Download or read book Paper Walls America and the Refugee Crisis 1938 1941 written by David S. Wyman and published by Plunkett Lake Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Paper Walls was the first scholarly book to deal with the question of America’s response to the Nazi assault on the European Jews. A revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard University, it was originally published in 1968... Those times were very different from these. There was little public receptivity to Holocaust studies then, and only limited academic interest... The scholarly reviews, of which there were several, were favorable. But the general press paid little attention to the book... A pioneer in its field, Paper Walls first established the thesis that three features of American society in the 1930’s and 1940’s were key to understanding the nation’s inadequate response to the refugee crisis. They were anti-Semitism, nativistic nationalism, and the unemployment problem of the Great Depression. This basic concept has been followed in all the succeeding scholarly literature on the topic. This concept is also the main legacy from Paper Walls to my more recent book, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (1984). AlthoughAbandonment stands as a complete study in its own right, it is in fact the sequel toPaper Walls. It is a continuation of the history of America’s reaction to the plight of the European Jews in the Nazi era.” — David S. Wyman, Preface to the 1985 paperback edition of Paper Walls “[A] thorough study of American refugee policy from 1938 to 1941... On the basis of Wyman’s book, the United States stands indicted for a tragic failure to live up to its nineteenth-century ideal of asylum... Though Wyman makes no effort to disguise his strong sympathy for the refugees, his book... gives a careful and well-documented history of American refugee policy... The state department — above all Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long — emerges from his pages as the primary culprit... The attitude displayed by... the foreign service... led to the creation of the paper walls that Wyman so honestly and tragically describes in this important book.” — Robert A. Divine, Journal of American History “The first scholarly examination of American refugee policy between 1938 and 1941... What Wyman sets out to do he does extremely well. Paper Walls is a worthwhile addition to our growing knowledge of the policy of those who bore witness to the Holocaust.” — Henry L. Feingold, American Jewish Historical Quarterly “No one who reads this book will be able to ignore the fact that blatant antisemitism in the United States — from the public, from Congress, and from within the State Department — prevented our government from giving more than minimal assistance to the Jewish refugees... Professor Wyman has done an immense amount of research in primary and secondary sources and Paper Walls is extraordinarily sound and superbly documented. It is tightly written, well-organized, and logically presented.” — Leonard Dinnerstein, Jewish Social Studies “The conclusions of the book are stark and simple: ‘The half-filled quotas of mid-1940 to mid-1941, when refugee rescue remained entirely feasible, symbolize 20,000 to 25,000 lives lost...’ In the eight years from 1933 to 1941, about 250,000 refugees found safety here. The total is not small, but neither is the country which received them.” — Raul Hilberg, Political Science Quarterly “Generally [President Roosevelt] left refugee policy to the disposition of a hostile Congress and the State Department. Yet, as the author points out, neither Roosevelt, the State Department, nor Congress can be blamed entirely for what happened. ‘Viewed within the context of its times, United States refugee policy from 1938 to the end of 1941 was essentially what the American people wanted.’ In December 1938 only 8.7 per cent of the respondents to a Roper poll favored entry of a larger number of European refugees than the quota law allowed; fully 83 per cent were flatly opposed. This book tells a dismal story. While it is dear where the author’s sympathies lie, he tells the story with restraint; if anything, his approach and writing style underplay the pathos involved... Wyman has given us a scholarly description and analysis of the first act of the tragedy, which he promises to carry on through the war and postwar years.” — J. Joseph Huthmacher, The American Historical Review “This thoroughly documented study of the United States policies in regard to the refugee crisis of 1938-1941 is the best available source in this field and on that period. Drawing on material from some well known as well as several previously untapped sources, Wyman discusses both the ambiguous role of particular figures and organizations and the underlying forces at work in American society which influenced governmental policy and practices; anti-semitism, nativism, fear of unemployment and of Nazi subversives are shown as the major pressure to which America’s people and leaders succumbed.” — Joseph S. Roucek, The International Migration Review “This is a depressing topic impressively researched. Professor Wyman has investigated almost all the relevant primary and secondary materials in order to recount the tragic story of America’s indifference to the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe... Over two-thirds of Americans desired to keep the Jewish refugees out of the United Stales. Wyman argues that this sentiment was due to three sources: ‘nativism, anti-Semitism, and economic insecurity’... There is enough evidence in Wyman’s book to cause the Statue of Liberty to collapse for lack of moral foundation.” — John P. Diggins, The Historian “Professor Wyman skillfully investigates and thoughtfully analyzes the complexities of the crisis and the reasons why more was not done to aid the refugees in the crucial period between 1938 and 1941... The author examines the problem thoroughly from a number of standpoints... The State Department, the Congress, and the President really were reflecting the attitudes of the American people, who, Wyman asserts, were indifferent and even antagonistic to the refugees [because of] the economic insecurity engendered by the depression, nativistic nationalism, and anti-Semitism. A well-researched and lucidly, if not dispassionately, written book, Paper Walls is a sound, workmanlike study of a significant episode in our nation’s recent past.” — E. Berkeley Tompkins, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Download or read book Hungarian British Diplomacy 1938 1941 written by András Bán and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the relationship of Britain and Hungary during the crucial years 1938-1941. In addition to archival research in London and Budapest, Bán's work broadens into political, social, intellectual and cultural history.

Download or read book The Borrowed Years 1938 1941 written by Richard M. Ketchum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1991 with total page 940 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Re-creating the consciousness of America from 1938-1941, The Borrowed Years skillfully mingles the personal with the cataclysmic. It begins with a new generation of journalists--Murrow, Shirer, Severeid--bringing us the faraway voices of men named Chamberlain, Churchill, and Hitler, and tellsolationism and the woeful weakness of the U.S. military during that borrowed time when America lost its innocence. 20 photographs and 5 maps.

Download or read book Three Minutes in Poland written by Glenn Kurtz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

Download or read book Britain at Bay written by Alan Allport and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From statesmen and military commanders to ordinary Britons, a bold, sweeping history of Britain's entrance into World War II—and its efforts to survive it—illuminating the ways in which the war permanently transformed a nation and its people “Might be the single best examination of British politics, society and strategy in these four years that has ever been written.” —The Wall Street Journal Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict’s first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles pressing questions such as whether the war could have been avoided, how it could have been lost, how well the British lived up to their own values, and ultimately, what difference the war made to the fate of the nation. In answering these questions, he reexamines our assumptions and paints a vivid portrait of the ways in which the Second World War transformed British culture and society. This bracing account draws on a lively cast of characters—from the political and military leaders who made the decisions, to the ordinary citizens who lived through them—in a comprehensible and compelling single history of forty-six million people. A sweeping and groundbreaking epic, Britain at Bay gives us a fresh look at the opening years of the war, and illuminates the integral moments that, for better or for worse, made Britain what it is today.

Download or read book The History of the Industrialization of the USSR 1938 1941 written by Erdogan A and published by Erdogan Ahmet. This book was released on 2021-02-06 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents and Materials for The History of Industrialization of Soviet Union, 1938, 1941

Download or read book The Devils Alliance written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History remembers the Soviets and the Nazis as bitter enemies and ideological rivals, the two mammoth and opposing totalitarian regimes of World War II whose conflict would be the defining and deciding clash of the war. Yet for nearly a third of the conflict's entire timespan, Hitler and Stalin stood side by side as partners. The Pact that they agreed had a profound -- and bloody -- impact on Europe, and is fundamental to understanding the development and denouement of the war. In The Devils' Alliance, acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse explores the causes and implications of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, an unholy covenant whose creation and dissolution were crucial turning points in World War II. Forged by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, the nonaggression treaty briefly united the two powers in a brutally efficient collaboration. Together, the Germans and Soviets quickly conquered and divided central and eastern Europe -- Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Bessarabia -- and the human cost was staggering: during the two years of the pact hundreds of thousands of people in central and eastern Europe caught between Hitler and Stalin were expropriated, deported, or killed. Fortunately for the Allies, the partnership ultimately soured, resulting in the surprise June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union. Ironically, however, the powers' exchange of materiel, blueprints, and technological expertise during the period of the Pact made possible a far more bloody and protracted war than would have otherwise been conceivable. Combining comprehensive research with a gripping narrative, The Devils' Alliance is the authoritative history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact -- and a portrait of the people whose lives were irrevocably altered by Hitler and Stalin's nefarious collaboration.

Download or read book Hanna s Diary 1938 1941 written by Hanna Spencer and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2001-06-08 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the preface: "For forty-five years I had not opened the wooden box with the fancy hand-carved lid. I knew what was in it. Together with miscellaneous keepsakes and photographs, it contained six notebooks written in German. This was the journal I kept from 1938 to 1941, during a crucial period in many people's lives, including mine. The box had remained locked since 1942, when I had pulled down my own "iron curtain," shutting out the memories preserved on those pages. But the time eventually came for the curtain to be raised. The main reason for this change of mind was my profound regret that I had not quizzed my parents more about their personal history; I didn't want this to happen to my children and grandchildren. Thus I brought myself to open the box, literally and figuratively, and set about translating the diaries from German into English - strictly for the use of my family, or so I thought." Hanna Fischl, a Czech of Jewish descent, was a twenty-four-year-old teacher in a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia when Hitler's shadow loomed over Europe in 1938. No longer able to associate openly with her lover, Hans Feiertag, the talented, Christian composer whom she had loved since her teens, she began writing a diary at his request so that, once they were reunited, he could learn about her life while they had been apart. Written in a touching and candid style, Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941 is the result of that request. Hanna's Diary, 1938B1941 offers an intimate view of sweeping historical events that engulfed Europe and the world, evoking the creeping fear, desperate hopes, desertion of friends, and sense of isolation that Hanna Spencer felt as Nazism spread. The diary follows Spencer to England - where she faced misery of a different kind - and then to Canada, where, as a young immigrant with a PhD, she worked in her uncle's glove-making factory before finally landing a teaching job in Ottawa. Spencer describes her experiences lecturing on Czechoslovaki's history and its takeover by the Nazis, and her resulting celebrity on the Ontario lecture circuit. Written with clear wit and a sharp eye for detail, Hanna's Diary, 1938B1941 is a must-read for anyone interested in the human side of the Second World War.

Download or read book The Unwanted written by Michael Dobbs and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The powerfully told story of a group of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape the Nazis, and an illuminating account of America's struggle with the refugee crisis caused by the rise of Hitler. Official tie-in to the U.S. Holocaust Museum multi-year exhibit"--

Download or read book Hitler s American Friends written by Bradley W. Hart and published by Thomas Dunne Books. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Download or read book Germany On Their Minds written by Anne C. Schenderlein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

Download or read book Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hanna s Diary 1938 1941 written by Hanna Spencer and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2001 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hanna's Diary, 1938-1941 offers an intimate view of the events that engulfed Europe and the world, evoking the fear, desertion of friends, and sense of isolation that Hanna felt as Nazism spread."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Excerpts III 1938 1941 Toward War written by Henry Breckinridge and published by . This book was released on 1944 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Jews of Nazi Vienna 1938 1945 written by Ilana Fritz Offenberger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Jewish life in Vienna just after the Nazi-takeover in 1938. Who were Vienna’s Jews, how did they react and respond to Nazism, and why? Drawing upon the voices of the individuals and families who lived during this time, together with new archival documentation, Ilana Offenberger reconstructs the daily lives of Vienna’s Jews from Anschluss in March 1938 through the entire Nazi occupation and the eventual dissolution of the Jewish community of Vienna. Offenberger explains how and why over two-thirds of the Jewish community emigrated from the country, while one-third remained trapped. A vivid picture emerges of the co-dependent relationship this community developed with their German masters, and the false hope they maintained until the bitter end. The Germans murdered close to one third of Vienna’s Jewish population in the “final solution” and their family members who escaped the Reich before 1941 chose never to return; they remained dispersed across the world. This is not a triumphant history. Although the overwhelming majority survived the Holocaust, the Jewish community that once existed was destroyed.

Download or read book From peace to war 1938 1941 written by David Lawrence and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Policy Toward Immigration of Refugees from Nazism 1938 1941 written by David Sword Wyman and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: