RUTH: A Little Known Bit of History

Seventy years ago, the names of 50 German-Americans appeared in a full-page advertisement in ten daily newspapers ‘in denunciation of the Hitler policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews of Europe .’ The most prominent signatory was George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth.

Babe Ruth is remembered for his home runs on the field and his hot dog binges and other peccadilloes off the field. But as the American public is about to discover, there was another Babe Ruth – one who went to bat for women and minorities, including the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.bc

Throughout the spring and summer of 1942, Allied leaders received a steady stream of reports about the Germans massacring tens of thousands of Jewish civilians.

Information reaching the Roosevelt administration in August revealed that the killings were not random atrocities, but part of a Nazi plan to systematically annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. In late November the State Department publicly verified this news, and on December 17, the US and British governments and their allies issued a declaration acknowledging and condemning the mass murder.

But aside from that Allied statement, the Roosevelt administration had no intention of doing anything in response to the killings. There was no serious consideration of opening America’s doors – or the doors of British-ruled Palestine – to Jewish refugees. There was no discussion of taking any steps to rescue the Jews. As quickly as the mass murder had been revealed, it began to fade from the public eye.

Dorothy Thompson was determined to keep that from happening. And Babe Ruth would help her.

Thompson (1893-1961) was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. She was once described by Time magazine as one of the two most influential women in the United States , second only to Eleanor Roosevelt. In the autumn of 1942, Thompson contacted the World Jewish Congress with a novel idea: mobilizing German-Americans to speak out against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

As a journalist, Thompson understood the man-bites-dog news value of German-Americans protesting against Germany – especially in view of the well-publicized pro-Nazi sentiment in some segments of the German- American community. Just a few years earlier, more than 20,000 supporters of the German American Bund had filled Madison Square Garden for a pro-Hitler rally.

The World Jewish Congress agreed to foot the bill for publishing Thompson’s anti- Nazi statement as a newspaper advertisement.

She drafted the text and set about recruiting signatories. Seventy years ago, on Dec. 22, the “Christmas Declaration by men and women of German ancestry” appeared as a full-page ad inThe New York Times and nine other major daily newspapers.

“We Americans of German descent raise our voices in denunciation of the Hitler policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews of Europe and against the barbarities committed by the Nazis against all other innocent peoples under their sway,” the declaration begins. “These horrors… are, in particular, a challenge to those who, like ourselves are descendants of the Germany that once stood in the foremost ranks of civilization.”

The ad goes on to “utterly repudiate every thought and deed of Hitler and his Nazis,” and urge the people of Germany “to overthrow a regime which is the infamy of German history.”

The names of 50 prominent German-Americans appeared on the advertisement.

There were several notable academics, such as Princeton University dean Christian Gauss and University of Maine president Arthur Mauck. Leading Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, news correspondent William Shirer and orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch appeared in the ad. So did Freda Kirchwey, editor of the political news weekly The Nation, and Oswald Heck, speaker of the New York State Assembly.

But the signatory who was by far the best known to the American public was George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Widely regarded as the greatest baseball player in the history of the game, Ruth, known as the Sultan of Swat, at that time held the records for the most home runs in a season (60) and the most home runs in a career (714) as well as numerous other batting records. Having excelled as a pitcher before switching to the outfield and gaining fame as a hitter, the amazingly versatile Ruth even held the pitching record for the most shutouts in a season by a left-hander. Not surprisingly, Ruth was one of the first players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

By participating in this German-American protest against the Holocaust, Ruth used his powerful name to help attract public attention to the Jews’ plight. Timing is everything, both on the baseball field and beyond, and the timing of Ruth’s protest was crucial: precisely at the moment when US officials were hoping to brush the Jewish refugee problem aside, Babe Ruth helped keep it front and center.

In an era when professional athletes rarely lent their names to political causes, and when most Americans – including the Roosevelt administration – took little interest in the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, Babe Ruth raised his voice in protest. Ruth’s action is all the more memorable when one contrasts it with the other kinds of behavior that all too often land athletes on the front pages these days.

Filmmaker Byron Hunter and Ruth’s granddaughter, Linda Ruth Tosetti, have collaborated on a soon-to-be-released documentary, Universal Babe. Those who are accustomed to thinking of Ruth’s off-the-field activities in terms of binges and carousing will be pleasantly surprised to learn from the film of the slugger’s noble efforts on behalf of women’s baseball, the Negro Baseball Leagues and the Jews of Hitler’s Europe.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC.

BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS
Andrew Roberts, Member Parliament

I would like to speak to you today as an historian, because it seems to me that the State of Israel has packed more history into her 62 years on the planet than many other nations have in six hundred.
There are many surprising things about this tiny, feisty, brave nation the size of Wales , but the most astonishing is that she has survived at all.
The very day after the UN declared Israel a country in 1948,
five Arab countries attacked, and she has been struggling for her right to     life ever since. And that is what we are here for today, to reiterate   Israel ‘s right to self-defense, inherent in all legitimate countries.
>
>
From Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25
million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab
League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers
only eight thousand square miles, and is home to seven million citizens,
one-fifth of whom are Arabs.
The Jews of the Holy Land are thus
surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and
sixty times their population, yet their last, best hope of ending two
millennia of international persecution, the State of Israel has somehow survived.
When during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery; today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous
onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.
>
Jerusalem is the site of the Temple of Solomon and Herod. The stones
of a palace erected by King David himself are even now being unearthed
just outside the walls of Jerusalem . Everything that makes a nation
state legitimate—bloodshed, soil tilled, two millennia of continuous
residence, international agreements ,argues for Israel ‘s right to exist, yet that is still denied by the Arab League.
For many of their governments, which are rich enough to have economically solved the   Palestinian refugee problem decades ago, it is useful to have Israel
as a scapegoat to divert attention from the tyranny, failure and
corruption of their own regimes.
>
>
the tragic truth is that it suits Arab states very well to have the
Palestinians endure permanent refugee status, and whenever Israel
puts forward workable solutions they have been stymied by those whose
interests put the destruction of Israel before the genuine well being
of the Palestinians.
Both King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt were assassinated when they attempted to come to some kind of   accommodation with a country that most sane people now accept is not
going away.
“We owe to the Jews,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, “a system of
ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together. The Jewish contribution to finance, science, the arts, academia, commerce and industry, literature, philanthropy and
politics has been astonishing relative to their tiny numbers.  Yet we tend to treat Israel like a leper on the
international scene, merely for defending herself, and threatening her with academic boycotts if she builds a separation wall that has so far reduced suicide bombings by 95% over three years.
>
>
>    It is a disgrace that no senior member of the Royal Family has ever
undertaken an official visit to Israel , as though the country is still in quarantine after more than six decades. Her Majesty the Queen
has been on the throne for 57 years and in that time has undertaken
250 official visits to 129 countries, yet has not yet set foot in Israel . She has visited 14 Arab countries, so it cannot have been that she wasn’t in the region.
Although Prince Philip’s mother,
Princess Alice, is buried on the Mount of Olives because of her
status as Righteous Among Gentiles, the Foreign Office ordained that his
visit to his mother’s grave in 1994 had to be in a private capacity only. Royal visits are one of the ways legitimacy is conferred on nations, and the Coalition Government should end the Foreign Office’s de- facto boycott.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish people recognized that they must have their own state, a homeland where they could forever be safe from a repetition of such horrors. Putting their trust in Western Civilization was never again going to be enough.
Since then, Israel has had to fight no fewer than five major wars for her very
existence.
>
>
She has been on the front line in the War against Terror and has been
fighting the West’s battles for it, decades before 9/11 or 7/7 ever
happened.
Radical Islam is never going to accept the concept of an Israeli State, so the struggle is likely to continue for another sixty years, but the Jews know that that is less dangerous than entrusting their security to anyone else.
>
>
Very often in Britain , especially when faced with the overwhelmingly
anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we
fail to ask ourselves what we would have done placed in their position?
The population of the United Kingdom of 63 million is nine
times that of Israel . In July 2006, to take one example at random,
Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed eight
patrolmen and kidnapped two others, and that summer fired four     thousand Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further forty-three civilians.
>
>
Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire thirty-six thousand rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 87 British civilians, after killing seventy-two British servicemen in an ambush and capturing eighteen.
There is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not
go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right
too. Why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?
>
>
In the course of researching my latest book on the Second World War,
I recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Walking along a line of huts and the railway siding where their forebears had been worked and starved and beaten and frozen and gassed to death, were a group of Jewish schoolchildren, one of whom was carrying over his shoulder the
Israeli flag, a blue star of David on white background. It was a     profoundly moving sight, for it was the sovereign independence     represented by that flag which guarantees that the obscenity of
genocide which killed six million people in Auschwitz and camps like
it—will never again befall the Jewish people, to whom the rest of
civilization owes so much.
>
>
I said at the start that I was speaking to you as an historian, and so
I say: No people in History have needed the right to self-defense
and legitimacy more than the Jews of Israel, and that is what we in
the Friends of Israel Initiative demand here today.

BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS
Andrew Roberts, Member Parliament

I would like to speak to you today as an historian, because it seems to me that the State of Israel has packed more history into her 62 years on the planet than many other nations have in six hundred.
There are many surprising things about this tiny, feisty, brave nation the size of Wales , but the most astonishing is that she has survived at all.
The very day after the UN declared Israel a country in 1948,
five Arab countries attacked, and she has been struggling for her right to     life ever since. And that is what we are here for today, to reiterate   Israel ‘s right to self-defense, inherent in all legitimate countries.
>
>
From Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25
million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab
League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers
only eight thousand square miles, and is home to seven million citizens,
one-fifth of whom are Arabs.
The Jews of the Holy Land are thus
surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and
sixty times their population, yet their last, best hope of ending two
millennia of international persecution, the State of Israel has somehow survived.
When during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery; today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous
onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.
>
Jerusalem is the site of the Temple of Solomon and Herod. The stones
of a palace erected by King David himself are even now being unearthed
just outside the walls of Jerusalem . Everything that makes a nation
state legitimate—bloodshed, soil tilled, two millennia of continuous
residence, international agreements ,argues for Israel ‘s right to exist, yet that is still denied by the Arab League.
For many of their governments, which are rich enough to have economically solved the   Palestinian refugee problem decades ago, it is useful to have Israel
as a scapegoat to divert attention from the tyranny, failure and
corruption of their own regimes.
>
>
the tragic truth is that it suits Arab states very well to have the
Palestinians endure permanent refugee status, and whenever Israel
puts forward workable solutions they have been stymied by those whose
interests put the destruction of Israel before the genuine well being
of the Palestinians.
Both King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt were assassinated when they attempted to come to some kind of   accommodation with a country that most sane people now accept is not
going away.
“We owe to the Jews,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, “a system of
ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together. The Jewish contribution to finance, science, the arts, academia, commerce and industry, literature, philanthropy and
politics has been astonishing relative to their tiny numbers.  Yet we tend to treat Israel like a leper on the
international scene, merely for defending herself, and threatening her with academic boycotts if she builds a separation wall that has so far reduced suicide bombings by 95% over three years.
>
>
>    It is a disgrace that no senior member of the Royal Family has ever
undertaken an official visit to Israel , as though the country is still in quarantine after more than six decades. Her Majesty the Queen
has been on the throne for 57 years and in that time has undertaken
250 official visits to 129 countries, yet has not yet set foot in Israel . She has visited 14 Arab countries, so it cannot have been that she wasn’t in the region.
Although Prince Philip’s mother,
Princess Alice, is buried on the Mount of Olives because of her
status as Righteous Among Gentiles, the Foreign Office ordained that his
visit to his mother’s grave in 1994 had to be in a private capacity only. Royal visits are one of the ways legitimacy is conferred on nations, and the Coalition Government should end the Foreign Office’s de- facto boycott.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish people recognized that they must have their own state, a homeland where they could forever be safe from a repetition of such horrors. Putting their trust in Western Civilization was never again going to be enough.
Since then, Israel has had to fight no fewer than five major wars for her very
existence.
>
>
She has been on the front line in the War against Terror and has been
fighting the West’s battles for it, decades before 9/11 or 7/7 ever
happened.
Radical Islam is never going to accept the concept of an Israeli State, so the struggle is likely to continue for another sixty years, but the Jews know that that is less dangerous than entrusting their security to anyone else.
>
>
Very often in Britain , especially when faced with the overwhelmingly
anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we
fail to ask ourselves what we would have done placed in their position?
The population of the United Kingdom of 63 million is nine
times that of Israel . In July 2006, to take one example at random,
Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed eight
patrolmen and kidnapped two others, and that summer fired four     thousand Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further forty-three civilians.
>
>
Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire thirty-six thousand rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 87 British civilians, after killing seventy-two British servicemen in an ambush and capturing eighteen.
There is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not
go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right
too. Why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?
>
>
In the course of researching my latest book on the Second World War,
I recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Walking along a line of huts and the railway siding where their forebears had been worked and starved and beaten and frozen and gassed to death, were a group of Jewish schoolchildren, one of whom was carrying over his shoulder the
Israeli flag, a blue star of David on white background. It was a     profoundly moving sight, for it was the sovereign independence     represented by that flag which guarantees that the obscenity of
genocide which killed six million people in Auschwitz and camps like
it—will never again befall the Jewish people, to whom the rest of
civilization owes so much.
>
>
I said at the start that I was speaking to you as an historian, and so
I say: No people in History have needed the right to self-defense
and legitimacy more than the Jews of Israel, and that is what we in
the Friends of Israel Initiative demand here today.

BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS
Andrew Roberts, Member Parliament

I would like to speak to you today as an historian, because it seems to me that the State of Israel has packed more history into her 62 years on the planet than many other nations have in six hundred.
There are many surprising things about this tiny, feisty, brave nation the size of Wales , but the most astonishing is that she has survived at all.
The very day after the UN declared Israel a country in 1948,
five Arab countries attacked, and she has been struggling for her right to     life ever since. And that is what we are here for today, to reiterate   Israel ‘s right to self-defense, inherent in all legitimate countries.
>
>
From Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to Aden, the 5.25
million square miles of territory belonging to members of the Arab
League is home to over 330 million people, whereas Israel covers
only eight thousand square miles, and is home to seven million citizens,
one-fifth of whom are Arabs.
The Jews of the Holy Land are thus
surrounded by hostile states 650 times their size in territory and
sixty times their population, yet their last, best hope of ending two
millennia of international persecution, the State of Israel has somehow survived.
When during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery; today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous
onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.
>
Jerusalem is the site of the Temple of Solomon and Herod. The stones
of a palace erected by King David himself are even now being unearthed
just outside the walls of Jerusalem . Everything that makes a nation
state legitimate—bloodshed, soil tilled, two millennia of continuous
residence, international agreements ,argues for Israel ‘s right to exist, yet that is still denied by the Arab League.
For many of their governments, which are rich enough to have economically solved the   Palestinian refugee problem decades ago, it is useful to have Israel
as a scapegoat to divert attention from the tyranny, failure and
corruption of their own regimes.
>
>
the tragic truth is that it suits Arab states very well to have the
Palestinians endure permanent refugee status, and whenever Israel
puts forward workable solutions they have been stymied by those whose
interests put the destruction of Israel before the genuine well being
of the Palestinians.
Both King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt were assassinated when they attempted to come to some kind of   accommodation with a country that most sane people now accept is not
going away.
“We owe to the Jews,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1920, “a system of
ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together. The Jewish contribution to finance, science, the arts, academia, commerce and industry, literature, philanthropy and
politics has been astonishing relative to their tiny numbers.  Yet we tend to treat Israel like a leper on the
international scene, merely for defending herself, and threatening her with academic boycotts if she builds a separation wall that has so far reduced suicide bombings by 95% over three years.
>
>
>    It is a disgrace that no senior member of the Royal Family has ever
undertaken an official visit to Israel , as though the country is still in quarantine after more than six decades. Her Majesty the Queen
has been on the throne for 57 years and in that time has undertaken
250 official visits to 129 countries, yet has not yet set foot in Israel . She has visited 14 Arab countries, so it cannot have been that she wasn’t in the region.
Although Prince Philip’s mother,
Princess Alice, is buried on the Mount of Olives because of her
status as Righteous Among Gentiles, the Foreign Office ordained that his
visit to his mother’s grave in 1994 had to be in a private capacity only. Royal visits are one of the ways legitimacy is conferred on nations, and the Coalition Government should end the Foreign Office’s de- facto boycott.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish people recognized that they must have their own state, a homeland where they could forever be safe from a repetition of such horrors. Putting their trust in Western Civilization was never again going to be enough.
Since then, Israel has had to fight no fewer than five major wars for her very
existence.
>
>
She has been on the front line in the War against Terror and has been
fighting the West’s battles for it, decades before 9/11 or 7/7 ever
happened.
Radical Islam is never going to accept the concept of an Israeli State, so the struggle is likely to continue for another sixty years, but the Jews know that that is less dangerous than entrusting their security to anyone else.
>
>
Very often in Britain , especially when faced with the overwhelmingly
anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we
fail to ask ourselves what we would have done placed in their position?
The population of the United Kingdom of 63 million is nine
times that of Israel . In July 2006, to take one example at random,
Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed eight
patrolmen and kidnapped two others, and that summer fired four     thousand Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further forty-three civilians.
>
>
Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire thirty-six thousand rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 87 British civilians, after killing seventy-two British servicemen in an ambush and capturing eighteen.
There is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not
go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right
too. Why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?
>
>
In the course of researching my latest book on the Second World War,
I recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Walking along a line of huts and the railway siding where their forebears had been worked and starved and beaten and frozen and gassed to death, were a group of Jewish schoolchildren, one of whom was carrying over his shoulder the
Israeli flag, a blue star of David on white background. It was a     profoundly moving sight, for it was the sovereign independence     represented by that flag which guarantees that the obscenity of
genocide which killed six million people in Auschwitz and camps like
it—will never again befall the Jewish people, to whom the rest of
civilization owes so much.
>
>
I said at the start that I was speaking to you as an historian, and so
I say: No people in History have needed the right to self-defense
and legitimacy more than the Jews of Israel, and that is what we in
the Friends of Israel Initiative demand here today.

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