Books by "Richard A. Geist"
3 books found
An unknown story of an unlikely hero--the US consul who best analyzed the threat posed by Nazi Germany and predicted the horrors to come In 1929, Raymond Geist went to Berlin as a consul and handled visas for emigrants to the US. Just before Hitler came to power, Geist expedited the exit of Albert Einstein. Once the Nazis began to oppress Jews and others, Geist's role became vitally important. It was Geist who extricated Sigmund Freud from Vienna and Geist who understood the scale and urgency of the humanitarian crisis. Even while hiding his own homosexual relationship with a German, Geist fearlessly challenged the Nazi police state whenever it abused Americans in Germany or threatened US interests. He made greater use of a restrictive US immigration quota and secured exit visas for hundreds of unaccompanied children. All the while, he maintained a working relationship with high Nazi officials such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann Göring. While US ambassadors and consuls general cycled in and out, the indispensable Geist remained in Berlin for a decade. An invaluable analyst and problem solver, he was the first American official to warn explicitly that what lay ahead for Germany's Jews was what would become known as the Holocaust.
American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945
by Richard Bretman, Alan M. Kraut
1987 · Indiana University Press
How does one explain America's failure to take bold action to resist the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews? In contrast to recent writers who place the blame on anti-Semitism in American society at large and within the Roosevelt administration in particular, Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut seek the answer in a detailed analysis of American political realities and bureaucratic processes. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, the authors describe and analyze American immigration policy as well as rescue and relief efforts directed toward European Jewry between 1933 and 1945. They contend that U.S. policy was the product of preexisting restrictive immigration laws; an entrenched State Department bureaucracy committed to a narrow defense of American interests; public opposition to any increase in immigration; and the reluctance of Franklin D. Roosevelt to accept the political risks of humanitarian measures to benefit the European Jews. The authors find that the bureaucrats who made and implemented refugee policy were motivated by institutional priorities and reluctance to take risks, rather than by moral or humanitarian concerns.
From the Introduction: This inquiry is concerned with the themes of praxis and action in four philosophic movements: Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. It is rare that these four movements are considered in a single inquiry, for there are profound differences of emphasis, focus, terminology, and approach represented by these styles of thought. Many philosophers believe that similarities among these movements are superficial and that a close examination of them will reveal only hopelessly unbridgeable cleavages. While respecting the genuine fundamental differences of these movements, this inquiry is undertaken in the spirit of showing that there are important common themes and motifs in what first appears to be a chaotic babble of voices. I intend to show that the concern with man as an agent has been a primary focal point of each of these movements and further that each contributes something permanent and important to our understanding of the nature and context of human activity.