Aristides de Sousa Mendes Quotes

During WWII, he ignored and defied the orders of his own government to issue no visas for the safety of war refugees fleeing from invading German military forces in the early years of World War II. Between June 16 and June 23, 1940, he frantically issued Portuguese visas free of charge, to over 30,000 refugees seeking to escape the Nazi terror, 12,000 of whom were Jews who were thus saved from murder. He was fired by the Portuguese dictator and spent the remainder of his life in disgrace and poverty. In 1966 Sousa Mendes was honored at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust as one of the "Righteous Among The Nations," Also in 1987, the Portuguese Republic began to rehabilitate Sousa Mendes' memory and granted a posthumous Order of Liberty medal,

After the war Donitz was found guilty of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare and using thousands of slave laborers in his shipyards. He was sentenced to 10 years, one of the lightest sentences if the German War Crimes Trials.

Schindler was a very wealthy industrialist who risked his own life and kept over 1000 Jews from being sent to the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem’s, Israel’s Memorial of the Holocaust has a duty to convey the gratitude of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. This mission was defined by the law establishing Yad Vashem, and in 1963 the Remembrance Authority embarked upon a worldwide project to grant the title of Righteous Among the Nations to the few who helped Jews in the darkest time in their history.

Robinson who was a Republican from New York was, like the other Negro Republican delegates , when they were cursed, shoved, threatened and spat on. The Southern delegates were part of a general Southern backlash as a result of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Nazis and most of the Arabs were allies in WWII. The Jews of Palestine—although they were opposed to many of the British policies regarding Palestine—were active in the Allied cause contributing units to the British Army. Although the Germans were brutal to civilians, murdering millions, they refrained from public pronouncements or exhortations to kill civilians in most cases. The Arabs did not. The Mufti was actually given the rank of General in the Nazi SS and had his own SS unit. In this despicable exhortation he actually uses a concept and wording from the Koran. See {584355}. This quotation is important in that it refutes a common claim by some Palestinians that it was only the Germans who were responsible for the Holocaust and the post war Jewish Refugee problem and that the Palestinians had to bear the price rather than place Israel in Europe. This quotation and the other by the Grand Mufti prove that Palestinians were not only complicit in persecution of Jews but took a leadership and advocacy role.

Chvalkovsky had just returned from Berlin where he had met with Hitler and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. He related the meeting to the French Ambassador who reported it to the French Foreign Minister by letter.

He was shot in 1944 for his involvement in an attempt to kill Hitler

The historical record that is available shows that while the Pope did not, actively or aggressively oppose Hitler, and he did not discipline Catholic prelates who were Nazi supporters, there is no specific evidence that shows the Pope conspired with Hitler, about the extermination of Jews or anything else. However, most of the relevant documents of the era are in the Vatican and the records have been sealed and have not been visible to historians. Apologists for the Pope’s passivity point out that a large percentage of Germans were Catholic and he had a duty to not antagonize Hitler who would retaliate against German Catholics and the German Catholic clergy and church property. Further, Fascist Italy was under Hitler’s control, and the Vatican itself could have closed and its property seized. The historical record is still very vague.

It is amazing what explanations religious and biased fanatics can come up with to explain history.

The Professor was explaining the explanation of the so-called “Frankfurt School” of WWII policy advisors Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer.

The Nazis had started vicious persecution of Jews in Germany. In the early days of irrational anti-Semitism and Nazism he preached against the irrational Nazi propaganda – See {638920}. However, when it became clear that the Nazis had the upper hand, he publicly recognized the Nazi government as legitimate, required Catholic clergy to remain loyal to the Nazi government, and maintained bridges between fascism and the Church He then became silent on the terrible, inhuman, un-Christian treatment of the Jews concentrating his efforts on negotiating the best for the Catholics that he could get. See {639129}.

The Germans had just passed a law making it illegal for a Jew to work as a teacher, professor, government official, scientist, or researcher. Szilard, a Jewish Hungarian politically astute physicist who was working in Germany was trying to organize a plan for the rescue of the Jewish German scientists—to place them in scientific or teaching positions in other countries. Kuhnwald, himself a Jew, was not only a very experienced politician, but one who had been following the Nazi Germany political scene “next door” to predict the future effect on Austria.

He was a viscious anti-Semite who attracted to his party extreme right wingers, Nazi Sympathers and apologists for the Vichey Franch government. The party was rejected by the majority of French voters, but when his daughter took over the party, she was not an anti Semite but foudn it hard to shake the party's image which was alaysa associated with her name even when she actually kicked her father out of the party.

This was the first day of WWII and Hitler’s armies seemed invincible. Kaplan was one of the few who at that time predicted allied victory. He was not even wrong about his own fate. He and the vast majority of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto never survived.

An official had been assassinated by a left wing Jewish activist. Anti Semitic crowds demonstrated in Jewish neighborhoods.

German Jewish scientists were at first unwelcome and discriminated against as the Nazi’s gained power, Then they were banned from participating in most university and other scientific projects and institutes, Many began to leave Germany, and then the remaining ones were sent to concentration camps and mostly murdered. But the ones who had escaped came mostly to England and America. Before this started, Germany had the best physics research in the world. By the end of the war, the “German Jewish Scientists (like Albert Einstein) not only were helping to make America the world’s best physics research center, but were instrumental in developing the atomic bomb which Nazi Germany could not develop because there were not enough great scientists left.