France’s national train company SNCF acknowledges with “profound pain” in Florida its wartime role in the deportation of Jews from 1942 to 1944.
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France’s national train company SNCF acknowledges with “profound pain” in Florida its wartime role in the deportation of Jews from 1942 to 1944.You’d think that Veterans Day—what Commonwealth countries call Remembrance Day and the French simply call 11 Novembre—would be an occasion to think about it our soldiers and policies in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but instead there’s been a lot of talk about Nazis this past week.
First, political entertainer Glenn Beck entertained his faithful by slamming a Holocaust survivor for not being Republican by referring to liberal philanthropist George Soros as “a Jewish boy sending Jews to the death camps.”
Then, looking to obtain contracts for train projects in the United States, France’s train company SNCF acknowledged with “profound pain” in Florida something that the company had yet to do directly in France: the state-run company’s active wartime compliance and contracts with Germans from 1942 to 1944 that resulted in the company transporting about 75,000 Jews toward concentration camps during the German Occupation of France. The company’s previous unwillingness to acknowledge its wartime role had all but blacklisted it from the competition for major rail contracts in Florida and California. Now, France’s ambassador for human rights, while encouraging SNCF to be upfront about its wartime history, has accused American politicians of exploiting the issue for protectionist purposes.
This was followed up over the weekend by The New York Times’ revelation of a 600-page Justice Department report detailing how, in the years following WWII, the U.S. government and its intelligence services assisted the entry of Nazis into the United States and provided them with safe haven.
So Glenn Beck’s listeners may have gotten a good chuckle, SNCF is back in the running for the Tampa-Orlando high-speed line, and it turns out that that old neighbor of yours you thought might have been a Nazi might actually have been one.
– GLK