June 9, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES who, six months after the 98 murders and millions of dollars or property damage known as Kristallnacht, rightly feared that things would not get better in Germany – a country where Jews had flourished prior to 1933 – until Hitler and his gang were dead. Hull refused to issue passports to the refugees. Morgenthau was horrified at Hull’s lack of compassion, if not deliberate malice. He tried to intervene, but lacked the courage to risk offending FDR. The refugees were not allowed to land and returned to Europe, where some lived to help the British fight Hitler, and about half were murdered in the Holocaust. Whether this cruel affront was due to racial-religious prejudice or personal malice, it was a low point in American diplomatic history. Holocaust denial started while the Holocaust was still going on. By 1943, most informed people knew that some of the previous slave labor camps had been turned into murder factories – and nobody did anything. Plans to bomb the railroad tracks to Auschwitz were vetoed so as not to offend our gallant Soviet allies. The Soviets had murdered the entire Polish officer corps in 1940 and seven million Ukrainians in the 1930s, but we were not supposed to mention that. Plans to trade Jews for trucks and other non-lethal hardware were also scrapped because this too might have offended the Soviets. People regarded as right-wing nut-cakes due to liberal propaganda – including Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa, whose wife was Jewish and who didn’t try to hide it; Senator Big Ed Johnson of Colorado, a second-generation Swede and impartial humanitarian; and FDR’s own Anglo-Saxon prototype Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York – got on FDR’s case and told him that the Nazi government was murdering huge numbers of Jews and that the U.S. government should warn the Nazi officials that the Nazis would be held responsible. Nobody did anything. Instead, Morgenthau, probably driven off the deep end by the government’s idle disinterest in the Holocaust, drafted a plan to break post-war Germany into five separate countries, destroy all industry, and let the people live on potatoes if they lived at all. FDR loved it. Churchill hated it, but allowed himself to be bribed because Britain was broke. But when the German officers who had already widely conspired to kill Hitler, and almost did, heard about it, they stiffened their armed resistance and probably killed an additional 20,000 Americans in the Battle of the Bulge and wounded another 100,000 instead of collapsing in the West and seeking terms with America. The Jews got a very dirty shuffle from FDR and so did those Germans who hadn’t supported Hitler or murdered at his behest. Next stop in the Dirty Deal: the Arabs. Most Arabs had either supported the Allies or stayed out of World War II entirely. Near the end of the war, Britain and America IV • Page 31 What does the sinking of a South Korean destroyer by a North Korean warship have in common with the shooting of relief workers running supplies to Gaza through an Israeli blockade? Both had their origins in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s State Department. First let’s look at Gaza and the background of how American diplomacy contributed to trouble in the Middle East. Americans of good will may not be ready for this, especially if their favorite adage is “my country, right or wrong,” but since “my country” isn’t the only one that has nuclear weapons, it might be a good time to do some background work before we lapse into the good guy/badguy mentality made popular by football pep rallies and oldfashioned TV Westerns and war movies. Roosevelt’s official secretary of state was Cordell Hull of Tennessee, a Spanish-American War veteran, self-taught lawyer, and so old-time American that he was said to be part Cherokee. Aside from that, Hull had a hard time taking “people of color” seriously, and he was not prepared for the emergence of China and Japan as world powers. Hull had another problem: He saw himself as presidential timber, but his wife was Jewish. Actually, her father was Jewish and her mother was Anglo-Saxon, and she had been raised as an Episcopalian, but Hull was hyper-sensitized to the impact that his wife’s religious heritage might have with the urban Democratic constituency and the Midwest trade union members. He kept her close to the vest. Hull’s advisor on Asia was Stanley Hornbeck, who spent three years teaching in Manchu-ruled China, but had never learned to speak or read Chinese. Hornbeck was a man of forceful opinions. He hated Japan, thought all Asians were docile and incapable of mastering technology, but also believed that Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang’s Americaneducated wife held the future of China in their hands. The future of China, obviously, was to provide a pre-mechanized market for American manufactured goods. You can’t make this stuff up. Hull relied on Hornbeck. Roosevelt’s “second secretary of state” according to the general understanding around Washington, was Henry Morgenthau Jr., openly Jewish. Morgenthau never finished college and had been set up as a “gentleman farmer” with the old man’s money until FDR, his Hudson Valley neighbor, first invited him to be secretary of agriculture and then secretary of the treasury. Morgenthau needed help from people who understood economics and, under his loose control, the U.S. Treasury Department became a magnet for closet communists, much to the concern of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover knew about some of the communists, but couldn’t get FDR or Morgenthau interested in the possible threat that men and women loyal primarily to Marxist theory and oblivious to Stalinist murder posed to America. Hull and “Second Secretary of State” Morgenthau came to loggerheads over a shipload of German Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi oppression in 1939. In June, a German ship arrived off Cuba with almost 1,000 educated German Jews How the mess in Gaza got there were short of petroleum and cut a deal with Saudi Arabia: unlimited oil at reasonable prices in return for a written promise that the United States and Britain would not support an expanded Zionist state on Arab land. The Jews suffered terribly from Hitler, advised the Saudis, who said, “Give them a piece of Germany.” (Keep in mind that Arab and Islamic anti-Semites prior to the Zionist movement were substantially non-existent.) The Saudis got their signed promises from FDR and Churchill. The Americans and British got the oil. In 1947, at the United Nations, the Saudis got the shaft. Britain abstained from voting on the recognition of Israel. The United States – FDR now being dead – voted in favor. After the discovery of Belsen and Buchenwald, and the hidden knowledge of the fact that FDR hadn’t done much to stop the Holocaust, the U.S. could hardly have done otherwise than support Israel as a refuge for the ravaged survivors of Nazi bestiality and Anglo-American apathy. But Islam is a religion of contracts, so the Saudis didn’t see it that way. They saw we had lied to them. Reciprocal massacres of Israeli settlers and of Palestinian villagers seesawed back and forth, with each side arguing about who had been victimized more savagely. The trouble with trying to resolve the mess in Gaza is that neither side will listen to reason when reason comes from the United States. Within the memory of many people still living, we substantially abandoned the Jews to Hitler and shortly afterwards broke our sworn and signed pledge to the Arabs. America didn’t invent anti-Semitism and historically has had a much better record than most European countries, but FDR’s State Department wasn’t a great dispenser of compassion or integrity either to the Jews or to the Arabs who are, linguistically, also Semites. Cut to that other trouble spot. There was no such place as North Korea until FDR at Yalta and Truman at Potsdam tacitly handed Poland and the eastern quadrant of Germany over to Russia in return for a ground attack on Japan. Korea had been one country, and the Koreans had been one people during the bleakest days of Mongol and Manchu Chinese dominance and 20th century Japanese occupation. The Soviet invasion of the mainland Japanese Empire, demanded by Truman for the price of Poland and Prussia and assisted by a handful of anti-Japanese Korean communists, caused communist North Korea to exist for the first time. Had the Japanese Empire surrendered on terms instead of being blasted into unconditional surrender by atomic weapons, the Anglo-American allies might have insisted on Korean sovereignty under the far more numerous Korean anti-communists. How do we calm the mess in Gaza and the danger in Korea? We had better get the Swiss to handle the negotiations. The Israelis, the Arabs, and the North Koreans just might not trust us to cut them a “new deal.” Historian recognized for work (continued from page 4) historian for more than 25 years, and has served for many years on the Historic Preservation Commission and on the Bergen County Historic Preservation Advisory Board. She has also been a trustee and chair of the New Jersey Historic Tract Restoration Grant Program. Greene described some of her favorite topics in the book, such as Franklin Turnpike, particularly during the Golden Age of stage coaching; post roads and later turnpike taverns; the millstreams of Mahwah with original research on their mill sites; and the colonial architecture of the Ramapo Reformed Church. “It took me 26 years to complete the book, because I brought it up to the present,” Greene said. According to a review of Greene’s book, which she refers to as “The RamChron,” the volume is a meticulously researched, engagingly written history of Mahwah and the surrounding region. Rich in visual detail, the book shows that Mahwah was a typical 18th century American hamlet with a centrally located church, grist and saw mills, essential trades, a general store, a distillery, and a nearby tavern. The story continues in the 19th century when the hamlet grew and prospered, attracting some of America’s wealthiest families as residents. After Mahwah changed in the mid-20th century from a rural farming community into a metropolitan suburb, it developed even more, and today it is one of Bergen County’s most populous, still-growing communities. The story ends in 2009 with photographic glimpses of Mahwah today, its amenities, and its remnants of bygone times. Interviews of area residents, and 19th and 20th quotations from diaries, journals, and letters bring vitality and personality to the narrative. The book contains multiple separate reference sections, including genealogy. “The Ramapough Chronicles” also includes the impact of three centuries of surrounding roads, mountains, water courses, historical buildings, and the area’s growth and inevitable changes, Greene said. She described the book as a regional history of Mahwah’s “surrounds” in northwest Bergen County and adjoining Rockland County in New York. A book signing by Greene will be held at the Mahwah Museum at Franklin Turnpike and Miller Road on Sunday, June 13 from 4 to 6 p.m. Greene will present a gallery talk on the “Winters for All Seasons” display at the museum about the prominent Winter family of Mahwah based on research from her book.