Was Patton anti-Semitic?
As the other thread was deleted by the OP I will post this here instead- just read this quote on Facebook but don't know where it is originally from:
(Posted by Alex Zaretser)
"It was Patton’s job after the defeat of Germany to run the displaced-persons (DP) camps in southern Germany, where he was commanding officer. In the view of some, including an outraged President Harry S. Truman, he treated the Holocaust survivors little better than the Nazis did.
In a letter to Eisenhower, Truman quoted from a report on conditions in the DP camps. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”
The “military guard” that Truman mentioned was Patton’s idea. He had his reasons, Patton wrote in his diary:
“If they [the Jewish DPs] were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camps, would spread over the country like locusts, and would eventually have to be rounded up after quite a few of them had been shot and quite a few Germans murdered and pillaged.” At least twice in his diary, Patton referred to the Jewish DPs as “animals”:
The report to Truman was written by Earl G. Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school who had inspected the camps. Here is what Patton thought about Harrison: “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to Jews who are lower than animals.” He went on to say that the Jews had “no sense of human relationships,”
Harrison was sent in 1946 by President Truman to investigate the issue of Jewish displaced persons. Patton viewed this mission as a conspiracy by Jews in Washington, D.C such as "Morgenthau and Baruch." Later Patton wrote about "...a very apparent Semitic influence in the press...they are trying to implement communism."
Unfortunately, Patton wasn’t all talk. He let Nazis bunk with Jews and gave them positions of authority, disobeying General Eisenhower’s command to “de-Nazify” the camps.
Patton was fired and, of course, he blamed Jews and Communists for his problems. From Patton's terminology one can learn the way that for years American officers defined Jews: 'Jewish problem', 'Jewish Press', 'Jewish Threat', 'Jewish Conspiracy', 'Jewish Communism', 'Jewish international conspiracy to control the world' and the 'protocols of the leaders of Zion.' Even the term Zionism became an issue for the army; Zionism was defined as a component of the "protocols." And even "Israel" became a component of the "protocols."
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