I watched part three of Ken Burns ‘The Holocaust’ and was made aware of aspect of this Human Outrage that eluded me, or, I did not want to look at. Most nations refused to take in Jewish Refugees so they would not be exterminated. The United States could have done – much more – if it were not for Samuel Breckinridge Long who is related to John Breckenridge who ran for President with Joseph Lane as his VP. Breckenridge did all he could to block Jewish immigration. This morning I wonder if he was afraid American Negros would be angry to see foreigners treated better than they. Would the Jews be given opportunities long denied Negroes – paid for by Uncle Sam? The Brackenridge family – was the Confederacy. Nazi propaganda was working American Racism.
With the lawsuit filed against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, I and others are reminded of how Donald Trump WEAPONIZED the immigration crisis when he took office. He gleefully used IC as a Dividing Tool to cleave the American People – in twain – so he could have Extra Special Powers and be above the law. If Trump was attracted to Hitler, it was for the fact – he was above the law! The Attorney General of New York filed a suit in order TO HURT all the Trumps where they live….in a state of real-estate lawlessness and tax evasion that has been passed down in the family. Greed and Fraud is Family Tradition. Cohen got it right. It’s a powerful drug to Donald Trump that he believes elevates him above all of humanity.
rump thought he could prosecute Comey and Clinton himself: book (msn.com)
“You can’t prosecute anybody,” McGahn told Trump, the authors wrote, Insider reported.
According to Insider, the book states McGahn subsequently produced a memo to Trump explaining how leveraging his role as president to prosecute his political enemies would be illegal, also comparing such actions to those taken by dictators.”
I have made a proposal before the Mayor of Springfield and Eugene, to deal with the truth Lane County is named after Joseph Lane who backed the Confederate Insurectionists – who formed the Klu Klux Klan that had it out for Jews and Blacks. I suspect Lane backed the KKK in Oregon, and am looking for proof. What is so utterly depressing about Burn’s documentary is how Hitler’s Monsters were able to murder four million Jews in the heart of Europe – and this murder ended only when the Allies spent a trillion dollars on weapons and armies – to make the Nazis stop! Two more million Jews were found and Degraded To Death!
As the years went by, I put myself in the place of the Survivors, who with every passing week, knew time was running out and, surely HELP would arrive and save me. How long ago did the Black People in America – give up hope? What about the homeless on the streets of every major city? They are being weaponized by Christian Republicans and other politicians. One women running for Governor of Oregon declared she would CRACKDOWN on crime and the homeless problem. I cringe every time I hear her ad. Her writers should use a dictionary. The other woman uses Hevenly Images of The Golden Cowboys of God, refugees who have ESACPED THE EVIL in the Big Cities, and thus they volunteer to RULE BY GOLDEN EXAMPLE! What a great sacrifice they will make. Owning a personal relationship with Jesus gives them the Wisdom of Solomon. Alas – a new and real solution!
If I could chat an hour with a Dead American Politician, it would FDR.
“Did you fear THE SOUTH would rise again if the war went badly for the Allies? Was Hitler reaching out to Neo-Confederates as to open a Southern Front?”
As a student of the Bible I conclude both books are about suppressing THE NEED of human beings to PLAY GOD, and be – GODLIKE! At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry he is offered many crowns which means he was offered – THE GODHEAD! Breckenridge and Trump – went for it – as did Judge Aileen Cannon. She found THE TEMPTATION – too great!
“Get behind me – Satan!”
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
“A former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who worked for the Trump administration believes the former president orchestrated an even more deviant plot that expands further than shipping immigrants to Democratic-led states.
According to HuffPost, the latest controversy stems from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) actions shipping dozens of immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. The seemingly political plot has led to more debates about border policies.
Now, Miles Taylor, a former DHS chief of staff, is weighing in on the controversy and revealing Trump’s take on the situation. Per the news outlet, Taylor recalled how Trump “once took the idea of shipping migrants north to the next level.”
A thorough rebuke of Judge Aileen Cannon’s pro-Trump order (msn.com)
Samuel Miller Breckinridge Long (May 16, 1881 – September 26, 1958) was an American diplomat and politician. He served in the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[1] He is infamous among Holocaust historians for making it difficult for European Jews to enter the United States in the 1930s and ’40s.
Breckinridge Long was born on May 16, 1881 to Margaret Miller Breckinridge and William Strudwick Long in St. Louis, Missouri. Long was a member of the Breckinridge family, which has been described as “practically Confederate aristocracy“.[2] Long was a distant cousin of Henry Skillman Breckinridge (1886–1960), who was the United States Assistant Secretary of War from 1913-1916 under Wilson, and whose daughter married John Stephens Graham, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and commissioners for the Internal Revenue Service and Atomic Energy Commission.
Oregon has a housing crisis. Can the next governor solve it? – OPB
Joseph Lane and John Breckenridge | Rosamond Press
How Nazi Germany weaponized the race card against the US Army | by US Holocaust Museum | Medium
To start dealing with bad or illegal behavior in a more severe way:
Synonyms for crackdown
Synonyms: Verb
- clamp down (on),
- crush,
- put down,
- quash,
- quell,
- repress,
- silence,
- slap down,
- snuff (out),
- squash,
- squelch,
- subdue,
- suppress
A lawsuit alleges Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ agents lied to get migrants to board flights out of Texas. (Chris O’Meara / Associated Press)© Provided by LA Times
Earlier this week, we speculated that the saga of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s migrant flights was bound to look uglier with time.
And so it goes.
In a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Massachusetts, the immigrant aid group Alianza Americas put meat on the bare bones of what’s been known about the DeSantis-sponsored flights of nearly 50 migrants to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
The problem is we’re not seeing mass movements of them into Florida. It’s just coming in onesie-twosies.
The problem is we’re not seeing mass movements of them into Florida. It’s just coming in onesie-twosies.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, lamenting the absence of an immigration problem in his state
What had previously been reported was that the migrants had been told before boarding two planes in Texas that they were being taken to Boston or Washington, D.C., where they would be given jobs and receive a host of immigrant services.
Instead, they were dropped off on the island, which is reachable only by air or sea, where no one capable of providing such services had been warned of their arrival.
Naming DeSantis, Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue, and the state of Florida as defendants, the lawsuit states that they “manipulated” the migrants, “stripped them of their dignity, deprived them of their liberty, bodily autonomy, due process, and equal protection under law.”
DeSantis responded to the lawsuit Tuesday by making public a consent form purportedly signed by one of the passengers. If it’s genuine, the disclosure must rank as a spectacular self-own on DeSantis’ part. It’s in English and Spanish, but the Spanish text — the part bearing the passenger’s signature — is an incomplete translation from the English.
Breckinridge Long
Between 1940 and 1944, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long supervised the US State Department’s Visa Division, which regulated the issuance of visas to people who applied to immigrate to the United States—including Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Long and his staff implemented new immigration rules and restrictions in response to national security threats, and often showed little sympathy for humanitarian concerns. Long fought any attempt to make immigration easier, and resented any criticism of the State Department, particularly by Jewish organizations.
Samuel Breckinridge Long was born in 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a wealthy family. He practiced law, planning for a career in politics. He served as a third assistant secretary of State during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and, while in Washington, befriended future president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Long’s own political campaigns failed: he ran for the US Senate in Missouri twice and lost both times. When Roosevelt announced his presidential candidacy in 1932, Long enthusiastically raised money for the campaign. After Roosevelt’s landslide victory, Long became Roosevelt’s ambassador to Italy, serving from 1933 to 1936. When World War II began in September 1939, Roosevelt asked Long to work in the State Department and appointed him an assistant secretary of state several months later.
REFUGEE CRISIS
As part of his duties at the State Department, Long supervised the Visa Division, which regulated the issuing of American immigration visas at American consulates all over the world. The US consulates in Europe, particularly in Nazi Germany and the territories it had annexed or invaded, were overwhelmed with people, many of them Jewish, requesting help with immigration.
By the time Long rejoined the State Department, more than 300,000 people born in Germany—mostly Jews—had joined a waiting list for an American immigration visa. At the time, immigration was limited by the applicant’s country of birth. A maximum of only 27,370 people born in Germany or Austria were legally allowed to immigrate to the United States each year. The US immigration quota for Germany was filled for the first time in 1939 and almost filled in 1940. During all other years of Nazi rule (1933–1945) the German quota was not filled, and the laws governing the visa process were never adjusted to meet the enormous demand.
NATIONAL SECURITY FEARS
Like most Americans, Long worried that Nazi Germany had planted spies and saboteurs in the United States. This fear of a “Fifth Column”—the term used for these individuals and groups— increased after the May 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. The four countries collapsed so quickly that many Americans believed that German spies played a role in bringing them down. In a speech, Roosevelt warned that new immigrants—even Jewish refugees—might be forced to secretly work for the Nazis.
On June 26, 1940, ten days after France surrendered to Nazi Germany, Long wrote a memo to other State Department officials laying out the options for stopping all immigration into the United States in the event of a national emergency. Consular officers, he wrote, could “put every obstacle in the way and require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.”
Long’s memo was never put into effect, but a few days later Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed all State Department officials abroad to take additional caution when screening refugees. If the officials had any doubt about the identity or intentions of a refugee, they were to deny the visa application. After Hull’s order, it became much harder to immigrate from German-occupied areas.
In June 1941, the State Department issued a “relatives rule” that denied visas to anyone with close relatives still living in Nazi-occupied territory. They argued that Germany could pressure immigrants to become spies by threatening relatives still held by the Nazis.
The State Department also announced that all visa applications needed to be reviewed by an interdepartmental committee in Washington, made up of staff from the State and Justice Departments, the FBI, and military intelligence. This new committee, which, Long wrote, “will consider the cases of visa applicants from the viewpoint of national defense,” lengthened an already long and difficult immigration process.
RESCUE RESOLUTION
In November 1942, American newspapers and magazines printed reports of the Nazi regime’s plan to murder European Jews. Some Americans wrote passionate letters and telegrams to the State Department expressing their concern and pleading for rescue action. Others held public rallies calling on the US government to rescue or provide relief for the Nazis’ victims.
Long contended that rescue was impossible without harming the Allied war effort, and he tried to calm criticism by making it look like the government was doing more than it really was. In April 1943, delegates from the United States and Great Britain met for a conference in Bermuda. Long gave the American negotiators strict instructions ensuring that the conference would not lead to any significant new steps on behalf of Europe’s Jews. Long also briefly attempted to stop reports of mass murder from reaching the United States because he feared that releasing the news might lead to additional pressure on the State Department.
![The young students of a Jewish yeshiva [religious school] in New York wrote letters pleading with President Roosevelt to take action to save European Jews.](https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/storage/434/NARA-840.4016-49A_6-840x1100.jpg "NARA-840.4016-49A_6-840x1100")
In November 1943, the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs held hearings on a bipartisan resolution calling on President Roosevelt to appoint a commission to rescue European Jews. Long testified in a closed session, claiming the State Department had undertaken extensive work to assist refugees and provide humanitarian relief. The congressmen were impressed, and Long, hoping to lessen public pressure and defeat the resolution, decided to release his testimony to the public. Almost immediately, Jewish organizations proved one of Long’s claims—that the United States had accepted 580,000 refugees since 1933—to be patently false. (The actual number, which varies depending on the definition of “refugee”–which was not a legally protected category at the time–was much lower.)
In December 1943, US Treasury Department officials discovered Long’s efforts to suppress information about the Holocaust. These officials successfully petitioned Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January 1944 and to announce a new US policy of relief and rescue for Jews and other victims of Nazism. Approximately 5 million Jewish victims of the Nazi regime had already been murdered at this point. As part of a larger State Department reorganization, Long was reassigned from supervision of the Visa Division, and eleven months later, he left government service. He died in 1958.
How Nazi Germany weaponized the race card against the US Army
Propaganda efforts sought to exploit racial tensions
“There have never been lynchings of colored men in Germany. They have always been treated decently,” said the Nazi leaflet, dropped on African-American soldiers fighting across Europe. “So you don’t have to be afraid to be with Germans.”
“Uncle Sam’s colored soldiers are just cannon fodder!” another proclaimed.
Still another promised good food and fellowship if African-American troops would just surrender. “There’s no need to go on a diet. Plenty of food, nourishing, well-cooked and wholesome for all P.O.W.”
The Nazis were virulent racists who viewed history as a biologically driven struggle for survival and dominance between various peoples. They identified black people as an inferior, alien race that threatened the future existence of Western society. But that didn’t stop them from trying to exploit racial tensions among US forces to encourage desertion in the closing days of World War II. Creating wedges between people had been a Nazi strategy since the party’s inception.
The Nazis were skilled masters of what might be called today, niche marketing. Beginning in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi propaganda apparatus tailored messages to blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, men, women, Catholics, farmers — even blind Germans, despite the Nazi definition of “fitness.” The goal was to make the Nazi Party all things to all “Aryan” people while exploiting divisions wherever it was in the party’s interest.
The Nazis exploited people of African descent in their propaganda for political and military purposes. They were bogeymen, used as props to garner votes and later to incite Germans in “defense” of racial purity and their homeland.
From the start, the Nazi Party vilified black people as barbaric, uncivilized, and criminal. Hitler, in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, described blacks as tools in a plot by “international Jewry” to take over the world:
“It was and it is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.”
Nazi propagandists stressed to Germans that black people were participants in the nation’s humiliation following the Versailles Treaty, when African troops served in the French army’s postwar occupation of the Rhineland. In the Third Reich, black people, like Jews, were subjected to discriminatory legislation, including the notorious Nuremberg race laws of 1935, and were excluded on racial grounds from membership in the “national community.” In 1937, some 385 German children fathered by French-African troops were forcibly sterilized by German physicians in a secret Gestapo program.
Nazis decried the influence of “Negro Culture” on German art and music, seeing such works as “degenerate” and “racially alien.” In 1935, Eugen Hadomowsky, a high official with the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, prohibited German radio stations from broadcasting “N —-Jazz.” The Nazis identified jazz music, which had gained popularity in Germany in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic, with African-Americans and Jews.
But consistency wasn’t something the Nazi regime particularly cared about.
While the negative image of black people tended to predominate in the Nazi media, the regime’s propagandists also, on occasion, saw the benefit of using images of African-Americans as victims of racism to denounce foreign critics.
Following the international outcry against the pogroms perpetrated by the Nazis against the Reich’s Jews during Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938, Goebbels’ propaganda ministry lashed out at American newspaper columnists and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, denouncing them as hypocrites.
The SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, for instance, made this point clearly in a front-page cartoon, “The Last Scream,” showing a Jewish Uncle Sam spouting the words, “We are protesting in the name of humanity against the barbaric methods in Germany.” Juxtaposed with this image were portrayals of screaming African-Americans being lynched and executed in the electric chair.
Of course, the Nazi view of all people of African descent was at least as dark as any promulgated in the United States. Posters such as the one below whipped up hatred of the enemy by reminding Germans “that French Negroes raped defenseless German women and shot down German workers like dogs in the name of this civilization.”
Still, what benefit did consistency have for Nazi Germany? Demonizing African-American soldiers as violent savages might help firm up the home front, but it could only make things harder on the battlefield.
In World War II, the belligerent nations dropped tons of leaflets on enemy lines to encourage opposing troops to surrender. In their leaflets for African-American soldiers, German propagandists tailored their message, repeatedly playing the race card, emphasizing overt racism in the United States. What kind of “free society” were African-Americans fighting for?
African-American soldiers would need no reminding of the inequalities of American life in the 1940s. The army itself was a segregated force and race riots erupted in Detroit and other American cities in 1943.
All the leaflets urged African-Americans soldiers to surrender to German troops rather than serving as cannon fodder for a white America that denied them equality.
The harder task would have been to convince anyone that life for African-Americans was better under Nazi rule. Propagandists implausibly whitewashed Nazi racism with claims that “colored people living in Germany can go to any church they like. They have never been a problem to the Germans,” as the leaflet below shows.
The Nazis also offered false comfort to those who surrendered. One leaflet showed a photograph of an African-American soldier in a German prisoner of war camp eating a heaping plate of food, while the other side contained a testimonial from a GI stating how well he was treated after his capture. In reality, provisions for Allied prisoners of war rapidly declined and the mortality rate increased as the war went on.
It is difficult to know what impact, if any, these fliers had on African-American soldiers, especially in late 1944, when Germany was nearing defeat. Long before these leaflets were dropped, America’s propaganda agency, the Office of War Information, reached out to blacks, pointing out what Nazi victory would mean for African-Americans.
The Allied liberation of the concentration camps ultimately exposed the horrific truth and consequences of Nazi racism. African-American soldiers were among those who saw first-hand evidence of Nazi crimes. Vincent Tubbs, a wartime correspondent for the Afro American, described the scenes he encountered in a Dachau subcamp:
“Inside I saw one of the Nazi atrocities you read about, see pictures of and are told about, but never believe until you’ve seen it for yourself. The charred bodies of uncountable men. . . . On my honor it was one of the most inhumane attempts at race extermination any people ever suffered. The inmates, those dead and those surviving out of the 4000 internees there, were Jews.”
Now, as in the past, these words and images serve as potent reminders of the evils of racism and antisemitism and as a moral imperative to confront hate propaganda.
Written by Steven Luckert, Ph.D., senior program curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This article could not have been written without the generosity of Carter Boehm, who donated the treasure trove of Axis and Allied propaganda leaflets that his father, Edward, recovered on the battlefields of Italy while he was serving as an American officer in the Psychological Warfare Branch.
Jewish Americans have flourished in America, enjoying immense freedom and opportunities. But like other minorities, Jewish Americans have also faced prejudice, especially during periods of economic hardship or war. During World War I and the Great Depression, Jews were often targeted as scapegoats.
The lynching of Leo Frank, a prominent Jewish businessman in Atlanta, alarmed Jewish Americans in 1915. He was falsely accused and convicted of killing a worker, Mary Phagan, in the pencil factory that he managed. After Georgia Governor John M. Slaton stayed Frank’s execution because of a lack of evidence, a mob dragged him from the jail and lynched him. Though an isolated tragedy, it caused a ripple effect of fear. Decades later, in 1986, Frank was granted a posthumous pardon while evidence now points to the guilt of Jim Conley, a janitor in the factory who falsely accused Frank of the murder during the trial.
The Leo Frank incident also led to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). By the mid-1920s, the KKK claimed to have four million members, more than all the Jews in the United States. In the midst of this turmoil and despite protestations at the time, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916. As the first Jew to serve on the Court, Justice Brandeis had to endure bitter taunts, particularly from fellow justice James C. McReynolds. In the 1920s, Henry Ford, who revolutionized mass production in American industry, relentlessly blamed Jewish Americans for many of the nation’s ills in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. It was only after World War II that barriers to Jewish Americans began to dissipate in America.
The Jewish Americans . Anti-Semitism in America | PBS
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