Anti semitism Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period. The pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent (published by Ford from 1919 to 1927). The radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s attacked Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal and promoted the notion of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Some prominent politicians shared such views: Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency, blamed Jews for Roosevelts decision to abandon the gold standard, and claimed that in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.[130] Einsatzgruppe A members shoot Jews on the outskirts of Kaunas, 1941–1942 In the early 1940s the aviator Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans led The America First Committee in opposing any involvement in the war against Fascism. During his July 1936 visit to Germany, Lindbergh wrote letters saying that there was more intelligent leadership in Germany than is generally recognized. The German American Bund held parades in New York City during the late 1930s, where members wore Nazi uniforms and raised flags featuring swastikas alongside American flags. With the start of U.S. involvement in World War II most of the Bunds members were placed[by whom?] in internment camps, and some were deported[by whom?] at the end of the war. Sometimes race riots, as in Detroit in 1943, targeted Jewish businesses for looting and burning.[131] A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp In Germany the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler, which came to power on 30 January 1933, instituted repressive legislation denying the Jews basic civil rights. It instituted a pogrom on the night of 9–10 November 1938, dubbed Kristallnacht, in which Jews were killed, their property destroyed and their synagogues torched.[132] Antisemitic laws, agitation and propaganda were extended to German-occupied Europe in the wake of conquest, often building on local antisemitic traditions. In the east the Third Reich forced Jews into ghettos in Warsaw, Krakow, Lvov, Lublin and Radom.[133] After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 a campaign of mass murder, conducted by the Einsatzgruppen, culminated between 1942 to 1945 in systematic genocide: the Holocaust.[134] Eleven million Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and some six million were eventually killed.[134][135][136] Antisemitism was commonly used as an instrument for personal conflicts in the Soviet Union, starting from conflict between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky and continuing through numerous conspiracy-theories spread by official propaganda. Antisemitism in the USSR reached new heights after 1948 during the campaign against the rootless cosmopolitan (euphemism for Jew) in which numerous Yiddish-language poets, writers, painters and sculptors were killed or arrested.[137][138] This culminated in the so-called Doctors Plot (1952–1953). Similar antisemitic propaganda in Poland resulted in the flight of Polish Jewish survivors from the country.[138] After the war, the Kielce pogrom and March 1968 events in communist Poland represented further incidents of antisemitism in Europe. The anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland has a common theme of blood-libel rumours.[139][140] In 1965 Pope Paul VI issued a papal decree disbanding the cult of Simon of Trent, the shrine erected to him was dismantled,[141] and Simon was decanonized.[142]
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:34:37 +0000
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