(Jerusalem Post) Ervin Birnbaum - After the German Anschluss (annexation) of Austria on March 15, 1938, the march of German troops to Vienna was hailed by the delirious Austrians as a victory march, showering the German troops with flowers, embraces and kisses, while the bells of the Viennese St. Stephen Cathedral pealed hymns of victory. The next day, the New York Times reported that the Viennese Jewish Quarter, Leopoldstadt, was invaded by triumphant crowds who chased the Jews out of their homes, forcing them on their knees to scrub the sidewalks clean with their toothbrushes. The proceedings were supervised by stormtroopers wearing swastika armbands. 200,000 Austrian Jews were caught in the jaws of the Jew-hating monsters. Reports said suicides by desperate Jews increased to 200 daily. Jewish physicians and other professionals were taken from their jobs to concentration camps. On March 22, President Roosevelt invited 33 states to work out a plan of aiding the political refugees of Germany and Austria at the Evian Conference, convened in France in July 1938. Two weeks before the conference, the London Times reported: "Men and women, young and old, are taken each day and each night from their homes or in the streets and carried off, the more fortunate to Austrian prisons, and the rest to Dachau." From the outset, the president made it clear that the conference would not result in "an increase or revision of U.S. immigration quotas," which stood at an annual figure of 27,370 for Germany and Austria combined. 3,000 Jews waited daily at the American Consulate in Vienna, in vain; more than 10,000 requests lay on the desk of the Australian Consul, unanswered. The U.S. even refused to allow unused quotas from other countries to be made available for refugees. At the Evian Conference, only the Dominican Republic expressed willingness to take in a few thousand Jews. The conference was not only a total failure, it was a disaster - by pointing out to the Nazis that they were eliminating a segment of humanity that nobody wanted. The writer is a retired professor of international relations at City University in New York.
2018-08-10 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive