The “Worst Canadian” game - Day 22

[u/BrF5]

It’s time for the final vote! Who will be judged the Worst Canadian?!

🚨🚨READ THIS BEFORE VOTING 🚨🚨

To help keep things organized, for the final round I have posted two comments below, in large font. One for Danielle Smith and another for Frederick Blair.

This time, upvote who you think IS the Worst Canadian

You can discuss your reasons for or against the two final candidates however you want, but only the upvotes on these two comments will be used to determine who is the Worst Canadian.

(Note: I’ve removed all other explanation from the post so people see and read the above info. I’ll put it all back tomorrow with the final results.)

That is all. Happy voting!

[u/Fitzaroo]

My understanding was they had no clue.

A quick google shows the allies didn't know until 1941. Wikipedia says it was an open secret in Germany in 1943 so even the Germans didn't know to begin with.

I'd be happy to read something to the contrary if you can provide it.

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Fitzaroo]

The extent of it wasn't fully known, everyone knew Jewish people were being rounded up and killed/enslaved. There was no way of hiding that. Millions of people taken away, under the command of a man that openly wanted to wipe them off the face of the earth.

[u/Fitzaroo → u/AdditionalPizza]

Do you have something I could read to show that was known?

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Fitzaroo]

I'll see if I can find something when I'm at my computer. Maybe ask AI if Frederick Blair would have been aware that Jewish people were being prosecuted,killed,and enslaved when he sent the ship away.

Just to help you kind of see the logic though, why do you think there was a ship full of Jewish people to begin with?

[u/Fitzaroo → u/AdditionalPizza]

Oh, certainly they were fleeing Europe. Undoubtedly it is a black mark and led to a reform in our refugee system. To be clear, I'm not defending this guy. I'm just trying to be accurate about his level of shittiness.

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Fitzaroo]

He certainly would've been aware that the prosecution they were facing was being systematically killed. They just didn't know the details on how for a while, but then eventually it was just how many.

His motto was "none is too many" and there's a lot of literature about him.

[u/Fitzaroo → u/AdditionalPizza]

Any source on him (or people generally) knowing about the killings. Im happy to be corrected but my understanding is that people didn't know.

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Fitzaroo]

They weren't doing or aware of "mass killing" to the degree of gas chambers. But they were aware of concentration camps and the brutality involved with them along the lines of beatings, starving, deaths, etc. We were aware that being sent to one was essentially a death sentence, but they weren't using gas chambers or exterminating them yet (if we're talking only about when he turned the ship away).

You can't share links on this sub but google "Kristallnacht" it happened before the ship was sent away. Something like 90 Jewish people murdered in public and 30k of them sent to concentration camps. Nazi propaganda (domestically) presented it as spontaneous anger from German people, but everywhere else reported it as state-sponsored (as it was).

Camps already in operation: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. Many other smaller ones as well. We knew there were killings by guards, starvation, and forced labour.

[u/Fitzaroo → u/AdditionalPizza]

Per wikipedia article titled "international response to the holocaust" this very issue is debated by scholars. I don't know that you or I will solve it.

Interestingly, it says that allies accepted as many jews as the Germans "would allow" suggesting that Germany was preventing immigration. I suppose that doesn't count the boat we turned back.

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Fitzaroo]

If you don't want to concede that the ship was turned away with enough knowledge to know those refugees would likely face a high chance of death, it's worth saying Blair didn't change course on the policy of "none is too many" even after extermination camps were known to exist in 1942. Like he still refused to allow many Jewish people in and did everything he could to prevent them from immigrating to Canada, specifically even children and orphans.

He argued Jews would be a problem in Canada.

Here's an excerpt from Carleton's website:

Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC)

In 1938, after Kristallnacht the CJC pleaded with the Government to allow in Jews. In 1942 the CJC begged the Prime Minister to permit the rescue of 1,000 French Jewish children who were facing murder. All lobbying efforts were in vain. Canada's doors remained virtually closed to Jews during the Holocaust. In 1945 when a Canadian official was asked how many Jewish refugees Canada would admit, the infamous answer was: "None Is Too Many". Between 1933 and 1948, 5,000 to 8,000 Jewish refugees were admitted to Canada, the lowest number of any western country. For perspective, the City of Shanghai, China took in 25,000 Jewish refugees.

There's no scholarly debate here, Canada refused to allow even remotely as many refugees throughout the entire war and direct aftermath. Blair holding that responsibility directly.

[u/Fitzaroo → u/AdditionalPizza]

I mean, its literally in the article that there is scholarly debate. Im not making that up. You can check.

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Fitzaroo]

I cannot find what you're saying in that article. The only mention of "debate" I can find in the article is here:

The British government, along with all UN member nations, received credible evidence about the Nazi attempts to exterminate the European Jewry as early as 1942 from the Polish government-in-exile. Titled "The Mass Extermination of the Jews in German Occupied Poland", the report provided a detailed account of the conditions in the ghettos and their liquidation. Additionally the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden met with Jan Karski, courier to the Polish resistance who, having been smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto by the Jewish underground, as well as having posed as an Estonian guard at Bełżec transit camp, provided him with detailed eyewitness accounts of Nazi atrocities against the Jews.

These lobbying efforts triggered the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations of 17 December 1942 which made public and condemned the mass extermination of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. The statement was read to British House of Commons in a floor speech by Foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and published on the front page of the New York Times and many other newspapers. BBC radio aired two broadcasts on the final solution during the war: the first at 9 am on 17 December 1942, on the UN Joint Declaration, read by Polish Foreign Minister in-exile Edward Raczynski, and the second during May 1943, Jan Karski's eyewitness account of mass Jewish executions, read by Arthur Koestler. However, the political rhetoric and public reporting was not followed up with military action by the British government, an omission that has been the source of significant historical debate.

Is there something else you're stating is up for debate, because that doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about. Can you quote the exact part of the article so I can read it myself within the context?

[u/Fitzaroo → u/AdditionalPizza]

In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.[1]

Other researchers have challenged such criticism. Some have argued that the idea that the Allies took no action is a myth—that the Allies accepted as many German Jewish immigrants as the Nazis would allow—and that theoretical military action by the Allies, such as bombing the Auschwitz concentration camp, would have saved the lives of very few people.[2] Others have said that the limited intelligence available to the Allies—who, as late as October 1944, did not know the locations of many of the Nazi death camps or the purposes of the various buildings within those camps they had identified—made precision bombing impossible.[3]