LEST WE FORGET: JUNE 6, 1944, 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF D-DAY— THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF WWII & OF THE HOLOCAUST

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Contents:

D-Day at 70: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, May 29, 2014—  Seventy years ago this June 6, the Americans, British, and Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion of Europe since the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 B.C.

The Jewish Contribution to D-Day – A Personal Account: Walter Bingham, Arutz Sheva, June 6, 2013— I venture to guess that the largest number of readers were not yet born when on one sunny 6th of June, Jews as well as the rest of the free world prayed for the success of the long awaited second front that began on that day.

Obama at Omaha: Roger Cohen, New York Times, June 5, 2014— What kind of figure will Obama cut at Omaha?

The Birthplace of a Legend: Steve Linde, E Jewish Philanthropy, June 5, 2014— Two days before Passover in 1944, on the night before he and his family were rounded up and forced into ghettos and later deported to Auschwitz, 15-year-old Elie Wiesel dug a hole in the garden of his home and buried a gold watch his beloved grandfather had given him.

On Topic Links

Last Rites: Joe O’Connor, National Post, June 5, 2014

Then and Now in Pictures: 70 Years Later, Normandy's Beaches Retain Memory of D-Day Invasion, Globe & Mail, June 1, 2014

D-Day in Numbers: Telegraph, June 5, 2014

Little Israeli Flag Makes Big Impact at Syria Protest in London (VIDEO): UCI, June 3, 2014

Israel Air Force is Deadlier Than Ever: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ynet, May 8, 2014

D-DAY AT 70           

Victor Davis Hanson                                                                                           

National Review, May 29, 2014

Seventy years ago this June 6, the Americans, British, and Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion of Europe since the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 b.c. About 160,000 troops landed on five Normandy beaches and linked up with airborne troops in a masterly display of planning and courage. Within a month, almost a million Allied troops had landed in France and were heading eastward toward the German border. Within eleven months the war with Germany was over.

The western front required the diversion of hundreds of thousands of German troops. It weakened Nazi resistance to the Russians while robbing the Third Reich of its valuable occupied European territory. The impatient and long-suffering Russians had demanded of their allies a second front commensurate with their own sacrifices. Their Herculean efforts by war’s end would account for two out of every three dead German soldiers — at a cost of 20 million Russian civilian and military casualties. Yet for all the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was largely responsible for his war with Nazi Germany. In 1939, he signed a foolish non-aggression pact with Hitler that allowed the Nazis to gobble up Western democracies. Hitler’s Panzers were aided by Russians in Poland and overran Western Europe fueled by supplies from the Soviets.

The Western Allies had hardly been idle before D-Day. They had taken North Africa and Sicily from the Germans and Italians. They were bogged down in brutal fighting in Italy. The Western Allies and China fought the Japanese in the Pacific, Burma, and China. The U.S. and the British Empire fought almost everywhere. They waged a multiform war on and under the seas. They eventually destroyed Japanese and German heavy industry with a costly and controversial strategic-bombing campaign. The Allies sent friends such as the Russians and Chinese billions of dollars worth of food and war matériel.

In sum, while Russia bore the brunt of the German land war, the Western Allies fought all three Axis powers everywhere else and in every conceivable fashion. Yet if D-Day was brilliantly planned and executed, the follow-up advance through France in June 1944 was not always so. The Allies seemed to know the texture of every beach in Normandy, but nothing about the thick bocage just a few miles inland from Omaha Beach. The result was that the Americans were bogged down in the French hedgerows for almost seven weeks until late July — suffering about ten times as many casualties as in the Normandy landings themselves.

So how did the Allies get from the beaches of Normandy to Germany in less than a year? Largely by overwhelming the Wehrmacht with lots of good soldiers and practical war matériel. If German tanks, mines, machine guns, and artillery were superbly crafted, their more utilitarian American counterparts were good enough — and about ten times as numerous. Mechanically intricate German Tiger and Panther tanks could usually knock out durable American Sherman tanks, but the Americans produced almost 50,000 of the latter, and the Germans fewer than 8,000 of the former. Over Normandy, British and American fighter aircraft not only were as good as or better than German models but were far more numerous. By mid 1944, Germany had produced almost no four-engine bombers. The British and Americans had built almost 50,000, which by 1944 were systematically leveling German cities.

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were far more pragmatic supreme commanders than the increasingly delusional and sick Adolf Hitler. American and British war planners such as George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Alan Brooke understood grand strategy better than the more experienced German chief of staff. Allied field generals such as George S. Patton and Bernard Montgomery were comparable to German legends like Gerd von Rundstedt and Erwin Rommel, who were worn out by 1944. The German soldier was the more disciplined, experienced, armed, and deadly warrior of World War II. But his cause was bad, and by 1944 his enemies were far more numerous and far better supplied. No soldiers fought better on their home soil than did the Russians, and none more resourcefully abroad than the British Tommy and the American G.I., when bolstered by ample air, armor, and artillery support. Omaha Beach to central Germany was about the same distance as the Russian front to Berlin. But the Western Allies covered the same approximate ground in about a quarter of the time as had the beleaguered Russians.

D-Day ushered in the end of the Third Reich. It was the most brilliantly conducted invasion in military history, and probably no one but a unique generation of British, Canadians, and Americans could have pulled it off.                                        

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THE JEWISH CONTRIBUTION TO D-DAY –

A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

Walter Bingham                          

Arutz Sheva, June 6, 2014

I venture to guess that the largest number of readers were not yet born when on one sunny 6th of June, Jews as well as the rest of the free world prayed for the success of the long awaited second front that began on that day. If you are still guessing at what I am talking about, then let me explain. It was the June 6th in 1944, the 15th of Sivan 5704, now 70 years ago, which was the beginning of the end for one of the most horrendous, if not the most cruel period in the history of the Jewish people in our entire history. The following are my recollections of Operation Overlord and an account of the part that Jewish refugees played in the British Armed Forces during World War II.

I acknowledge of course, that Jews from America and other places gave equally valuable service, but I confine myself here to the British Army, to which my knowledge mainly extents. No one knew that Operation Overlord – the invasion of Europe by British and American troops that began on the coast of Northern France in Normandy on that day, commonly known as D-Day – would bring to light what was later correctly described as the Holocaust of six million Jews, along with millions of other innocents. Even before that date, my unit was already confined in a large London park, where we were briefed on the mission which we were about to take part. This information included the terrain we were to encounter and more. Hence, we were kept under guard so that this information would not reach the outside world, in what was referred to as a "concentration camp" in the very literal sense, where the only way out was in convoy to the port of embarkation.

It was ten days into the operation that I drove my light Humber Ambulance to the port of Harwich and embarked onto one of those Liberty ships, mass-produced in the U.S., to sail to Normandy in north-western France. By that time, already some elements of Mulberry Harbour as it was then called, large floating obstructions to serve as breakwaters were towed across from England and had reached the French coast, to facilitate the unloading of ships onto the beaches. Transferred from the ship onto landing barges, I made it onto the beach. Paths to the interior which were secured earlier were marked by tapes to be free of mines. My unit was facing fanatical SS troops and some Hitler-youth who would not come out of their dugouts despite loudspeaker warning. Our tanks had to run over them. We eventually crossed the Odon, a small river and came to halt before the Orne, the large river in the area. The battle that became known as one of the fiercest of the early days of the invasion was about to begin on July 10th. The battle of Hill 112 took place on the highest point between the rivers Odon and Orne in an effort to capture Caen, the main city of Normandy. During that period, I saw the first 1,000 bomber raids on Caen. It was an awesome sight as well as sound.

There was a great contribution of those Jewish men and women of an older generation, who fled to England from Hitlerite oppression to join the British Army already in the early war years. As they were mainly German and Austrian nationals, if they were captured, they would be shot without further question. That was the risk they undertook and they were requested to sign a declaration declaring they understood the situation. “I hereby certify, that I understand the risks to which I and my relatives may be exposed by my employment in the British Army outside the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding this, I certify that I am willing to be employed in any theatre of war." To sign this was already a brave act before even having donned a uniform.

It was in the very early years of the war, when thousands were held in camps set up for enemy aliens. They wanted to get out and volunteer for army service to fight the Nazis. Eventually, more than 6,000 of these men were released to join the British Army. At first, they were only allowed to become members of the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps. They became the Army’s handmaidens – teacher was turned into bricklayer, merchant banker into carpenter, and philosopher into general laborer – as they were not trusted with arms. Their early training was with spades and broomsticks instead of rifles. Having completed their training, they were dispersed all over England, to different jobs where their skill and training could be put to use. Some were distinguished engineers and architects. This enabled them to carry out difficult and important work and initiate improvements.

But these refugee soldiers were not satisfied. They wanted the chance to fight, and at last in 1943, were accepted when a call came for volunteers. At first it was only for the most dangerous jobs, then the commandos, the parachute regiments and later for the rest of the units including intelligence. At Anzio and in Normandy, on the Rhine and in the south of France, they were the Army’s pathfinders, familiar with the terrain since childhood and fluent linguists. Those who were accepted as volunteers had a deep conviction of the cause for which they fought. They went into enemy country in British uniform or as civilians, knowing that if they were captured they would be executed as spies and traitors. Not to mention what would have happened to them had they been discovered to be Jews.

They won promotion and hundreds of them became officers, many leading British troops into action. In the Intelligence Corps, officers from Berlin and Hamburg planned moves which enabled their colleagues from Vienna and Cologne to catch criminals. Later they became interpreters as well as fighters. In the early post war administration of Germany and Austria, the Control Commission, the former bricklayers took leading parts as interpreters at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, in legal departments and broadcasting through the critical days. As the war progressed many more young refugees who lived in England became of military age and successively joined the British Armed forces…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

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OBAMA AT OMAHA                                                           

Roger Cohen                                                                                                                     

New York Times, June 5, 2014

What kind of figure will Obama cut at Omaha? On the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings Friday, the American president will join the French president, François Hollande, at the American Cemetery on a bluff overlooking the beach, code-named Omaha, where German machine guns ripped into Allied forces coming ashore in the name of freedom. Of the estimated 4,500 dead that day, more than half were United States personnel. Casualties at cliff-ringed Omaha were the highest of the five beaches.

I wish I could say he will cut a convincing figure. Any American leader must embody the nation’s commitment to the spread of liberty, the defense of allies and the sanctity of the American “red lines” that are the guarantors of global security. I wish Obama was persuasive in this role in part because his story is a very American one. The unlikely rise to the pinnacle of an African-American, so named, stirred hopes across a world that had grown disillusioned with the United States and its universal promise.

But Obama at bloody Omaha, in the sixth year of his presidency, falls short at a time when his aides have been defining the cornerstone of his foreign policy as: “Don’t do stupid stuff.” Americans do not respond well to doctrine defined in negative terms. As citizens of a nation that represents an idea, they are hard-wired to the optimism of that idea. Since when did the can-do nation become the can-avoid nation? He falls short at a time when Syria bleeds more than three years into the uprising, its dead and displaced pile up, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, reinforced by Obama’s last-minute retreat from the red line he had set on use of chemical weapons, holds a farcical election to rubber-stamp his tyranny.

So conspicuous is the American failure in Syria that one of the nation’s bravest diplomats and finest Arabists, Robert Ford, has resigned from the government. He told Christiane Amanpour of CNN this week that he was “no longer in a position where I felt I could defend the American policy.” The United States, he said, had been “behind the curve,” failing to provide early on the military and logistical assistance, and the cash, that would have enabled the opposition to “gain more ground a couple of years ago more quickly.” This, from a diplomat schooled in restraint, amounted to a fierce condemnation. It is warranted.

Obama falls short at a time when Vladimir Putin, emboldened by that Syrian retreat and the perception of American weakness, has annexed Crimea — the first such land grab in Europe by a major power since 1945. (Putin will attend the Normandy commemoration.) Obama falls short as Putin’s Russian surrogates in eastern Ukraine wreak havoc. On Europe, until very recently, this president has been content with the de rigueur minimum, convinced the old Continent was old news. He falls short, also, when the Egyptian dreams of liberty and pluralism that arose in Tahrir Square have given way to the landslide victory of a former general in an “election” only a little less grotesque than Assad’s in Syria.

On all these issues — Syria, Ukraine, Egypt — President Obama was unconvincing in his recent foreign policy speech at West Point. He said his decision to avoid military involvement in Syria “does not mean we shouldn’t help the Syrian people stand up against a dictator.” Well, the Syrian people are still waiting. He said America, standing with its allies, had given “a chance for the Ukrainian people to choose their future” — except, of course, those in Crimea and the overrun eastern area. He said the United States will “persistently press for reforms that the Egyptian people have demanded” — as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi applies his iron fist…Obama would argue he is a realist adapting to a changed world in the wake of two taxing wars. He has a point. But realism did not win the day at Omaha. No realist would have attempted such impossible landings. If he takes one lesson away from the beaches for the remainder of his presidency, it should be that.

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THE BIRTHPLACE OF A LEGEND                                                                        

Steve Linde                                                                                                                        

E Jewish Philanthropy, June 5, 2014

Two days before Passover in 1944, on the night before he and his family were rounded up and forced into ghettos and later deported to Auschwitz, 15-year-old Elie Wiesel dug a hole in the garden of his home and buried a gold watch his beloved grandfather had given him. Two decades later, after surviving the Holocaust, Wiesel returned to Sighet by himself and, under the cover of darkness, crept into the garden to see if the watch was still there. A week ago Sunday, I sat in the house in Sighet in which he was born in 1928, and moderated an interview with him via Skype in New York.

As he sat in New York, smiling with his jaw resting in his hand, I asked him where he had buried the famous watch. He laughed. “Twenty years later, when I came back to Sighet, I found where I buried my gold watch under a tree, and I put it back,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to find it.” The story speaks volumes, according to Wiesel scholar Joel Rappel. “It’s symbolic,” Rappel says. “Just like the watch, time stood still.” But although the watch remains buried, its memory lives on in our minds because of Wiesel’s story.

Wiesel’s parents, Shlomo Wiesel and Sarah Fieg, as well as his younger sister Tzipora, died in Nazi death camps, while he and his two older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, survived. Some 10,000 Jews from Sighet, almost half of the town’s population, were loaded onto freight trains from May 16 to 22, 1944, and sent to Auschwitz. Only 1,000 to 2,000 survived, and while a few returned to Sighet after the war, the majority were spread across the world. On the weekend of May 16-19 this year, more than 100 “Sigheteni” – a few survivors as well as second- and third-generation Jews from the Transylvanian border town, including some of Wiesel’s cousins from Israel – gathered in Sighet to mark the 70th-anniversary commemoration of the Jewish deportations under the Hungarian government. They came from Israel, the US, the UK, South America and South Africa.

In a particularly moving ceremony at the Sighet City Hall on the morning of May 18, in the presence of Mayor Ovidiu Nemes, they lit candles for their relatives who perished during the Holocaust, and cried as they told their stories. That afternoon, they joined residents of the town in attending the opening of the Holocaust Cellar education center adjacent to the garden in Wiesel’s home, which Wiesel himself opened as a Holocaust Museum in 2002. In total, more than half a million Jews from northern Transylvania were murdered or died during the Holocaust; the learning center contains photographs and archival material dedicated to the local victims. “The education center commemorates the terrible fate that befell the Jews of this area, and ensures their story will not be forgotten,” said Chaim Chesler, founder of Limmud FSU and chairman of the Claims Conference Memorial Committee. “Next year, I hope Wiesel will be able to come here himself to see it for himself, together with his family.”

It was Chesler who initiated the idea of the education center, which was dug out and renovated over the last year or two under the supervision of Eli Izhaki, a retired IDF colonel and Jewish Agency official. Itzhaki grew up in Transylvania and lost most of his family during the Holocaust – including two brothers, four-year-old Moshe Iszak and three-year-old Hershel Iszak. “It took a lot of hard work to dig up this cellar and renovate it,” Izhaki said. “But it was worth it. It means a great deal to me and other survivors.” Funding for the Holocaust Cellar came jointly from the government of Romania, the City of Sighet, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Romanian Jewish Federation, the Caritatea Foundation and Limmud FSU. Among those in attendance were Romanian Religious Affairs Minister Viktor Opaschi, Deputy Education Minister Irinia Cajal, Claims Conference Vice President Ben Helfgott, Sighet Jewish community head Harry Marcus, Romanian Chief Rabbi Rafael Sheffer, cantor Yosef Adler, and Eliesabet Ungurianu, director of the Wiesel Institute in Romania. The rabbi spoke in Romanian and Hebrew, Helfgott in Yiddish and English, and the cantor sang kaddish.

 “This is one of the most emotional moments of my life,” Nemes said, speaking through a translator. “The Holocaust is the cruelest crime of humanity. I have made a promise to the Jews of Sighet to make the town the most important place of pilgrimage in Transylvania. We are trying all the time to remember those Jews who were once part of this city. To all of you who once had family in Sighet, welcome home!” “Not only have I witnessed this morning a very wonderful memorial service, but I was very touched by it,” said Helfgott, 84, a Holocaust survivor from Poland who now lives in the UK. “Those dealing with Holocaust education and remembrance are performing a very important task, because we should never forget what has happened. I don’t know of any other particular town that has made such a moving memorial.”…

For his part, in the Skype interview, Wiesel said the world had not yet learned enough from the Holocaust. “Sighet has never left me,” he said, noting that his parents had kept wine in the cellar of their house. “Shabbat in Sighet was like no other Shabbat I ever had, except Shabbat in Jerusalem. I hope to come to Sighet next year.” Wiesel, the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor, is also a prominent human rights activist and the author of some five dozen books. His best-known book, Night, is based on his horrific experiences in the Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald camps. The Nobel Committee, in awarding him the peace prize in 1986, called him a “messenger to mankind,” saying that through his struggle to come to terms with “his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler’s death camps” as well as his “practical work in the cause of peace,” he had delivered a powerful message “of peace, atonement and human dignity” to humanity.

He and his wife, Marion, established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity soon after he received the Nobel Prize, “to combat indifference, intolerance and injustice through international dialogues and youth-focused programs that promote acceptance, understanding and equality.” He has devoted his life to fighting prejudice and racism, as well as the violation of human rights throughout the world. “To all of you at the opening of the new Holocaust Cellar in my home in my little town of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains, I so wish that I could be there with you today,” he said, in his soft, deep voice. “The house I was raised in is now a museum, but to me it will always be uniquely special, eliciting the warmest of memories until the darkness of the kingdom of night befell us.”…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

CIJR Wishes all its Friends and Supporters Shabbat Shalom!

Last Rites: Joe O’Connor, National Post, June 5, 2014 —‘Mortar shells were raining down’: Canadian chaplain from iconic war photo risked his life to comfort the dead

Then and Now in Pictures: 70 Years Later, Normandy's Beaches Retain Memory of D-Day Invasion, Globe & Mail, June 1, 2014—Reuters photographer Chris Helgren compiled a series of archive pictures taken during the 1944 invasion and then went back to the same places, to photograph them as they appear today.

D-Day in Numbers: Telegraph, June 5, 2014

Little Israeli Flag Makes Big Impact at Syria Protest in London (VIDEO): Joshua Levitt, Algemeiner, June 2, 2014 —The appearance of a small Israeli flag and a handwritten sign at a Syrian protest rally in London’s Trafalgar Square made a big impact.

Israel Air Force is Deadlier Than Ever: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ynet, May 8, 2014 — IAF believes it can shorten next war on its own by striking thousands of targets a day, dropping more than 10 accurate bombs from one plane on different areas.

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L'institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com