colonel Shiro Ishii became the leader of the infamous Japanese laboratory known as Unit 731. The purpose of Unit 731 was to develop biological warfare agents. The main laboratory was centered in Harbin, China. Tests of biological agents including bubonic plague, cholera, and anthrax were tested on live Chinese prisoners of war. In 1946 the United States granted Colonel Ishii full immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for his data.


Got to run. I will have more items shortly.

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So we see in items 1 and 2 that at the same time that the United States was thumping its chest and conducting War Crimes trials both at Numerburg and in Japan, behind the scenes it was cutting deals with known Axis war criminals in exchange for technology and information. But wait, there's more. Consider item #3:

3.) Russian POWs forceably returned to the Soviet Union

http://www.fortfreedom.org/h16.htm
http://www.vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/5/1/Lutton84-94.html

In May of 1945 Nazi Germany surrendered. At that time there were more than two million Soviet POWs in the zone controlled by the U.S. and Britain. At the Yalta conference in February 1945 a secret deal (one of among many) was agreed to in which Russian POWs would be sent back to Russia. The only problem is that none of them wanted to go. They knew that Stalin thought that they had been contaminated by western ideas or had even collaborated with the enemy. They knew that the fate that awaited them was either the Gulag or execution. And that is exactly what happened to most of them. Many of them committed suicide rather than be returned to Stalinist Russia. Yet another story that Ken Burns won't tell you about.

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You are missing the point of this documentary film. It's from an American point of view. That's why they didn't cover what you listed. In fact i could also name other interest stories like the nazi developing the atomic bomb, oscar shendler, that Japaneses ambassadors who help save thousand of Jews in eastern Europe, German Secret weapons of world war two and so on, but these would like this documentary too long and it's wouldn't be about American point of view.

Game Over Man, Game Over!

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Curious comment. All three items I've listed involved activities by the Americans either during World War II or shortly thereafter. Certainly there were Americans involved who had a point of view so their story could have been told.

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[deleted]

Yes, I too know of some of these things via word of mouth. I have a close friend whose father was in the infantry stationed in Germany when the war ended. His story was that they were under orders to round up the Russian POWs in the sector they were in and send them back to the Russians. So they put them on railroad cars that were completely sealed so they couldn't escape. The Russian POWs were down on their knees begging the Americans not to send them back. But they were under orders so they forced the Russians into the railroad cars at gunpoint and the train was then sent eastward. In that way the Americans and British sent more than two million Russian POWs to their deaths. According to my friend's father this was the hardest thing he ever had to do during the War, and he had fought at the Battle of the Bulge. So that's saying a lot.

This information was kept hush-hush from the American public. I have never seen any documentary on World War II discussing this issue. Burns had his chance but I guess he couldn't find anyone from Luverne, Minnesota who was involved in this forced repatriation. Even if he had, I doubt he would have included it in his film. It would have ruined the whole "Necessary War", "Greatest Generation" nostalgia thing he had going.


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Union General William Sherman stood in front of a large audience one evening many years after the Civil War ended and said. "There are a lot of young men here tonight that think that war is all glory, but I can tell you boys it is all hell".

Horror, death, destruction, injustice; the innocent all too often die, while the guilty somehow manage to survive. That's what war is really all about.

Maybe Burns didn't feed us a steaming kettle of that gruel, but he did provide a good portion of the apple pie dessert. And I'm happy to have eaten it.

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Could you tell us how prisoners of war knew of Stalin's plan? Could you provide us some documentaion showing that the US knew of Stalin's plan? Thanks.

This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here.

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It sounds as if you think WWII wasn't a "Necessary War" and the people who fought and supplied it weren't rightfully described as the "Greatest Generation". You'd rather the Germans and Japanese were victorious? This series covered the ordinary American on the battle front and the home front, not the military leaders or politicians.

I've known of these things for years, learning of them through reading and research. They are common knowledge for anyone with even a modicum of education and curiosity.

The US saved the world, regardless of what anyone thinks. Yes, the English paid a terrible price and the Soviets an even worse price, but without the men, money and machines of the US, the outcome of WWII would have been very different.

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Oh, good Lord, peterkw-1 is back.

Yes, we all know that America is not pefect.

That being said, we were honorable in how we treated our enemies after the war. How did Japan and Germany treat the countries they defeated? How about the USSR?

Take a hike. You've got to take an all over look at history in order to make value judgements such as you are trying to make. You can't just pick up several incidents and use that as the rationale for saying that the USA is a morally bankrupt society. There is no country on earth that has no bad incidents in their history.

The good guys won WW II. Get over it.

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"...use that as the rationale for saying that the USA is a morally bankrupt society..."

I suggest you go back over all the pages of this post. Cut and paste them into a text editor. Now search for the string "bankrupt". Guess where the first occurrence of that string shows up? Yep, your posting. I never used that term anywhere in any of my postings. And no one else did either. So now you're putting those words into my mouth?

Maybe you're the reincarnation of peterkw-1. You seem to be just as nutty.

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I can understand why they returned the POW's, Stalin was holding tens of thousands of prisoners from the US, Britain, Canada, etc. that had been picked up in POW camps they overran. If we hadn't returned them, we wouldn't have gotten our own back.

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Why should either one have been mentioned in the documentary? Both are elements of the Cold War rather than the Second World War, and neither one of those 'items' listed has anything to do with the common man dodging bullets in Europe or the Pacific, or their family members worrying for them at home.

The documentary was not about the politicians or the generals or the spy chiefs, it was an examination of the war from the bottom up. Burns' documentary focused solely on the experiences of average Americans both in combat and on the home front and wasn't about the big picture.

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[deleted]

Yes, I agreed with allenkr62. It's like writing an essay, you state you issue and thesis and outline what the premise will be and stick to it so that you don't end up writing an encyclopedia. And in my opinion, Burn stuck to his thesis quite well. If he added the stuff the OP suggest, Burn would get a B or C grade, unless it involve one of the people he was interviewing. But the point is there just too many stories involving world war 2, that you can make this into a series that would last for 10 plus seasons.

Game Over Man, Game Over!

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I agree.
Let Michael Moore make a documentary on these thigs and their effect on Flint, Michigan.
Let Ken Burns tell the stories he wants to tell.

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You are correct.

There's always got to be the "I hate America" nutcases out there trying to throw rocks.

Yes, we did use some Nazi scientists after the war.

How do we know that they weren't forced to work for the Nazis? If they didn't cooperate, perhaps their family would have been killed? Stranger things happened in that war.

And, frankly, if this nutcase wants the negative stuff to be added to this documentary, then why not also add something about how America helped Japan and Europe back on their feet after the war? Does it make us look too good for the radical left to stomach?

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sclvr
You are correct.

There's always got to be the "I hate America" nutcases out there trying to throw rocks.


This x10.

The OP posts this information as if he uncovered some unknown facts and he alone is shining the light of justice upon it. His posts have the same 'look at me' (attention-who--ing) glee in his post that the idiotic 9/11 'truffers' have when they spill their conspiracy drivel.

Yawn, none of his information is new, and none of it pertains to the fighting of WWII. If someone (Ken B for example) wishes to make a documentary about the German Rocket scientists, or other POST WAR events/projects go for it. I'll be happy to watch it, but to pretend it will uncover some heretofore unknown events you are sadly mistaken. This is all common knowledge.

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4.) The Holocaust and the Allied Response

Now let's turn our attention to a topic which Ken Burns did mention in his film - the Holocaust. Burns tells the following story which appears to be the official story of the U.S. government in regards to the Holocaust. It runs pretty much like this:

U.S. troops enter Germany in the Spring of 1945

They are SHOCKED to find concentration camps containing dead and dying Jews, Gypsies, etc., etc.

The local townsfolk deny all knowledge of the camp's existence but they are obviously lying, since the camp can be smelled from miles away

The local Germans are forced to bury the dead bodies

The implication of such a story, which Burns does nothing to dispell, is that the liberation of the camps was the first knowledge that the U.S. government had of the Holocaust. It may have been the first time that the G.I.'s had ever heard of the Holocaust but how likely is it that the Allied governments had no idea about it? The likelihood is nil. Here's why. The British had broken the German encryption machine known as Enigma - this became known as Project ULTRA. British and American cryptographers at Bletchley Park deciphered literally millions of German messages during the course of the war. Their intelligence was so good that they were able to determine the complete German order of battle at the Battle of Kursk and pass along this information to the Russians. The German SS also used the same Enigma machine for their communications.

That means that Hitler's plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question would have been open knowledge to the Bletchley Park cryptographers. Without a doubt Allied intelligence would have known the names of the camps (e.g., Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, etc.), their locations, and exactly what they were up to.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/bombau.html

We now know for a fact that U.S. intelligence had detailed knowledge of the layout of the Auschwitz concentration camp by June 1944 provided by two escapees. And yet no bombing raid was ever conducted against the camp where two thirds of the Jews died in World War II. Bombing the rail lines leading into the camp would have disrupted the flow of Jews into the camp and may have saved thousands of them. In December 1944 an American bombing raid dropped bombs on an oil facility less than five miles from the camp, proving that the camp was within easy range of American bombers. But the sad truth is, that saving Jewish lives was not a high priority among the Allied war planners. The Americans and British could have saved thousands of Jewish lives had they decided to act, but they chose not to. Yet another story Ken Burns will not tell you because it doesn't involve Luverne, Minnesota.

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Well Thomas, maybe you should make a documentary that focuses solely on questionable, unethical or suspected dealings and decisions of the USA and the other Allied nations during and after the war. But Luverne, Minnesotta is a big part of the documentary Ken Burns made. And he is not ignoring unpleasant truths by any means. Yet he seems too honest for the jingoists and not strident and critical enough for the "America is the devil" crowd.

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Go somewhere else, dude. Nobody cares about your anti-American rants.

"I know you're in there, Fagerstrom!"-Conan O'Brien

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Some people just like nitpicking on small things. "Re: Some things Burns never told you", don't you realize how much pages, book, volumes of encyclopedia this would fill a building dedicated to world war two. It's unimaginable, There so many stories, experiences, angle's to tell how world war two was that even today people are still researching untold aspects of the war such as secret weapons of ww2 to Nazi occult beliefs that are link to Japanese secret society. Now if Burn can fit all that vast information into 8 episodes, that would be great, don't you think?

Game Over Man, Game Over!

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Yes, I apologize for bringing these topics to your attention. I realize now that such matters as cutting deals with Nazi and Japanese war criminals, sending two million Russian POWs to their deaths, and knowing about the Holocaust but doing nothing about it, are minor matters after all. It's much more important to know about what was going on back in Luverne, Minnesota during the War years and to have Tom Hanks read to us articles from the local newspaper. I can't wait for Mr. Burns' next film about the Vietnam War where he tells us what was happening in Luverne, Minnesota during the Tet Offensive.

One final comment: If telling the truth is Anti-American ranting then that doesn't speak well for America. Uncle Sam, don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

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Don't be such a strident, self-righteous dick.

I hope you're just a college kid going through the whole "Wake up, people!" phase.

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If Uncle Sam can't do the time don't do the crime? Since when did you become the judge, jury, and decider?

It's not the truth that's anti-American, it's the way you preach it. Of course the U.S. isn't perfect. Mind you we'd just helped save the world. Go away.

"I know you're in there, Fagerstrom!"-Conan O'Brien

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From the first I smelled a political agenda at work here.
And that the OP comes off as a total jerk does not help his case.

I'll Teach You To Laugh At Something's That's Funny
Homer Simpson

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I actually appreciate you writing all this. Many of us read in silence. Too bad your fellow debaters choose to divert from the topic of your post-one has to understand it's a forum for a nationalistic self indulgent and romantic movie- telling you to "go somewhere else," to not be "anti american," interesting arguments that they bring up and suggestions like quit "nit picking on things" or even to go and make your own documentary. Perhaps that's not such a bad idea. They will be happy to go on the imdb forum to it and talk about all the nice things "america" has done for the world which you are not mentioning.

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I think the term "debater" is somewhat of a stretch. All I'm seeing are cheap ad hominem attacks directed against me such as:

"self-righteous dick", "total jerk", etc., etc.

I have not seen one URL posted containing information which contradicts anything I've said. BTW, I never said that Burns should not include positive things that the U.S. did during or after World War II (e.g., the Marshall Plan, etc., etc.). The whole point of the original post was to remark on several significant negative points which he left out. But then again, he left quite a lot of things out of his film.

I'm glad at least one person appreciated the initial posting.

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You aren't fooling anybody. We know what your agenda is, troll. You have the right to believe and say anything you want, thanks in part to the actions of the Allies during WW II. Think you would be allowed the same under the Nazis or Imperial Japan?

Oh, and I have the right to say what I think of your posts too. And I say Stuff IT, you ignorant jerk.

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Nobody is going to contradict you because anyone with an education knows those things happened. But you just scratch the surface of the happenings of the time and make generalizations. Yes, if Burns had wanted to make a series three times as long as the one he made he most likely would have covered these subjects, but the entirety of the war was not the subject of this series, but its effect on ordinary Americans. You go on ahead and try to impress yourself by telling us things we already know, we'll roll our eyes at your narcissism and adolescent world and history view.

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Uh, yeah... to be really honest, I don't give a crap that we sent 2 million soldiers back to the Soviet Union. If they had any balls they would have turned on Stalin and planted him in a shallow grave.

Cutting deals with valuable citizens of the enemy you just defeated... that's been happening since wars began, why are you so upset that the U.S. did it?

I suppose we should have risked thousands of U.S. soldiers to drop behind enemy lines on a suicide mission to end the concentration camps... then you would have just one less thing to bitch about. I don't know why Eisenhower didn't have the forward-thinking to do just that! Never mind that we sacrificed nearly half a million of our citizens to liberate Europe (including the Jews in the concentration camps).

Get a life, thomas-marking.

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You know nothing of the time. You're nothing but a pseudo intellectual horses a**. War is not a cut and dried, by the book undertaking. Neither is geopolitics. You need to look beyond what your friends father allegedly told you.

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In the first place, Burns can't tell every single thing that happened during the war. It wasn't the goal of this film. And i'm sure there are some things that won't be known for decades because they are still classified.

As far as Auschwitz, FDR and others did know about it, but I doubt the soldiers knew about it. It was discussed among the leaders about bombing the camps, but they certainly would have killed a lot of Jews and probably been criticized for that. The bombing raid you are talking about was at the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. I'm not certain of the geography with out consulting a map, but it's further away than 5 miles. There's an actual photograph taken by one of the bombing crews of the formation in flight, and Auschwitz is seen on the ground below. Rightly or wrongly, FDR reportedly said the best way to save Jewish lives was to end the war sooner by destroying the enemy. It can also be argued that had they started bombing the camps, the Germans might have just murdered faster.

As far as the Enigma code, they also had discussed that had the Allies bombed the camps, the Germans would have realized someone was reading their "mail."

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You might want to read the URL that I included in my post:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/bombau.html

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Former U.S. Senator George McGovern piloted a B-24 Liberator in December 1944,
and his squadron bombed Nazi oil facilities less than five miles from Auschwitz.
In 2005, he said “There is no question we should have attempted...to go after
Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines
off the face of the Earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those
death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”
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No, it wasn't the Ploesti raid which, by the way, is in a different country. Ploesti was in Rumania. Auschwitz was in Poland.

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McGovern was a jerk. I'd be surprised if much of anything he has said is true.

My favorite McGovern quote was right after he and many other leftists were run out of office in the early 1980s. His "gracious" speech after his defeat included this quote:

"We'll have to re-educate the American people".

He's almost as big a jerk as you are.

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Yes, I've seen this account on other documentaries. So you can take your obvious right wing bias and squat on it.

This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here.

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You talk as if precision bombing during WWII was a walk in the park. As a matter of fact, there was no such thing. The Nordan bomb sight we've all heard about got us closer to the target, but it in no way gave us the pinpoint accuracy needed to take out the rail line and miss the camps. And it wouldn't have taken much to rebuild those lines. As another poster pointed out, the best way to save lives was to defeat Germany.

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There were several other items left out by Mr. Burns. I don't recall any mention of the Dootlittle Raid or the Battle of the Coral Seas, significant because it was the first naval battle in history where the ships of the opposing navies never came in sight of each other.

There was merely a passing reference to the Battle of Leyete Gulf. And there was no mention of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.

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I heard an interview where Ken Burns sasid he was not going to go over very famous "staged" incidents like the flag raising. Although it did happen as has been stated the pictures that were shown all over the world were staged.

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Yes, there were many, many things left out of the Burns film. Some of them painted America in a bad light. Some of them painted America in a good light. It's hard for me to imagine why the flag raising on Iwo Jima was left out. It was such an iconic photograph and was probably the most famous photograph of the war. With 14 hours of film you would think it would have gotten a mention.

Some other things that got left out were:

American GI's stayed behind in the Philippines and operated with Filipino guerillas

The American rescue of American POWs at the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines in January 1945. There's an excellent book on this subject called "Ghost Soldiers" written by Hampton Sides.

The Flying Tigers under General Claire Chennault who flew the Himalaya "Hump"

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And on and on. I could have gone for some coverage on these events and less coverage on what was going on back in the four towns.

On a positive note, I commend Ken Burns for choosing Keith David as his narrator. I like him better as a narrator then David McCullough who narrated the Civil War film. BTW, Keith David is an African American. I first saw him in the 1980's remake of "The Thing" by John Carpenter. I always thought he had a pretty good voice.

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Correct me if im wrong, but i could have swear they mention something about the Doolittle raid. Mayabe i was watching anything PBS program, but i saw something about the doolittle raid.

Game Over Man, Game Over!

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Did Burns actually refer to the flag raising on Iwo Jima as a 'staged' incident?

Just curious, since that was most definitely not staged, though it is a persistant myth that the Marines photographed were posed for dramatic effect. There is actually film footage of the flag being raised from start to finish, proving that the men photographed were not posed. A Marine SSgt and combat photographer was filming the flag raising while Joe Rosenthal snapped the much more famous photo. Rosenthal just happened to catch the whole thing at the right moment and at the right angle.

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Yes, from my research on the Internet the flag raising at Iwo Jima was not a staged event:

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq87-3l.htm

If Ken Burns says it was then that is his mistake. Also, he included MacArthur's coming on shore at Leyte in October 1944 which definitely was a staged event. There were several takes done of this event in which the good general got back in the landing craft and re-enacted his heroic landing for the photographers.

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I don’t normally respond to threads that are this old but I am reading a lot of misinformation about the Iwo Jima flag raising. The iconic photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal that we are all familiar with was actually the second flag to be raised on Mount Suribachi. The first marines to fight their way to the top of Suribachi raised an American flag. There are photos of this flag being raised but they are relatively unknown compared to Rosenthal’s photograph. Not long after this Admiral James Forrestal decided that there needed to be a larger flag on Suribachi. Colonel Chandler Johnson dispatched Sergeant Mike Strank to take a second, larger flag to the summit of Suribachi. It was the raising of this second, larger flag that was captured on both still and motion picture cameras. So, while that iconic photograph was not staged, it was also not the first flagged raised on Suribachi. Here is the Wikipedia article that contains this and much more information on the battle of Iwo Jima.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima#Raising_the_flag

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It was "staged" in that the famous picture is the second flag raising. Rosenthal knew it was going to happen and went with the men assigned to raise the second, more famous, flag. The first flag was raised but was deemed too small to be seen by the fighting soldiers. They wanted something bigger to raise morale.

Staff Sergeant Louis R. Lowery, a photographer with Leatherneck magazine, took the first one.
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/the-first-flag-on-iwo-jima/


This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here.

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In reading through this line, I've found some good pieces of history, and some bad pieces. Among the bad: Van Braun being a member of the SS. Unless I miss my guess, Van Braun was not a member of the SS, but rather stayed a civilian throughout the war, but if he did join the SS, or become a member of the Nazi Party it was not because of his political beliefs, but rather it was because he was required to join in order to continue working, period. That happens a lot in dictatorships. Van Braun was working on rockets before the war (and possibly before the Nazi's came into power in Germany), and he saw in the Nazi Party a way to get funding, whereas they saw a pretty good weapon, and that was the primary relationship. Eventually, they spent so much money on rocket research that they finally placed one of their own in charge.

Another bad piece of history found in this thread is the story of the flag raising on Iwo Jima was faked; it wasn't. What happened was that Joe Rosenthal knew he had taken a photo of the flag raising (the SECOND flag to be raised over Iwo Jima), but wasn't sure of the quality and such (and as a News Photo, it's lousy, you almost can't identify even the best of the men pictured, and a couple of men are barely visable). He had then posed several Marines who were in the area to pose in front of the raised flag. Later, when he reached Guam, well after the film which contained the photo of the flag raising, he was asked if the photo was staged. Thinking of the second photograph, he said yes, but he was mistaken; they were talking about the first photo, the one of the flag raising. There is color film taken by a Marine Photographer at almost the same place that Joe Rosenthal was which proves that Joe did NOT stage the raising of the flag. Another point about the flag raising was that to the men on the island of Iwo Jima (among them Joe Rosenthal) it was the FIRST flag raising which was important, and not the second flag, which is the subject of the famous photograph.

As far as the holocaust is concerned, the Western Governments pretty much knew what was happening, as did many American Jews (including enlisted men in the Army), but it was not until the discovery of the camps that the real truth hit home. Given the extent of the holocaust, it is possible that no one outside of "Greater Germany" really knew how bad it was inside of the camps until after the liberation.

With regard to "The War", my biggest grip is that Ken Burns listened to the Marine Corps Propaganda Machine which states that they alone won the ground war in the Pacific. Army units are almost never mentioned, and the fights for New Guinea, the Alaskan island of Attu and the combat in the Philippines are just barely mentioned, if they are even mentioned. The fact it that two Army Divisions (the 32nd and 37th Infantry Divisions) BY THEMSELVES saw more combat against the Japanese in the Solomons, New Guinea and the Philippines then the whole of the United States Marine Corps during World War Two. The Marines only activated six Divisions, the Army activated some 90 divisions, of which more then 20 saw combat against the Japanese.

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The OP raised points that need to be raised - and debated. Yet the OP still has a lot of growing up to do. Just to raise a couple of points:

1) Just what exactly were the Americans going to do with 2 million Russian POWs, when they had a hard enough time feeding the native population in the areas they were occupying at that time? Would it have been better to keep the Russians there so many of them could starve to death? And while some Russians obviously did not want to go back to Stalinist Russia, some of them most likely did. What were the American soldiers, who just wanted to go home, supposed to do? Spend days or weeks taking polls of every single Russian? And if they had refused to send the Russians back, can't you figure out what Stalin would have done? How many American, British and other Allied POWs did HE hold in POW camps the Russians had liberated? I guarantee you the Americans couldn't know for sure. Stalin also could have claimed the Americans were holding the Russian POWs prisoner and sent his troops to "liberate" them. What fun it would have been to start WWIII right then and there (and don't bother saying the Russians were too worn down by WWII to start another war. When was the last - or FIRST - time Stalin cared about what his soldiers thought?)

2) You must be a child if you don't understand the position von Braun and the other German scientists were in. They were one "I won't do it" away from being forced labor themselves. And their families weren't exactly safe from Hitler's wrath if they had resisted der Fuhrer's wishes. Also, those same families were in danger of being bombed by Allied planes at the time. Yes, the German scientists wanted Germany to win the war. I noticed we didn't exterminate every German loyal to their country when the war ended. Go figure.

3) Yes, we knew the Germans were killing the Jews. But never before in human history had people carried out such mass exterminations in such a massive, systematic, cold-blooded, INDUSTRIAL way. Sixty years later, we have the "luxury" of knowing all about it. But for the soldiers who entered those camps (including, yes, generals), it was still a uniquely scarring experience. Unless you were there, you don't know what it was like for them. And by the way, what if Allied bomber crews (who risked their lives on every mission, so maybe - if you have any compassion - you can understand their reluctance to fly any more missions than they absolutely had to) had missed the railroad yards and hit the concentration camps? After all, on several
occasions they accidently bombed their own soldiers. In one case bombers accidentally bombed Geneva, Switzerland. Those things happened. But maybe if they had, 60 years later people like you might have claimed the Allied deliberately bombed the concentration camps out of some secret pact with the Nazis.

It's not the facts that make you immature, OP. It's the dead-certain conclusions you have reached about them.

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1.) So is it your position that the Russian POW's would have starved to death in the American and British occupation zones of Germany unless they were sent back to Russia? I've never heard anything so asinine in my life. Have you ever done any research on this topic or are you merely "spouting off" like so many of your brethren on this thread?

2.) See my other post below. Von Braun joined the Nazi party in 1937. Strughold conducted human experimentation. They both did so freely of their own volition. Your position holds no water, none at all. If they hadn't have had something of value to offer the Americans after the war, they both would have ended up at the end of a hangman's noose. There can't be any serious question about that.

3.) So, in order to understand the horrors of the Holocaust it requires American troops to actually go into the camps and see it firsthand, once it's already too late to do anything about it. Unless the Allied generals see it firsthand, their hands are tied. They can't do anything about it. Is that what you're saying?

Check out the story of Rudolph Vrba who was only one of five inmates to escape from Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1944:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Vrba

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba-Wetzler_report

He wrote a 32-page report containing exquisite detail concerning the horrors of the camp. The report made it to the U.S. State Department by June 16th, 1944. From that time onward the U.S. government knew everything they needed to know about the Holocaust. So I'm not buying this crap about Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton being shocked when they toured Bergen-Belsen. They would have pretty much known what to expect since it was already contained in Vrba's report.

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Your logic is so dependant on absolutes that I'm not sure there's any point in conversing with you. Either two million Russian POWs will starve, or none will starve. Either they all wanted to stay out of Russia, or none of them did. Either Von Braun and Strughold both were Nazi war criminals and should have been hung (you have nothing on Von Braun other than that he joined the Nazi party in 1937 - four years after Hitler took absolute power in Germany and it became dangerous NOT to be in the Nazi party), or their survival is absolute proof of how evil America is. Either American generals all knew nothing about the Holocaust, or absolutely every one of them knew absolutely everything about it, and should not have been shocked to see the carnage at the concentration camps, the like of which had never been seen or hardly even conceived of before in human history. Either we destroy the concentration camps, or we are guilty of participating in the Holocaust.

"You're either with us or agin' us." George W. Bush.

We did do something about the Holocaust. We helped utterly crush Nazi Germany. Vrba's report came 10 days after D-Day. What were the Allies supposed to do, pull out of Normandy so they could come in through Poland to get to the concentration camps? Do you have the slightest clue about the realities or warfare, or the realities of strategic bombing during World War II, or anything else related to the realities of World War II?

Again, you'd make a lot better points with your facts if you: A) Explored more deeply the complexity of the decisions that had to be made during World War II. B) Didn't have such a child-like view of "America is either all-good or all-bad".

Because it's true that America, throughout it's history, hasn't always "done the right thing". But using that fact to dismiss the other side of the story of American history is, well...I believe the word asinine comes to mind.

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Where are you getting these either-or propositions from? You seem to be spinning them out of thin air. They certainly are not based on anything I've said.

For example: "Either two million Russians will starve or none will starve". That's certainly not anything I ever said. It is my position that the U.S. Army had the capacity to feed two million Russian POWs that happened to be in its zone of occupation at the end of the war. The U.S.A. proved that it was up to this job only a few months and years later when it kept literally tens of millions of German citizens from starvation during the Marshall Plan. So very few Russian POWs would have starved if they had remained in the American and British occupation zones. So no either-or proposition there.

"Either they all wanted to stay out of Russia or none of them did". Read my initial post on this topic and the URL provided. The overwhelming majority of Russian POWs did not want to go back to Russia. Again, no either-or proposition being stated there.

"Either Von Braun and Strughold were both Nazi war criminals and should have been hung or their survival is absolute proof of how evil America is". Von Braun and Strughold WERE Nazi war criminals and should have been hung. Again, no either-or proposition being stated there. You say I have nothing on Von Braun? You need to do a little research for a change:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora

"A first-person account of the extreme brutality endured by the inmates who laboured to produce and assemble the V-1 and V-2 rocket components in the huge underground tunnel complex is detailed in Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Origins of the Space Age by Yves Beon. Of note in this book is the role played at Dora by Wernher von Braun, who became a top director at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) after having been smuggled into the United States. A reviewer of Planet Dora at the NASA headquarters library wrote: '...the greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century had its origins in the enslavement and murder of thousands of innocent people, the down-payment of a Faustian bargain that still tarnishes our reach for the stars'."

"Either American generals all knew nothing about the Holocaust, or absolutely every one of them knew absolutely everything about it". Again, a made-up either-or proposition. It doesn't matter what individual generals knew about the Holocaust. The facts are that by June 1944 (at the very latest) the Allied high command knew about it. In fact there was another inmate of Auschwitz named Witold Pilecki who escaped in 1943 and sent a report about the camp to British intelligence in August 1943:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki

So from August 1943 until May 1945 is a span of 22 months during which time the British and American governments knew about the Holocaust (it may have been even longer if we consider information gleaned from project ULTRA). Leaving aside military options, what more could the Allied governments have done to help the situation? I believe the following three steps should have taken place:

1.) Publication of the Vrba-Wexler report and the Pilecki report in the public newspapers. This would have alerted the Nazi leadership that we knew exactly what they were up to.

2.) Radio broadcasts into Nazi Germany warning Jews not to show up at the train station for relocation because they were being sent to their deaths

3.) Leafleting of German cities containing this same information (Allied bombers were already flying over German cities so dropping a few extra leaflets should not have represented any additional problem).

These three steps would not have added any additional danger to any Allied airman or soldier and they perhaps could have saved thousands of lives. The Jews of Europe would have been alerted to their grave danger. They would not have so meekly showed up at the train station carrying their luggage if they knew the truth that awaited them.

So question for you: Why is it that none of these steps were carried out even though they represented no additional danger for Allied soldiers?

But I do have one final comment. Either you will have a plausible answer or you won't. Actually, I know you won't have a plausible answer. It's going to be some garbage like "You don't have the slightest clue about the reality of strategic leafletting. It would have cost a fortune and that's just the ink itself."

:)

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[deleted]

Yes, but there was one important caveat that was left out (but probably unstated):

"...Unless such a war criminal has knowledge which has been deemed vital to the security of the United States; especially in such areas as rocket technology and biological warfare. In such a case said war criminal shall get off scott free and shall be recruited into the United States military establishment. His entire record of war crimes shall be expunged and all details of this transaction shall be deemed to be top secret..."

LOL - Yeah, but it's not really funny because it really happened.

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Okay, here's my last shot at getting through to you.

The two million Russian POWs were a lose-lose situation, a tragedy with no good options. The danger of Russia's response alone, much less the struggle (and despite the "official" reports, there are good indications that it was a struggle) that it took to feed even the native Germans in the area during this time, made the decision to send the Russian POWs back to Russia a much more complicated one than you seem to grasp. But if you want to see it in simple black-and-white terms, so be it.

Speaking of Russia, you simply ignore the fact that in the case of rocket technology, it was understood that either America would get Von Braun and the other Nazi scientists or Russia would. In fact, Russia actually did end up with more than a few of them. And given a choice between death and serving the Russians, I'm still hopeful you can do the math as to which Von Braun & co. would choose. Actually, those scientists were smart enough to put out "feelers" to both side before the war was even over in order to determine which side to surrender to. It was a common (and very black) joke of the space race that when one side or the other would move ahead, it was because "Our Nazi scientists are better than their Nazi scientists." Not a pleasant situation, again, but given two bad choices, America took the lesser of the two evils. But with either choice, none of those German scientists would have paid for their guilt, either direct or by association. I'm excusing nothing. I'm just telling you what the situation was.

I find it amazing that you believe that in 1944 there were Jews in Nazi Germany that didn't know about the concentration camps...or that there were even free Jews in Germany. Even in the rest of Europe the only free Jews were in hiding. Have you not even read THE DIARY OF ANN FRANK? Telling the remaining Jews not to "get on the trains" would have been about as effective as telling Allied POWs not to get on the trains. The logic was already long established and simple by then: get on the train, or get shot. And do you actually think the Germans would have stopped the exterminations if the Allies told them they knew about it? That is incredibly naive of you. Even if Hitler had responded to the notification, do you actually think he wouldn't have lied and said he would stop while continuing that awful work? Hitler still believed (into 1945) that he would WIN. It's not out of the question that he felt he had to finish the job and clear the camps for the future influx of British and American Jews. Remember, when Allied troops approached many of the concentration camps, the Nazis in charge actually INCREASED the rate of the murders, trying to kill off all the Jews before the Allies found them.

Look, you've made your points, and I've made mine. I'm not saying these weren't terrible events. I'm saying it's childish to paint the events in such simple black-and-white terms. It's like the people who say we shouldn't have dropped the A-bombs on Japan. It would have been nice not to have ever used the A-bombs. But you at least have to dig deeper into finding out the WHY.

Again, I still think it was a good thing that you brought up these events. But to use them as some kind of blanket condemnation of The Greatest Generation, after all the positive things they did do, is just not right. That I will never accept.

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[deleted]

O.K., Don't know why I have to do this, but here it goes. The name is Von Braun, not Van Braun. He was German, not Dutch (e.g., Van Gogh). Yes Virginia, Wernher Von Braun was a member of the SS. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 before World War II. No doubt some will say this was because he was afraid for his family (chuckle, chuckle). He became an SS officer in May 1940:

http://www.lycos.com/info/wernher-von-braun--nazi-party.html

"Under the fascist dictatorship, Wernher von Braun was a member of the Nazi party, having waited almost five years after Hitler came to power before signing up. Under heavy pressure, he later accepted an officer’s commission—essentially honorary—in Heinrich Himmler’s brutal SS corps. Without question, von Braun was a prominent member of the Third Reich at least peripherally connected with the underground, SS-run, forced-labor, main V-2 factory, with its atrociously high mortality rate. Yet this living, breathing paradox soon became America’s perennial “Patriot of the Year” and “Scientist of the Year,” although certainly not in everyone’s minds. Source:
appel.nasa.gov In November 1937 (other sources: December 1 1932), von Braun joined the Nazi Party. An Office of Military Government, United States document dated April 23 1947 states that von Braun joined the SS (Schutzstaffel) horseback riding school in 1933, then the Nazi Party on May 1 1937 and became an officer in the SS from May 1940 to the end of the war."

Another absolute sweetheart, was Dr. Hubertus Strughold who became known as the "Father of American Space Medicine". But before that he was busy conducting experiments on Jews at Dachau concentration camp. One of his favorite experiments was to put a Jew into a pressure chamber and then pump out all the air until the guy's eyeballs puffed out and he eventually died. After the guy died Dr. Strughold and his chums would dissect him. Apparently his portrait was hung for several years at Ohio State University as a "medical hero". But then again, there are several posters here who will claim he was doing it because he was afraid for his family. (BTW, that excuse didn't go down so well at the Nuremburg trials).

http://www.fscwv.edu/users/pedwards/jews_protest_nazi_portrait_among.htm

Concerning the flag raising at Iwo Jima being staged, the OP never said that. Someone else posted that Burns himself had said that, but I can't corroborate that since I didn't see the interview. Yes, of course, it wasn't staged and anyone who has done even the barest amount of research would know that. Which would call into question Burns' supposed six years of research (assuming that he actually said that the Rosenthal photo was staged).

"... but it was not until the discovery of the camps that the real truth hit home..."

But when was that discovery made? According to Burns and the official U.S. history this would have been spring 1945. Through ULTRA this probably would have been in 1942. At the very latest, June 1944 since two camp escapees from
Auschwitz (Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wexler) passed detailed information to the Allies.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/bombau.html

"One argument is that the Allies did not know about the Final Solution early enough to make plans to bomb the camps and they didn't have reliable intelligence about their location. In fact, the Allies began had information about the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews by 1942. As early as June 1944, the United States had detailed information about the layout of Auschwitz from Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wexler, who had escaped that April."

And finally, I agree with you on the bias showed in Ken Burns' film in favor of the Marines winning the ground war in the Pacific, with little mention of the Army being given.

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I'm just going to make three remarks to what you just wrote.

First, With regard to Von Braun vs. Van Braun, haven't you ever heard of a typo? What my intentions were, were clear, even if I made somewhat of a typo.

Second: With regard to Von Braun joining the SS, no it was not because he was afraid for his family, but because his life's work was in rocketry. He was basically given the choice of either finding something else to do, or joining the Nazi Party in 1937, which by that time had already banned civilian rocket societies, which meant that he would not be able to pursue his ideas even part time as a civilian. Ditto about becoming an officer in the SS.

With regard to von Braun's participation in the holocaust, he was Technical Director of Peenemunde and not in charge of actual production of the V-2 Rockets which he had helped developed, which was actually done by the SS at one of the Concentration Camps (Mittelwerk). While he did have the responsibility of occasionally making technical inspections of Mittelwerk, he was not responsible for the conditions at said camp. In fact, on one occasion when he did protest about the conditions at the camp, he was given the choice of either shutting up, or putting on one of the striped uniforms worn by the inmates who actually did the work and joining them.

Finally, your comment about: "... but it was not until the discovery of the camps that the real truth hit home..."
Let us not forget that you have had sixty plus years of trying to get your head around the holocaust, and even if you are not a member of "The Greatest Generation" (or earlier) then you have had your whole life to understand the holocaust and what the Nazi's did. The men in the Army in 1944-45 did not have the luxury of decades of time to understand what was happening, to them, it was happening HERE, and NOW. Take a look at the discovery of the Camp in the Movie "The Big Red One" to see something of what it was like for them. If I told you that everyone in Southern California (or some other well populated area) had suddenly died from smoke inhalation or another cause, you might intellectually understand that thousands, if not millions of people had died, but it would not be until you saw it for yourself (possibly through the window of television) that it would hit home how many people had really died. For you to really understand what had happened, for you to really get your mind around how many people had died you would have to see the acre upon acre of dead bodies that such a tragedy had produced, and even then there is no guarantee that you would be able to really understand it. That is part of the reason why so many people deny that the holocaust really happened; they cannot understand how a supposedly civilized advanced culture such as Nazi Germany could kill so many people.

No, the American people of that time did not really understand what was happening in the Concentration Camps of Nazi Germany until after the camps had been taken over from the Germans who ran them. It was just too big and too horrible to contemplate, until the evidence became overwhelming.


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Your reply is actually very similar to some of the postings that DD-931 has been making in that you cleverly evade most of my real arguments and you construct strawman arguments that I never posed in order to shoot them down.

In regards to Von Braun you say "he was given the choice of either shutting up, or putting on one of the striped uniforms worn by the inmates who actually did the work and joining them". Please provide some source for this information since it contradicts the research that I have been able to do which I have posted in previous posts. BTW, I am not aware of any production facility called Mittelwerk. I believe it was called Mittelbau or Mittelbau-Dora. Perhaps this is another one of your typos.

Also, by the end of his career in the SS, Von Braun held the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer in the SS which was roughly equivalent to the rank of Major in the U.S. Army. So who would have been telling him to shut up and threatening him? It could only be someone higher ranking. Was it Himmler?

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_Von_Braun

"... the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun also saw everything that went on every day. When they walked along the corridors, they saw the prisoners' drudgery, their exhausting work and their ordeal. During his frequent attendance in Dora, Prof. Wernher von Braun never once protested against this cruelty and brutality..."

"...On a little area beside the clinic shack you could see piles of prisoners every day who had not survived the workload and had been tortured to death by the vindictive guards. But Prof. Wernher von Braun just walked past them, so close that he almost touched the bodies..."

What about Hubertus Strughold and Colonel Ishii who both performed human experimentation and were given a free pass by the U.S. after the war? I find your silence concerning them to be quite interesting. DD-931 essentially says that America had no choice because either the Americans or the Soviets would get the Nazi rocket scientists. That doesn't explain why Colonel Ishii of Unit 731 was given immunity from prosecution by the Americans. The Russians were completely out of the picture in Japan.

You say: "No, the American people of that time did not really understand what was happening in the Concentration Camps of Nazi Germany until after the camps had been taken over from the Germans who ran them". Well, how could they. The Vrba-Wetzler report (summer 1944) and the Witold Pilecki report (summer 1943) which both detailed the atrocities being committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp were both denied them. The information was there and the Allied High Command knew it, but it was kept hidden from the American public.

So your assertion that it took sixty years to understand what was happening in the German death camps makes no sense at all. Both Pilecki and Vrba understood full well what was happening in those camps in 1943 and 1944 since they had just been imprisoned in them. They passed their knowledge along to the Allied High Command so the Allies understood full well what was happening in those camps. The question I posed which no one can answer (and Burns did not even attempt to answer) was why, since they had that knowledge, did the Allies do absolutely nothing to try to prevent or ameliorate the situation?

The only plausible answer is this. Preventing the Holocaust or trying to ameliorate it was a very low priority item to the Allied High Command at the time. That pretty much explains why they would send a bombing raid to bomb oil facilities only five miles from Auschwitz while leaving the camp itself and the rail lines leading into it untouched. That also pretty much explains why they didn't publicize the Pilecki and Vrba reports, why they didn't broadcast any radio messages into occupied Europe warning the Jews of their impending doom, why they never dropped leaflets over occupied Europe warning the Jews of their impending doom, and so on.

It was only after the war that the Allies chose to highlight the Holocaust by making it the cornerstone of their Nuremburg prosecutions, once it had become politically expedient to do so.

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"Your reply is actually very similar to some of the postings that DD-931 has been making in that you cleverly evade most of my real arguments and you construct strawman arguments that I never posed in order to shoot them down."

I'm afraid there's no real point in continuing this. You are guilty of the very thing you charge me of, but you seem oblivious to it. You've been reduced in your facts (and simply deny the information about Von Braun in the typical "My information must be totally right so contrary information must all be wrong" mode), and you call any response to the central point you seem to be making "strawman arguments". So be it. But your Holocaust arguments are still incredibly naive. I just finished watching AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (an excellent film). Watch it for a clue about how much the European Jews knew about their likely fate at the hands of the Nazis well before the Vrba Report. And tell me again how a demand of unconditional surrender against Germany by FDR at the Casablanca Conference in early 1943 and putting all of America's incredible resources into defeating Germany first, even while Japan was devastating American forces across the Pacific, was a "very low priority" in ending the Holocaust? Did you know America wanted the D-Day invasion to happen in 1943, and was talked out of it by the British (quite wisely, as it turned out)? Bottom line, you defeat Germany, you end the Holocaust. But don't you understand how hard an undertaking that was?

If your information about Ishii and Strughold (and considering your behavior, I will need collaborating sources on that one) are correct, it is another example of some of the terrible mistakes America and it's Allies made during and after World War II. Of course, you seem to think Ken Burns mentioned NOTHING about the dark chapters in America's World War II history, forgetting how much detail he went into about the Japanese internment camps, the Mobile race riots, the bigotry against black soldiers, etc....but again, it fits the overall compartmentalization of your approach to this argument.

Tell you what. You wanna believe Von Braun and Ishii and the two million Russian POWs and the Holocaust are permanent stains on America's soul or whatever, you go ahead. Knock yourself out. I'll always see things as a lot more complicated than that, but hey, that's just how I am.

Buh bye.

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Considering that you have not provided one single URL, book quotation, etc. in any of your postings to support anything you have claimed, why would anyone take anything you say seriously? I certainly don't. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

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"Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."


You've spent all this time and effort to make several interesting points and now you've thrown whatever credibility you might have possessed out the window with this silly remark. Are you interested in exchanging information or are you only interested in blasting those who don't see things your way? It needs to be one way or the other.

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LOL - this guy is so typical of the "hate America first" crowd.

It's fun to mess with him, but it makes you feel all dirty afterwards.

I loved it when he pointed to McGovern as a source for anything that would make Capitalistic America look bad. Next he's going to be quoting Jimmy Carter.

Enough of this nonsense. One could pick apart each of his urls and probably find problems -I've done this many times before. Leftist/anti-American web sites are generally NOT good sources for data. I don't know that this is where the current idiot's info came from, but it wouldn't suprise me. I'm just not going to waste my time on this troll.

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Hmmm, interesting. For someone who claims that you're not going to waste time on "this troll", you seem to be a prolific poster on this thread. This is your fifth post on the topic and your current post is just about as educational as your other four posts - which is to say, NOT.

Now I remember you. You claimed in one of your first posts that I said that America is "morally bankrupt" even though you were the first to use those words. So if by "messing with me" you really mean "making yourself seem stupid" then you have succeeded brilliantly. You claim I said things that I didn't. Now you claim you can pick apart my URL's while at the same time not giving us a demonstration.

Keep up the good job. Outstanding effort! I see a Darwin Award somewhere in your future. You will become world famous.

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<<Now I remember you. You claimed in one of your first posts that I said that America is "morally bankrupt" even though you were the first to use those words.>>

LOL - OK, dumbass, I guess I'll have to waste a little more time.

When I said "morally bankrupt" - that was a description of your views of America and it's actions during and after WW II. I was not trying to quote you directly - but you already knew that, didn't you, dumbass. I guess if you can't argue with the substance of what I said, the only way you can fight back is to try to attack the semantics.

I stand by my description of what your position is on the USA during the 1940s. Hell, you probably think we are even worse now. Do you deny this? Go for it - lie about it so we can all laugh some more.

I'm waiting for you to tell all of us that Bush did 9/11, and that we have no freedoms left in this country. I know that's probably what you think. I've had a lot of conversations with nutcases like you over the last couple of years.



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O.K. So now you're telling us you're telepathic. You know what my views are regardless of what I posted. Maybe I can borrow a little of that telepathy to tell you what your views are.

Oh, let's see... It's coming to me... The picture is becoming clearer...

Yes, you have a confederate flag draped up in your garage.

You believe that black helicopters sponsored by the U.N. are about to swoop down and get you.

You believe that the 1993 Waco standoff and fire was a terrible tragedy and that Timothy McVeigh was a patriot.

You are in constant fear of the black helicopters, or is that perhaps of your ex-wife seeking alimony?

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Bottom line,

Don't tell me what my views are, bonehead, unless you want me to tell you what yours are. Got it?

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Hahahahahahahahahaha....

As far as the "morally bankrupt" issue - you told my by your posts what you were thinking - no mind reading required.

As far as the comments about 9/11 being done by Bush - that was basically a joke.....but its suprising how many people belive that nonsense.

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Boo freakin' hoo. You'd think that saving the Europe (and they did) would draw out nicer sentiments than what Thomas has been putting forth. A simple "thank you for my existence" would do.

By the way, why aren't you pointing the finger at any of the other Allies for not doing something about the camps?

This will be the high point of my day; it's all downhill from here.

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Thomas-Marking...
Do you actually think that you are the only person who has ever read WW II histories and other papers in detail? Nothing that you are reporting here is a secret known only to you. These details are readily available in a variety of books and other sources. I've read thousands of them in my 65 years.

No, the United States did not behave 100% correctly at all times during it's pressing of the war against the axis forces. And, no, the United States did not act appropriately in it's handling of the Russian POWS, the Nazi and Japanese war criminals, nor it's invitation to a variety of ex-Nazis to contribute to the U.S. space research.

But here's the big picture that should be of the greatest interest to you and me and Ken Burns. The United States was on the winning side! Do you get it? And, what's more, 400,000 young American boys died in that horrible war just so pretentious little whiners like you can have the freedom to throw trash on their sacrifice.

Lighten up, go back to the the Student Union Building, have a soda and return to your "I Hate America" magazine.

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"No, the United States did not behave 100% correctly at all times during it's pressing of the war against the axis forces. And, no, the United States did not act appropriately in it's handling of the Russian POWS, the Nazi and Japanese war criminals, nor it's invitation to a variety of ex-Nazis to contribute to the U.S. space research."

Uh oh! You'd better get your flame retardant vest on, dude. You can expect postings like the following (or is it only when I say such things that people take offense):

America did not act appropriately? What kind of left-wing nut job are you?
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You are obviously one of the Hate America crowd.
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I can refute everything you claim especially with your Left Wing URLs such as Wikipedia.
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Why won't you grow up, you self-righteous dick?
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We see your obvious political agenda, troll. You're probably vying for the Secretary of State job under the Hillary Clinton administration.
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How dare you criticize Ken Burns' film! How dare you criticize Quentin Aanenson's sacrifice for our great country! How dare you criticize the Flag, motherhood, and apple pie!
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But...you are a strident self-righteous dick Thomas. Be fair.

It's possible to love the USA without being jingoistic. And it's possible to recognize its flaws without being you. Truth and reason lie inbetween, not in extremist interpretations.

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Yes, and the arbiter of what is "extreme" seems to be you. We depend on your good judgment to save us from the nutty "extremists". Only your opinion counts (and it must just be opinion since you have provided us with absolutely no source material backing up anything you claim). So if you want to see a real self-righteous dick I suggest you go look in the mirror, *beep*

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Source material? What have I claimed? I don't refute anything you say in particular, just your extreme slant on it.

You're far too emotional. I'm not even clear on what point you're promoting. America's the devil? Ken Burns is a sellout? What are you trying to say?

Nobody with a modicum of sense or education is saying the US is perfect or has always acted impeccably, certainly not Ken Burns. Burns doesn't need me to defend him, BTW, his body of work can do that itself. An obsessive fixation on what a country has done wrong is just as foolish(and inaccurate) as a national hagiography.

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Bletchley Park and the Holocaust

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There is an interesting web site for the PBS show NOVA concerning a program which aired in 1999 called "Decoding Nazi Secrets". The web site is:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2615decoding.html

Bletchley Park near London was the center of code breaking for both the British and Americans during World War II. Unfortunately in the Spring of 1946 all of the records at Bletchley Park were destroyed including millions of decyphered German messages. So we no longer have access to the specific messages.

But there was a very interesting passage in the program which was:

"In the spring of 1941, decoded Enigma messages hinted at preparations for a massive invasion of Russia. Once the invasion was under way, Bletchley Park began decoding other, more alarming messages.

As the German troops advanced, the SS and police sent signals reporting their mass killings of Soviet Jews. Although no one anticipated the full scale of the genocide, this is now known to be the opening chapter of the Holocaust. When Churchill saw the decodes amidst other evidence, he wanted the whole country to share his outrage.

WINSTON CHURCHILL [archive, radio speech]: Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 16th century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.

NARRATOR: Churchill was taking a chance that the Germans would realize their codes had been broken, exposing the work of Bletchley Park. It was a huge gamble. In fact, the head of the order police was suspicious and ordered new restrictions on the sending of reports on the mass killings by radio. Luckily for Bletchley Park, the German high command never lost its faith in the Enigma. But to avoid further risk of exposure, security was tightened and all information resulting from Bletchley Park decodes bore the top secret rating, code word Ultra."

So this really confirms what I have been saying all along, which is that British and American intelligence knew about the Holocaust from the very beginning. Apparently, as soon as Operation Barbarossa (i.e., the German Invasion of Russia) began on June 22, 1941 the mass murders of Jews at places like Babi Yar became known to the Allies. Churchill even went so far as to mention these murders specifically in a radio address given on August 25, 1941:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/1941/08/25.htm

So the Allies knew about the Holocaust almost as soon as it began.

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Here is another URL which contains interesting information on why the Allies did not bomb the Auschwitz death camp. There were several occasions where Allied bombers dropped bombs only a few miles from the camp. There was one episode where several SS guards at Auschwitz were blown up but it turned out to be from bombs not intended for them.

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http://www.shafr.org/newsletter/2003/aug/bomb.htm

August 2003 Newsletter

Why the Allies Refused to Bomb Auschwitz:
A Reply to William J. vanden Heuvel

Rafael Medoff



In the March 2003 SHAFR newsletter, William J. vanden Heuvel of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute defends the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to bomb Auschwitz. He argues that the Allies had no choice but to "totally direct [their] bombing strategy toward destroying Nazi fuel supplies, their synthetic oil industries."1 What vanden Heuvel neglects to mention, however, is that some of the oil facilities that the Allies struck were situated within a few miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers--meaning that the Allies could have easily bombed the gas chambers and crematoria used for the mass murder of Jews. On August 20, 1944, a fleet of U.S. bombers dropped more than one thousand bombs on the oil refineries in the factory areas of Auschwitz, less than five miles from the gas chambers. On September 13, American bombers struck the factory areas again; this time, stray bombs accidentally hit an SS barracks (killing fifteen Germans), a slave labor workshop (killing forty prisoners), and the railroad track leading to the gas chambers.


U.S. bombers carried out similar raids on December 18, December 26, and January 19. The frequent Allied bombings of seven other synthetic oil refineries near Auschwitz in 1944-45 included a January 20 raid on Blechhammer, forty-five miles from the death camp, which made it possible for forty-two Jewish slave laborers to escape.2 In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel recalls how he and other Auschwitz prisoners reacted when the bombers struck: "We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot. But we were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life. The raid lasted over an hour. If it could only have lasted ten times ten hours!"3


Similarly, when I interviewed former Auschwitz inmate Rabbi Menachem M. Rubin in 1997, he reiterated what he had written in a letter to van den Heuvel on December 27, 1996: "I stood in Auschwitz, looking skyward a number of times, as Allied planes passed overhead to bomb the nearby synthetics plant at Blechhammer. To drop a bomb on the crematoria would have been a simple and life-saving act. . . . By destroying a crematorium thousands would have been saved daily. The number of inmates possibly killed would have been much fewer than the number saved.” He also noted that “the people working in and around the gas chambers were condemned to be murdered anyway."4 Vanden Heuvel, in his SHAFR article, makes no mention of Rabbi Rubin's letter to him. Yet he does mention one unnamed Auschwitz survivor whose reported remarks seem to coincide with vanden Heuvel's view that bombing death camps would have been wrong because some prisoners might have been accidentally harmed in the process of knocking out the gas chambers where twelve thousand Jews were being murdered daily in 1944.5


Officials of Roosevelt's War Department repeatedly rebuffed proposals by Jewish groups to bomb the death camps. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy insisted that raiding the death camps would sap resources "essential" to Allied military operations elsewhere. Yet the administration was perfectly willing to divert military resources for an assortment of reasons far less compelling than the opportunity to knock out mass-murder camps. For example, an Air Force plan to bomb the Japanese city of Kyoto was blocked by Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of the city's artistic treasures.6 Assistant Secretary of War McCloy, who was adamant about not diverting bombs to hit Auschwitz, personally intervened to divert American bombers from striking the German city of Rothenburg because he feared for the safety of the city's famous medieval architecture.7


The State Department, which strongly opposed the proposal by Jewish activists to create a government agency to rescue Jewish refugees from Hitler, in August 1943 established a government agency "for the protection and salvage of artistic and historic monuments in Europe."8 General George Patton even diverted U.S. troops to rescue 150 prized Lipizzaner horses in Austria in April 1945.9 Perhaps the Zionist leader Rabbi Meyer Berlin was not so far off the mark when he told U.S. Senator Robert Wagner in early 1943 that "if horses were being slaughtered as are the Jews of Poland, there would by now be a loud demand for organized action against such cruelty to animals. Somehow, when it concerns Jews everybody remains silent."10


The Roosevelt administration's decision to remain silent, like its decisions to rescue horses, art, and architecture, was conscious, deliberate, and committed to writing. Thanks to the research of David S. Wyman, published in his book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, there is no mystery as to why War Department officials repeatedly rebuffed behind-the-scenes proposals by Jewish groups that the United States bomb Auschwitz. Assistant Secretary of War McCloy claimed at the time that the War Department had undertaken "a study" that found that such bombing would require "the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces." But Wyman's examination of the department's records shows that in fact no such study had been done. Rather, the War Department had already decided in February 1944 that it would not allow the armed forces to be used "for the purpose of rescuing victims of enemy oppression unless such rescues are the direct result of military operations conducted with the objective of defeating the armed forces of the enemy."11


Joseph Bendersky's recent study, The 'Jewish Threat': Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army, documents the widespread anti-Jewish prejudice among senior U.S. military officials throughout the past century and its impact on policy decisions--including the decision to refrain from bombing the death camps and the War Department's false claim to have studied the feasibility of the proposals. Bendersky finds that:

at the time, the army never attempted to acquire intelligence or
make the necessary operational assessments to determine whether such
bombing was feasible. The army never pursued any systematic examination of
the proposals presented to it; nor did it ask theater commanders what might
be done. The quick and repetitious responses from the army without much
inquiry into the intelligence or technical and operational aspects later
interjected by critics of bombing suggest other reasons for these policy
decisions, including indifference among highly placed officers to the
plight of Jews.12

Vanden Heuvel misrepresents the position of the Jewish Agency (Palestine Jewry's autonomous governing agency during the British Mandate period) with regard to the bombing issue. He claims that at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) in Jerusalem on June 11, 1944, JAE chairman David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues "voted eleven to one against the bombing proposal." What actually happened at the June 11 session is that Ben-Gurion opposed requesting an Allied attack on Auschwitz because "we do not know what the actual situation is in Poland"; similarly, his colleague Emil Shmorak opposed it because "we hear that in Oswiecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz] there is a large labor camp."13 At that point, not realizing that it was a death camp, they saw no reason to bomb it.


Eight days later, however, Richard Lichtheim, in the Jewish Agency's Geneva office, sent the Jewish Agency leadership in Jerusalem a detailed summary of the first eyewitness account of the mass-murder process (the account was produced by two Auschwitz escapees and is known as the Vrba-Wetzler report). Lichtheim noted that when the agency leadership had previously learned of the deportation of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau region, they “believed that it was done to exploit more Jewish labour in the industrial centres of Upper-Silesia." What the Vrba-Wetzler report revealed, Lichtheim wrote to his JAE colleagues in Jerusalem, was that in addition to the "labour camp in Birkenau" there were also "large-scale killings" in Birkenau itself "with all the scientific apparatus needed for this purpose, i.e. . . . specially constructed buildings with gas-chambers and crematoriums. . . .The total number of Jews killed in or near Birkenau is estimated at over one and a half million."14


Upon receiving this information, the Jewish Agency leadership promptly launched a concerted lobbying effort to persuade the Allies to bomb Auschwitz. Moshe Shertok, chief of the Jewish Agency's political department, and Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, who were stationed in London, lobbied the British. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the JA's Rescue Committee in Jerusalem, repeatedly pressed his colleagues in the United States to lobby Washington, which they did, and agency representatives in Europe lobbied locally stationed American diplomats on the subject.15


There can be no doubt that Ben-Gurion and his JAE colleagues knew of these lobbying efforts: when officials of the British Foreign Office promised Shertok in early July that they would actively pursue the idea of bombing the death camps, Shertok immediately telegrammed Ben-Gurion to tell him that Shertok had asked Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to bomb "death camps and railway lines leading to Birkenau" and that Eden had "already asked [the] Air Ministry [to] explore [the] possibility [of] bombing camps [and] will now add railways." At the next JAE meeting, Ben-Gurion relayed the news from Shertok and cited it in support of speculation that recent Allied bombings of Hungarian railway stations "may have been undertaken in response to our proposals and demands."16


Recently discovered documents further demonstrate that the entire Jewish Agency leadership was involved in pressing the bombing idea. The first of the documents is a note dated June 20, 1944, from Yitzhak Gruenbaum to Chaim Barlas, the JA representative in Istanbul. The key sentence reads: "We have relayed to Moshe [Shertok, in London] a proposal from [Moshe] Krausz [the JA representative in Budapest] as well as ours to bring about the bombing of the rail lines connecting Hungary with Poland and of the death camps in Poland." The sentence demonstrates that Shertok's lobbying in London for the bombing was not undertaken independently of the JA headquarters in Jerusalem. Gruenbaum's use of the plural "we" and "ours" indicates that the instructions from Jerusalem were no longer the sole idea of Gruenbaum, but rather came from the Agency leadership, and the reference to a similar proposal from Krausz demonstrates that Gruenbaum was not the only JA official pushing the idea during that early stage of the bombing discussions.17


The second of these documents, which was published in a collection of documents released by the Israeli and Russian governments, is a report to Ben-Gurion by a JA official in Egypt, describing his attempts in July of 1944 to convince a Soviet diplomat in Cairo that the Allies should bomb the death camps.18 The third document is the previously unpublished transcript of a session of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee on September 29, 1944, in which Yitzhak Gruenbaum reports to his colleagues on the agency's efforts to promote the bombing proposal, with none of the committee members expressing any objections.19


Vanden Heuvel is equally mistaken in his claim that "mainstream Jewish opinion was against the whole idea of bombing Auschwitz." In fact, only one official of a Jewish organization is on record as having explicitly objected to the idea of bombing the camps (for fear of harming the inmates). That was A. Leon Kubowitzki of the World Jewish Congress, and even he repeatedly urged the Allies to use paratroopers to attack Auschwitz. In any event, Kubowitzki’s objection was overruled. His superiors and colleagues at the World Jewish Congress (in New York, London, and Geneva) repeatedly lobbied the Soviets and the British to bomb Auschwitz.20


Many in the Jewish community publicly or privately advocated bombing the death camps or the railways leading to them. Between June and October 1944, such bombing proposals were put forth by, among others, the Orthodox group Agudath Israel;21 the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe;22 the Labor Zionists of America;23 the U.S. Orthodox rescue group Vaad Hatzalah (both its New York headquarters and its Geneva representatives);24 Slovak Jewish leaders Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Weissmandel;25 Czech Jewish leader Ernest Frischer;26 Benjamin Akzin, a Jewish staff member of the U.S. government War Refugee Board;27 the editors of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Independent Jewish Press Service;28 and columnists for the New York Yiddish daily Morgen Zhurnal and Opinion, the Jewish monthly edited by American Jewish Congress president Stephen Wise.29 The American Jewish Conference, a coalition of all leading U.S. Jewish organizations, called for "all measures" to be taken by the Allies to destroy the death camps.30


It is true that American Jewish leaders failed to protest vigorously when the Allies rejected their requests to bomb Auschwitz. Some Jewish leaders were intimidated by domestic anti-Semitism and were afraid they would be accused of interfering with the Allied war effort if they pressed for military action against Auschwitz. Marc Dollinger remarks in his recent study, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, that although "the deteriorating condition of European Jewry demanded that American Jewish leaders take more decisive action, even when that meant exceeding the limits of acceptable ethnic group expression," they did not do so for fear of "charges that their ethnic interests outweighed the need for victory," that Jews were "more self-interested than patriotic."31 But the fact that Jewish leaders were reluctant to publicly press the bombing issue is not the same as saying they were opposed to the bombing of the death camps. They were not. Nor does their hesitancy mitigate the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to make any serious effort to interfere with the annihilation process.

Dr. Medoff is Visiting Scholar, Jewish Studies Program, SUNY-Purchase; Associate Editor,
American Jewish History; and Director, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies


1. William vanden Heuvel. SHAFR Newsletter, March 2003.
2. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York, 1984), 299-300; Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York, 1981), 335.
3. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: 1969), 71.
4. Menachem M. Rubin, Letter to William van den Heuvel, 27 Dec. 1996. Copy in the possession of the author.
5. Vanden Heuvel,
6. Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950 (New York, 1990), 322-4.
7. "Kyoto Addendum" (Letters), Amherst: The College & Its Alumni 28:3 (Winter 1976), 31.
8. "U.S. Group is Named to Save Europe's Art," New York Times, 21 Aug. 1943: 9.
9. Carlo D'Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York, 1990), 742-3.
10. "Confidential Memorandum by Rabbi Meyer Berlin," 24 Feb. 1943, 5. File: Harold P. Manson, I-62, Abba Hillel Silver Papers, The Temple, Cleveland.
11. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 291-3.
12. Joseph Bendersky, The 'Jewish Threat': Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S.Army (New York, 2000), 344.
13. Jewish Agency Executive [JAE] Minutes, 11 June 1944, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.
14. L22/35, Central Zionist Archives.
15. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 245, 251-2; Dina Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of
David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 218-9; Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 218.
16. JAE Minutes, 16 July 1944, Central Zionist Archives.
17. The Gruenbaum-Barlas letter was mentioned for the first time in the footnotes of Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, 281, note 16, but Teveth was citing it to make a different point and did not quote the entire sentence. The full text of the Gruenbaum-Barlas letter was published for the first time in Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the
Allies Have Attempted It? (New York, 2000), 262.
18. Epstein to Ben-Gurion, 3 September 1944, Eytan Bentsur et al., eds. Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations 1941-1953 - Part I: 1941 - May 1949 (London and Portland, OR, 2000), 83. This document was actually first mentioned in Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David, 218. What Porat did not mention (since she had no particular reason to mention it), now revealed by the publication of the complete document for the first time, is that Epstein's report was addressed to David Ben-Gurion.
19. JAE Minutes, 29 Sept. 1944, Central Zionist Archives.
20. Goldmann to Masaryk, 3 July 1944, World Jewish Congress Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati; Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, 321.
21. John Pehle, "Memorandum for the Files," 24 June 1944, 16/15/peh, Benjamin Akzin Papers, Metzudat Ze'ev (Jabotinsky Archives), Tel Aviv; David S. Wyman, "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed," Commentary, May 1978, 37-8.
22. Samuel Merlin, "A Year in the Service of Humanity: A Survey of the Activities of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, July 1943 - August 1944" (New York: Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe), 25, Palestine Statehood Groups Papers, Yale University.
23. "Last Chance for Rescue" (editorial), Jewish Frontier 11 (Aug. 1944), 4.
24. Akzin to Pehle, 2 Sept. 1944, 16/15/peh, Akzin Papers; Isaac Lewin, "Attempts at Rescuing European Jews with the Help of Polish Diplomatic Missions During World War II," The Polish Review 22:4 (1977), 3-23.
25. Wyman, "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed," 38.
26. Pehle to Kubowitzki, 3 Aug. 1944; Kubowitzki to Pehle, 9 Aug. 1944. Both in World Jewish Congress Papers.
27. Akzin to Lesser, 29 June 1944, 16/15/peh, Akzin Papers.
28. "Reported Germans Willing to Exchange Hungarian Jews for Supplies," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 20 July 1944, 1; "We and Hungarian Jewry" [editorial], Independent Jewish Press Service, 7 July 1944, 1-A; "Protests Register" (editorial), Independent Jewish Press Service, 21 July 1944, 3-A;
"Devil's Barter" (editorial), Independent Jewish Press Service, 28 July 1944, 3-A.
29. Jacob Fishman, "From Day to Day," Morgen Zhurnal , 27 June 1944, 1-2; Theodore N. Lewis, "Men and Events," Opinion 14:11 (Sept. 1944), 33-4.
30. "Huge Open-Air Demonstration in New York Demands Rescue of Jews from
Europe," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1 August 1944, 2; "40,000 Here Seek Way to Save Jews," New York Times, 1 Aug. 1944, 17.
31. Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, 2000), 80.

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Okay, while we're on the subject of things Ken Burns never told us about the evil United States behavior during WW II, here's another example.

Immediately following the German surrender in Europe, Allied commander General Eisenhower quietly and outside of offical channels directed that the German POW's were to be treated "roughly". To that end, the coming months would see untold hundreds, if not thousands, of German POWs systematically starved, and many frozen to death from lack of proper clothing while living in outdoor pens in the winter of 1945-46. It didn't need to happen, but it did.

Additionally, those German POWs being held in the French sector were subjected to ocassional machine gun raids by drunken French soldiers bent on revenge.

The list of things the U.S. and the Allies did wrong could, I suppose, go on and on. But the truth is that much, if not most, of the allied military incompetence would result in far more loss of life among allied soldiers than among the enemy. Frankly, as an American citizen for 65 years, my sentiments are with the American boys who faithfully and herocially did their duty 60 some odd years ago; and, as stated earlier, the U.S. was on the winning side and that is all that matters now. It's all in the past now. We might as well be arguing about Custer's behavior at the Little Big Horn.

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

- George Santayana, American philosopher, 1905

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Union General William Sherman stood in front of a large audience one evening many years after the Civil War ended and said. "There are a lot of young men here tonight that think that war is all glory, but I can tell you boys it is all hell".

Horror, death, destruction, injustice; the innocent all too often die, while the guilty somehow manage to survive. That's what war is really all about.

Maybe Burns didn't feed us a steaming kettle of that gruel, but he did provide a good portion of the apple pie dessert. And I'm happy to have eaten it.

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Source for the Eisenhower comment?

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Several places in my reading. I'll admit, however, that at least one of those sources, a book titled, "Other Losses", published in 1989, has come under some criticsm due to some bad math by the author. However, whether the number of German POWs lost due to careless handling was a million or one hundred thousand, Isenhower is still faulted. Here is what Stephen Ambrose is quoted as having said at the time of the publication...

"I have now read "Other Losses" and wish I had not. I have had nightmares every night since I started reading... You have a sensational if appalling story and it can no longer be suppressed, and I suppose (in truth I know) it must be published... I must withdraw my offer to write a Foreword; I just can't do it to Ike. I quarrel with many of your interpretations, [but] I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery.... you have the goods on these guys, you have the quotes from those who were present and saw with their own eyes, you have the broad outline of a truth so terrible that I really can't bear it.... You really have made a major historical discovery, the full impact of which neither you nor I nor anyone can fully imagine.... I have written at length about your script to Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon and Schuster."

My point was not to condemn Ike but to show that there were errors made on our side during and following the war. Ken Burns has been critized here for not showing the negatives in his series, "The War", but I feel that Burns was showing us the long, hard journey to victory rather than those aspects which might have resulted in disaster.

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Several places in my reading. I'll admit, however, that at least one of those sources, a book titled, "Other Losses", published in 1989, has come under some criticsm due to some bad math by the author. However, whether the number of German POWs lost due to careless handling was a million or one hundred thousand, Isenhower is still faulted. Here is what Stephen Ambrose is quoted as having said at the time of the publication...

"I have now read "Other Losses" and wish I had not. I have had nightmares every night since I started reading... You have a sensational if appalling story and it can no longer be suppressed, and I suppose (in truth I know) it must be published... I must withdraw my offer to write a Foreword; I just can't do it to Ike. I quarrel with many of your interpretations, [but] I am not arguing with the basic truth of your discovery.... you have the goods on these guys, you have the quotes from those who were present and saw with their own eyes, you have the broad outline of a truth so terrible that I really can't bear it.... You really have made a major historical discovery, the full impact of which neither you nor I nor anyone can fully imagine.... I have written at length about your script to Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon and Schuster."

My point was not to condemn Ike but to show that there were errors made on our side during and following the war. Ken Burns has been critized here for not showing the negatives in his series, "The War", but I feel that Burns was showing us the long, hard journey to victory rather than those aspects which might have resulted in disaster.

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Numerous soldiers from european countries fought for the german wehrmacht,
to fight against bolshevism. More than 2 division where formed in france of french volunteers (Division Charlemagne, just an example).
Now this is an eyewitness report of my father, who was a POW at an american prisoner of war installation at the french City of Marsailles.
My father became a prisoner of war,at age 17, because he no longer believed in the fascist cause. As a member of a "Volksgrenadier" Division (hastly formed
new formations to replace losses of whole divisions, lost on the eastern front)his unit was used as cannon fodder, to harras allied troops in the Vosges mountains in southeastern france (Not far from the swiss border).
The german lines where so thinly stretched out in this region, that the frontline was occupied every 150 meters by a german MG position, with very little reseves in the back. Mostly fieldgendarmarie (Kettenhunde) to "hang"
every soldier , that did not have a good explanation of being in the rear.
My father witnessed the huge build up of american artillery positions whenever
he was ordered to go on recon-missions.The month was november, it was bitterly cold, the uniforms where sommer issue. To get informations, my dads recon patrol had to take american prisoners. My dad's leader was an experienced sargeant from the eastern front with nerves of steel. They had to swim through
half frozen rivers and creeks. My Dad hated these missions, specially when he
reported back, he witnessed german officers having a party with hookers and cognac. They didn't seem to be interested much in his report. So my Dad decided to quit. He knew about an abandoned mountain shack between the lines,
and decided with a few other disenchanted soldiers to wait there for the americans, to surrender to. Day after day passed by, and nothing happened,
my Dad believed, the americans knew about the thin and weak german defences in this area, and would attack soon. Eventually they arrived, the surrender went without much friction, only one american soldier seemed very agitated and wanted to shoot my Dad for no good reason. But an officer stopped that man.
So my Dad ended up in Marseilles, to work at the harbour, unloading ships.
In june 1945, ann american Liberty freighter arrived, with POW (french soldiers who fought for germany). The Guards where american Soldiers.
There was a french delegation, mostly former french communist partisans,
(my Dad saw the red flags with hammer and sichel), who where reciving those
POW's. Some of the POW's where lynched right away by the delegation, there was no diszipline, and the american soldiers did nothing.

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What the original poster (thomas marking) is trying to do is give a moral equivilance between America and the Nazi's. In his terms, even though the Americans DIDN'T put Jews in concentration camps, or starve them or kill them, we are equally to blame because we didn't rescue them EARLY enough. We should have made it hight priority...not defending the Pacific or battling Nazi troops throughout Europe..but getting to those camps.
Rational people know this is rubbish...it plays with the far left agenda...America bad...rest of the world good bull crap.

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Not really, I wouldn't say "equally to blame" because the overwhelming majority of the blame rests with the Nazi government. Yes, if an arsonist starts a fire in your next-door neighbor's house it is the arsonist who is legally responsible. However, if you notice the fire and stand back and don't call the fire department you also have moral guilt for your lapse of judgment. Your guilt is not equal to the guilt of the arsonist but it is not zero either. If you go on and hire that same arsonist to work for you (e.g., Strughold) then your guilt is magnified.

So on this subject, at least, I was criticizing the Burns film because it implies that the Allied guilt was zero. The Holocaust pops up in episode seven which chronologically takes place in 1945. People who do not know any better may be inclined to conclude from the film that 1945 was the first time that the Americans knew anything about it. I have shown in numerous other posts that this conclusion is erroneous.

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This documentary isn't about what the high-ups in the US government and military knew and when they knew it. It was about the experience of average Americans. And for the vast majority, the 1945 camp liberations were the first they'd heard of it. I think even the high-ups were suprised at the extent of the Holocaust.

Perhaps you think Mr. Burns should have made a film that concentrated largely on war crimes and missteps of the US, but he didn't. And if you are suggesting that this was film was a jingoistic, flag waving, whitewash...nobody that's seen the work that posesses a modicum of sense could believe you. I dislike people that view and criticize movies or art with an agenda in mind.

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...an epic war, and the OP wants to limn things Burns missed in his film? Talk about misguided... it would take 1,000+ volumes to tell EVERYTHING that happened in World War II from Ethiopia and Nanking to Nagasaki. Stupid thread.

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I agree.

Still there are some interesting historical debates (bickering back and forth asside) on this post about some interesting aspects of the war.

Ken Burns is very up front about the fact that the show is about how the war affected 4 towns in America and it is the soldiers' and their families' from those towns stories. The 4 towns had enough eyewittnesses still living that they could give an interesting summarization of much of the war in a 7 episode documentary, nothing more nothing less.

That we know of those soldiers:

1) Weren't privy to Von Braun's activities.

2) Part of the 2 million soldiers

3) Part of the holocaust knowledge that the state department had before the soldiers encountered it

etc...

It tells what they encountered by first hand accounts not all the additional gory details others encountered. Of course there are many other stories to tell about the war, the show was very up front about that and never claimed this was the entire story about everything WWII.

I guess you could say by calling this show "The War" it might not have been comprehensive enough but it never would be. But that's like saying "The Never Ending Story..." was too short a movie for what it's title claimed! :)

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Did you expect this series to report on everything that went on in the war? The war took place all over the world by millions of people.

And yes, war is hell. People on both sides do evil, evil things that they deem necessary. War sucks.

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Well, it's going on two years now since Burns film "The War" aired originally. As I might have predicted (although not for any of reasons I gave in this post) almost nobody is still talking about it today. "The Civil War" remains Burns' best work and probably always will be. "The War" is entirely forgettable.

A new film by Time-Life books including never before seen footage from WWII has been released during the last six months or so. I think it's called "The World At War" or something like that. It might be worth checking out although I have not bought it or seen it yet.

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The original 'World at War' aired in 1974. They have been advertising it lately on TV. I wonder if that is the same one that you mentioned in your post. The 'World at War' is highly recommended.

Here is info on it for viewers, please seek it out on DVD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_War

Frank: Just a man.
Harmonica: An ancient race.

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