Archbishop ‘blamed
Jews for Nazi policy’
From Nicholas Wapshott in New York |
COSMO GORDON LANG,
the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928-42 |
COSMO GORDON LANG, the Archbishop of
Canterbury from 1928-42, said shortly before the Second World War that
he believed German Jews had brought on themselves the hatred of Hitler,
according to newly released diaries.
The High Commissioner for Refugees, James
Grover McDonald, met Archbishop Lang, recording in his diary his
suggestion that “the Jews themselves” might be responsible
for the “excesses of the Nazis”.
Mr McDonald served at the League of Nations between 1933 and 1935. He
met similar indifference to the plight of German Jews from Nancy Astor,
the Conservative MP who led the “Cliveden Set”, which advocated
the appeasement of Hitler’s expansionist territorial demands.
“Did I not after all believe that there must be something in the
Jews themselves which had brought them persecution throughout all ages?”
he recorded her asking in his diaries, presented to the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington yesterday. “Was it not
in the final analysis their responsibility?” “To this thesis
I took violent exception,” he notes.
Mr McDonald, whose mother was German and who later became America’s
first ambassador to Israel, also records telling Franklin D. Roosevelt
as early as 1933 that the lives of German Jews were endangered by the
Nazis. President Roosevelt was sympathetic and “had a plan in
mind to reach over the head of Hitler to the German people”.
Severin Hochberg, an historian at the museum who has read the cache
of 10,000 typed pages, said: “McDonald conveyed the severity of
the Nazi hatred towards Jews and he found Roosevelt keenly aware of
the nature of the regime and the crisis. He told the President that
the Nazis’ first priority wasn’t just to purge communists
and socialists but that from the very beginning they were against Jews.”
The Holocaust saw six million Jews die at the hands of the Nazis between
1933 and 1945, culminating in the so-called “Final Solution of
the Jewish Question in Europe”.
President Roosevelt, criticised by historians for not doing enough to
facilitate more immigration into America by German Jews fleeing Nazism,
was hampered by domestic political considerations.But McDonald reveals
that he did press immigration officials into increasing the limit on
refugees arriving from Germany.
“My father found that (Roosevelt) was very interested and aware
and would have liked to help, but there were real political problems,”
Barbara McDonald Stewart, 77, the diplomat’s daughter, who presented
the diaries to the museum, said: “It was the Depression, and how
many refugees could he allow to immigrate when millions were out of
work in America?” McDonald met many world figures including Hitler,
Herman Goering, Benito Mussolini and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who later
became Pope Pius XII.
McDonald found Hitler openly anti-Semitic. “As to Jews,”
Hitler said, “why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown
out of places when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are out on
the streets. No, the world has no ground for complaint. Germany is not
fighting merely the battle of Germany. It is fighting the battle of
the world.”
McDonald recorded in his diary: “The man does have the eyes of
a fanatic, but he has in addition, I think, much more reserve and control
and intelligence than most fanatics.”
When in August 1933 McDonald met Cardinal Pacelli, the head of the papal
secretariat at the Vatican, he found him “noncommittal”
and more concerned about the plight of Bavarian Catholics than of German
Jews. The indifference to Jews apparently continued when the cardinal
was elected Pope Pius XII and refused to employ the authority of the
Catholic Church to halt the ill treatment of Jews.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1084972,00.html
LINK: Diaries
of first ambasador to Israel given to US Holocaust Museum.
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