The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places/usa/conspiracy.001


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac - American Failure to Provide Refuge
Summary: The failure of the Wagner-Rogers bill (Children's Rescue Bill)
         and lobbying efforts to defeat it...
Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.almanac.bc.ca
Followup-To: alt.revisionism 
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Wagner,Rogers,Kinnicutt

Archive/File: places/usa/conspiracy.001
Last-modified: 1996/04/24

William Perl, author of the 1989 book "The Holocaust Conspiracy," holds
that it was concerted and deliberate action, taken by many of the nations of
the world, that made it impossible for the Jews of Europe to escape Hitler's
Nazi government; this, he says, directly led to the Holocaust. The book
mentions the Swiss government's insistence, for instance, that Jewish
passports (issued in Germany) be clearly marked, and German compliance with
that demand, as one example of an event supporting his thesis. He then
presents the failure of the Wagner-Rogers bill in the U.S. Congress as
another example:

   "Stimulated by the events of Crystal Night, on February 9, 1939,
   Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of
   Massachusetts introduced identical bills in their respective houses
   of Congress to admit by special action 10,000 refugee children under
   14 years of age, in 1939 and another 10,000 in 1940. To avoid labor
   opposition, the bill provided that the children would not be
   permitted to work and would join their parents as soon as safety
   elsewhere was assured. The American Friends Service Committee, which
   volunteered their services, would organize the children's movements
   to the United States as well as their placement. Within 24 hours
   after the plan had become known, 4,000 American families had offered
   their homes to these children. Radio stations and newspapers were
   swamped with even more offers.

   But a powerful group of isolationists and anti-Semites banded
   together and planned their strategy to prevent these bills from
   becoming law.  By April, when the Congressional hearing started, the
   conspirators against the Children's Rescue Bill were well organized.
   Francis H.  Kinnicutt represented thirty 'patriotic organizations
   united in the Allied Patriotic Societies' of which he was
   president! These included the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American
   Legion, the Society of Mayflower Descendants, the Daughters of the
   American Revolution, the Lord's Day Alliance of the United States,
   the Daughters of the Confederacy, and other isolationist
   organizations.

   Mr. Kinnicutt spoke up quite openly, '...this is just part of a drive
   to go back to the condition when we were flooded with foreigners who
   tried to run the country on different lines from those laid down by
   the old stock...Strictly speaking, it is not a refugee bill at all,
   for by the nature of the case most of those admitted would be of the
   Jewish race.' There was of course more activity on the part of those
   united to prevent the bill from becoming law. There was heavy
   lobbying in Congress. Colonel John Taylor lobbied for the American
   Legion against the bill and in support of a bill by North Carolina
   Senator Robert Reynolds which would abolish all immigration to the
   United States for the next ten years. Mrs. Agnes Waters,
   representing, as she claimed, the Widows of World War I veterans,
   testified, that if the Children's Rescue Bill should pass, the United
   States 'would be made helpless to guarantee our children their rights
   under the Constitution to life, liberty and the pursuit of
   happiness...if this country is going to become the dumping ground for
   the persecuted minorities of Europe. The refugees...can never become
   loyal Americans.'

   Because the lobbying in Congress was going well, those who supported
   the bill hoped that the President might make his influence felt.
   Congresswoman O'Day of New York wrote to Mr. Roosevelt hoping to
   obtain a statement in favor of the bill. But the President refused to
   become involved in a subject opposed not only by many Republicans but
   bitterly resented by the conservative Democrats of the solid South.
   O'Day's letter forwarded to Mr. Roosevelt by his secretary carries on
   the margin in his own handwriting the notation" 'File - No action.'

   In Washington, more issues are often revealed and decided at
   diplomatic cocktail parties than at formal meetings. Mr. Pierrepoint
   Moffat, chief of the State Department's Division of European Affairs,
   reports in his diary, now in the National Archives, about such a
   cocktail party which points out clearer than the official debates the
   true nature of the attitude of the insiders toward this rescue
   attempt. Mrs. James Hougheling, wife of the all powerful Commissioner
   of Immigration said: 'The trouble with the Wagner-Rogers bill was
   that 20,000 children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly
   adults.'<10>

   Well, the bills never left the committee. The conspiracy of
   anti-Semites and isolationists succeeded in torpedoing the rescue
   bills and the children did not grow up into any kind of adults."
   (Perl, 19-21)

                             Work Cited

   Perl, William R.  The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy
   of Genocide.  New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989


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