Tag: wwii
Tommy Tuberville

While Harming US Military, Tuberville Lies About Father's Service Record (VIDEO)

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) campaigned on a platform of being a staunch supporter of the men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces and pro-veteran. His claims, including those surrounding his own father’s service, are being called into question.

Tuberville, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is a former college football coach, who goes by the nickname “Coach,” in campaign material and even on his official U.S. Senate website. Just weeks ago Tuberville, who has never served in the U.S. Armed Forces, told reporters, “There is nobody more military than me.”

Tuberville time and time again has used claims about his father’s record in World War II, which also appear on his campaign website, Tuberville’s official Senate website (and in this archived copy) to promote himself.

“Tuberville was inspired to serve in Congress by his father, a World War II veteran and recipient of five Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, who instilled in him the values of patriotism, work ethic, and grit,” his Senate website reads.

Tuberville’s 2020 campaign website says, “it is the legacy of his father, a highly decorated WWII veteran and Purple Heart recipient, that motivates Coach Tuberville to give back to the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces.” That website also lists as his first “issue,” “Serving those who served.”

It also reads: “The first role of our government is to protect its citizens and that is why I will support a strong and robust military. I know we must provide our Armed Forces with the tools and resources they need to protect Americans at home and abroad. Alabamians are proud and we stand with our military and our Veterans who have given so much for our nation.”

In June, Tuberville celebrated D-Day with a Fox News interview during which he lauded his father’s service – and denigrated today’s U.S. Military.

“Today, Coach is June 6, which is a big date in your family, because June 6, D-Day 1944. Your father was there, and wound up driving a tank across Europe,” Fox News’ Steve Doocy said to Tuberville, and Fox News viewers.

“Seventy-nine years ago. They said it was the most important day in the 20th century, because if we don’t win on D-Day, and the days after that, this whole country – the world is in trouble,” Tuberville responded.

Talking about his father, Tuberville told Fox News, “he lied about his age at 16. Joined the Army. Said it’s the first time he ever had a new pair of boots. And then he landed at Utah Beach and drove a tank across Europe, awarded five Bronze Stars and a purple heart at age 18.”

After sharing an amusing anecdote, Sen. Tuberville then took a shot at today’s U.S. Armed Forces.

“And, and back then, back then war was war. And it was pretty much hand-to-hand combat. And you know,” speaking about his father, Tuiberville added, “he said, ‘we stayed cold, hungry, it was miserable, scared for our lives,’ and he lost most of his friends, you know, in his company, that he went in, with but this is not the same military we have had back then.”

What Tuberville may be referring to is today’s military includes women and and LGBTQ service members who fight in combat.

Tuberville has been accused of putting national security at risk because he currently is blocking 265 military promotions, all of which need to be confirmed by the Senate. His blockade started in February, and he refuses to budge.

Why?

In response to state bans on abortions, the Pentagon decided it will reimburse service members who need to travel to a different state to access abortion services. Tuberville opposes abortion.

“This indefinite hold harms America’s national security and hinders the Pentagon’s normal operations,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said.

According to a deep dive byThe Washington Post, several of the claims Tuiberville repeatedly makes about his father’s service are false, including that his dad joined the military when he was 16 years old.

“This is false,” an analysis by the Post’s Glenn Kessler reveals. “Charles Tuberville, who was born in 1925, turned 16 five months before the United States entered World War II because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His draft registration card (front and back) shows he submitted it on July 16, 1943 — his 18th birthday.”

The Post also disputes Tuberville’s claim his father was a tank commander.

“This is dubious. Charles Tuberville’s tombstone lists his highest rank as ‘TEC 5’ or technician fifth grade, an Army rank at the time that indicated technical skills but not combat leadership. According to a 1944 Army memo, TEC 5 jobs were limited to armorer, cook, tank driver, light truck driver or tank mechanic. Tuberville would have needed to be a sergeant to be a tank commander.”

Tuberville has repeatedly claimed his father was awarded “five bronze stars.”

“This is false. The Bronze Star, the eighth-highest military award, is earned when a soldier ‘distinguished himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service’ in combat with an armed enemy of the United States,” the Post reports. “Earning five Bronze Stars would be highly unusual; Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, earned two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars, among other medals.”

Instead, the Post reports, Tuberville’s father “earned not Bronze Stars, but rather Bronze service stars — which denote that a soldier was physically present during a particular military campaign or engagement.”

Another of Tuberville’s claims, that his father drove a tank in Paris when U.S. troops liberated the city, the Post deems simply, “not possible.”

See the video above or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Fear Led Us To Intern Japanese Americans. Who’s Next?

Fear Led Us To Intern Japanese Americans. Who’s Next?

Imagine this.

You are a boy, living in a child’s blissful unaware. You are not terribly different from other kids. Maybe you play stickball in the street and pretend to be Joe DiMaggio. Maybe you listen to “The Lone Ranger” on the Philco. Maybe you’re crazy for Superman.

Maybe it’s a good life.

Then comes that sudden Sunday in December. All at once, everyone is angry about something bad that happened at a place called Pearl Harbor, and people you know — people who know you — are staring at you as if you are no longer who you always were.

Two months later — 75 years ago this week — there is news about a new executive order signed by President Roosevelt. Soon, the poster starts appearing on lamp posts. The headline reads: “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry.” It is an evacuation order.

As a child, you know nothing about the column in the San Francisco Examiner where Henry McLemore wrote: “Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

And you didn’t hear how Assistant War Secretary John McCloy said, “If it is a question of the safety of the country [and] the Constitution … why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

All you know is that suddenly, with maybe a week’s notice, you are on a train, being taken away from your Philco and from stickball games, from Superman comic books, from, well … everything.

Maybe your name is Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, and you will someday be Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid” movies. Maybe your name is Hosato Takei, and as George Takei, you will become the original Mr. Sulu on “Star Trek.” Maybe your name is Norman Mineta and you will be a congressman.

But in the desolate camps to which you are exiled, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you might someday be. In the camps, as they say, “A Jap is a Jap.”

So in the camps, you live behind barbed wire, under armed guard in tar paper barracks with toilets where you must do your business in public view.

You live with inferno heat, aching cold, and gritty dust. Yet, you struggle to hold on to who you used to be.

You play baseball. You draw and sing. And you go to school, where every morning you stand, hand over your heart, and recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America …”

Seventy-five years later, communal memory recoils from what the United States of America did to you. And as we tend do when memory indicts conscience, we choose to forget.

So many of us no longer know what happened, how you lost your businesses, your homes, how your lives were never again the same.

As many of us forget the story, we also forget its moral: how fear can interdict reason, make you lash out with hatred at harmless people.

Thus, some of us cheered recently when a new executive order was signed and our airports turned to chaos. Some of us echoed McCloy: “The Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

But the rest of us were saddened by what America has done to itself — and to countless innocents — in the spasms of its fear.

The rest of us were stunned by what Winston Churchill called “the confirmed unteachability” of humankind.

We never learn, do we?

Imagine you are a boy, living in a child’s blissful unaware, not terribly different from other kids. Maybe you play hoops at the park and pretend to be Michael Jordan. Maybe you watch Power Rangers. Maybe you’re crazy for Spider-Man.

Maybe it’s a good life.

But then comes a sudden Tuesday in September.

IMAGE: War Relocation Authority – 210-G-2A-572, Records of War Relocation Authority, Record Group 210; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Wikicommons / United States Department of Interior.

Exhibit At Texas Museum Focuses On 1936 Olympics In Berlin

Exhibit At Texas Museum Focuses On 1936 Olympics In Berlin

By Pam LeBlanc, Austin American-Statesman (TNS)

AUSTIN, Texas–In 1936, sports, politics and propaganda collided in Berlin in one of the most controversial Olympic Games ever.

The Berlin Games gave us Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in track and field, but they gave us much more–not all of it as triumphant.

“The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936,” a temporary exhibit at the University of Texas’ H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, explores the history and impact of the 1936 Games. It documents the treatment of Jews, blacks and Gypsies leading up to the competition, shows how Hitler and the Nazis used it as propaganda, and how other countries responded.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., created the multimedia exhibit, which opened nearly 20 years ago in conjunction with the Atlanta Olympics. The Stark Center, tucked in the north end zone of the Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, teamed with the Texas Program in Sports and Media to bring it to Austin.

“We felt it was important to have it here,” said Terry Todd, co-founder and director of the Stark Center, which includes a research library and museum and is one of about 20 designated Olympic Studies Centers around the world. “People get wrapped up in sports, but sometimes don’t realize how political it is. I think it’s important that we remember what happens in the world of sport has a broader cultural impact.”

The exhibit, Todd says, reminds people what can happen when sport is subverted for political reasons, and why race and religion should never be a reason to exclude someone from sport.

A series of lectures by sports historians and a showing of the German film “Berlin 1936” are planned in conjunction with the exhibit; dates have not yet been set.

“We’ve always liked to look at issues of anti-Semitism within a broader context, and there’s nothing more universal than sports and the Olympics,” said Robert Abzug, director of Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT, which is helping to organize the lectures.

The Olympics were awarded to Berlin two years before Adolf Hitler took power. At first, he was ambivalent about hosting the world’s biggest sporting event. Advisers convinced him he could use the Games as a propaganda tool, and, ultimately, he planned to make Germany the permanent home of the Olympic Games.

“He realized this would be a way to show the world what his vision of the world would be,” Todd said.

Some U.S. leaders urged a boycott of the 1936 Olympics, but the effort failed. Fifty countries participated, and Germany presented a peaceful, tolerant image to tourists. The Games were bigger and grander than ever, and, for the first time, televised. Officials temporarily removed anti-Jewish signs, and visitors didn’t know that non-Aryans were being rounded up and sent to internment camps or that a concentration camp was being built just outside Berlin.

Fitness was part of Hitler’s plan to strengthen the Aryan race. Jews and Gypsies were banned from sports facilities and competition leading up to the Games. The exhibit includes photographs of German soldiers diving into a pool wearing field equipment at a pre-game show at the Olympic trials and huge stadiums of youth exercising together.

“Everybody thinks of sports as a positive side to life. (The exhibit) really shows what happened politically, and how sports can be used as a propaganda tool to deceive and demonize races and religions,” said Gregg Philipson, a commissioner with the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission who also has a personal collection of Holocaust items. “This shows the other side of what can happen.”

Among the most touching components of the display are photos of Jewish athletes who were later killed in Holocaust.

Germany won the most medals overall at the Berlin Olympics, but athletes from around the world blasted gaping holes in the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy.

Blacks won 14 medals at the Games. Twelve Jewish athletes, including two Americans, also won medals. Two more _ U.S. track athletes Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman–might have added to the tally, but they were benched at the last minute and replaced by Jesse Owens, the son of an Alabama sharecropper, and Ralph Metcalfe. That reconfigured an American 4-by-100 relay team went on to set a world record of 39.8 seconds, which stood for 20 years.

Many people believe that Hitler specifically refused to shake Owens’ hand because he was black. But according to the exhibit, Hitler had decided ahead of time not to shake the hands of any of the athletes–not just Owens.

There’s a UT connection to the exhibit, too: Adolph Kiefer, who won a gold medal in backstroke at the Berlin Olympics, moved to Austin shortly after to swim for the Longhorns. He stayed a few years, but later transferred to the University of Illinois.

IF YOU GO

“The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936” is on display through Jan. 29 at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, 2100 San Jacinto St. Admission is free. For more information, go to http://starkcenter.org/naziolympics”starkcenter.org/naziolympics.

Photo by Joe Haupt via Flickr

World’s Largest Holocaust Compensation Agency Failing Survivors, Critics Say

World’s Largest Holocaust Compensation Agency Failing Survivors, Critics Say

By Joan Gralla, Newsday (TNS)

MELVILLE, N.Y. — Seventy years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, some Jewish leaders say the world’s largest Holocaust compensation agency is in urgent need of sweeping reforms — from new leadership to a sharper focus on aiding a dwindling number of survivors.

The critics say the Manhattan-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, entrusted with dispensing billions of dollars in restitution, is failing the men and women it was created to serve, most of whom are who now in their 80s and 90s.

Some survivors have waited years for the modest sums they are owed, in the form of monthly pensions or one-time hardship payments, records show. Others have died before their claims were decided.

Officials with the claims conference, a nonprofit overseen by Jewish groups, say the complaints are exaggerated.

“The Claims Conference is on the side of survivors,” executive director Greg Schneider stressed in an email.

But Pearl Pearson, 82, said she surrendered her independence and moved in with her daughter in Commack after her husband’s death in 2012, in part because their pension applications were still pending at the time. “She took me in,” she said. “It’s very uncomfortable, but that’s what I’m doing.”

As children, the Pearsons separately survived Nazi horrors in their native Bulgaria. He sought a survivor’s pension through the claims conference in 2003, but it wasn’t granted until September 2012 — three months after his death at 84, records show.

New York City attorneys representing Holocaust survivors say they’ve heard scores of similar complaints. An estimated 60,000 survivors live in the tristate area — more than half the U.S. total of 110,000.

A major part of the problem, advocates say, is the slow pace of continuing negotiations with Germany to expand the reach of restitution. Soviet bloc Jews, for example, only became eligible for pensions in 1998 — seven years after the Cold War ended. And many Western European Jews tormented outside Germany couldn’t receive hardship payments until 2012.

Since the claims conference was founded in 1951, it has secured $70 billion in restitution from Germany, Schneider noted. It also funds educational programs and numerous charities for survivors, providing meals, health care, and other support.

Over time, Schneider said, the claims conference has persuaded Germany to extend hardship payments and pensions to many more survivors, including people who hid from the Nazis for shorter periods or were imprisoned in unwalled, provincial ghettos

To date, 426,557 survivors have received $1.2 billion in hardship payments. And 123,570 monthly pensions valued at $4.7 billion have been granted to low-income individuals, according to the claims conference.

Major program expansions in 2012-14 benefited more than 92,000 survivors, Schneider said, adding: “We are doing everything possible to close the gaps.”

The expansions created a “tsunami” of applicants, creating a backlog of pending applications of up to 20 months last summer. He said those delays have since been reduced to six months, but it still can take nearly a year to retrieve records and process a claim.

Delays can be grueling for elderly survivors, who increasingly require medical care and other assistance, advocates say.

Elihu Kover of Manhattan-based Selfhelp Community Services said the nonprofit, which offers in-home health care, housekeeping, claims assistance, and social programs, enrolled 700 more survivors last year, bringing the total to 5,200.

“We get clients coming at age 90 who never needed anything before,” he said.

Pearl Pearson, then Pearla Avcheh, was ten in early 1943 when Nazi-allied Bulgaria began rounding up Jews. More than 11,000 Jews from parts of Bulgaria-controlled Greece and Yugoslavia were deported, bound for the Nazi gas chambers in Treblinka, Poland.

Pearson, her parents Jacob and Sara, and older brother Samuel, were driven from their home in Sofia to provincial ghettos with strict curfews and little chance of earning a living. Her father was sent to labor camps. “They took everything from us” — even shoes and clothes, Pearson recalled.

But the family survived and immigrated to Israel in 1948. It was there that she met her future husband, Joseph Pearson, whom she married at 17.

In 1956 the couple joined relatives in the United States, eventually settling in Woodbury. He became a women’s clothing manufacturer in Manhattan; she was a sewing machine operator.

Though Joseph Pearson spent three months in the Somovit concentration camp in Bulgaria, he wasn’t eligible for a pension until 2010, when Germany reduced the six-month minimum prison-stay requirement.

Pearl Pearson requested a hardship payment in 2005 and received it about four months later, the claims conference said. Currently, survivors receive about $3,500.

Her 2012 request for a pension of about $400 a month was rejected a year later because Germany did not recognize until 2013 the kind of ghettos she endured.

After Newsdayinquired about Pearson’s application, the claims conference approved the pension. The group said it had uncovered a 1958 affidavit detailing her wartime suffering that had been notarized in Brooklyn, said Stephen D. Schwartz, Pearson’s son-in-law.

Sam Dubbin, a Miami lawyer who assisted Pearson, said the complex application process and the unexplained delays and denials were “excruciating” — and all too common.

“The bureaucracy that has been inflicted on survivors has been devastating,” he said.

After she was widowed, Pearson received a one-time award from her husband’s pension of about $3,000.

“I used it to buy the grave for him,” she said.

Of the 68 Holocaust survivors represented by Manhattan attorneys Barbara and Michael Lissner, nearly a third have died before their years-old claims were decided.

In many of their pending cases, the lawyers say they’ve struggled to get answers to the most fundamental questions: Is a client eligible? What supporting documents are needed? When will a decision be made?

“It is appalling that survivors are kept waiting for years and die without knowing that their claims have been properly acknowledged and processed,” said Michael Lissner, whose father survived the Holocaust.

The claims conference denies the charge, saying some of the Lissners’ clients — Austrian Jews — were notified in writing about a year after they applied that they weren’t yet eligible.

The Lissners say neither they nor their clients received the notices and they were kept in the dark in subsequent dealings with the claims conference.

Barbara Lissner, whose mother and father are survivors, said some of the proof demanded is insulting “minutiae.”

“The types of requested information further demonstrate a total lack of concern and respect for survivors, what they have suffered, and perpetuates a further form of victimization,” she said.

Seven years after retired NYPD Officer Herbert Millet applied for a hardship payment, the claims conference required “direct evidence for the escape of his family to the United States in the fear of being persecuted,” records show.

Millet, 87, called another demand to prove he was Jewish “unbelievable,” noting his parents had received restitution years earlier.

Within three days of the Nazi invasion of Austria, the SS entered their apartment building in Vienna, banging on doors, he said, demanding “Who lives here?” He was ten.

His father managed to get them to the United States, but seven close relatives perished in Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, and Dachau, Germany.

Millet finally received his hardship payment last year.

Isi Leibler, a leading critic of the claims conference and a former World Jewish Congress official, has called for the group to halt all funding of educational and other programs that do not directly aid survivors.

Leibler said the organization’s leaders, including longtime chairman Julius Berman, should have been ousted after a $57 million internal fraud was uncovered.

“The claims conference needs a dramatic reform, and that is not going to happen while the present people who control the claims conference remain in office,” he said.

A number of critics have argued that restitution negotiations should have concluded decades ago, and too many survivors have died without receiving their due.

“The piecemeal approach has been deadly and inflicted massive suffering on thousands of survivors,” said David Schaecter, 85, of Miami, who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Schaecter, who lost more than 100 relatives in the Holocaust, is founding president of the Florida-based Holocaust Survivors Foundation-USA, which has pushed for greater control over restitution issues.

Schneider said Germany, not the claims conference, deserves to be asked why it’s taken so long to compensate “people who had suffered so much.”

Germany’s Ministry of Finance, which negotiates with the group, did not respond to requests for comment.

The fraud occurred over 11 years, federal prosecutors charged, and included staffers receiving kickbacks for falsifying documents for people who were not survivors. The conference’s then-director was sentenced in 2013 to eight years in prison for his role in the fraud.

Thirty-one people — including caseworkers and the director of pension and hardship programs — pleaded guilty or were convicted, the federal prosecutors said. Safeguards adopted since the fraud include protecting documents from alterations and randomly assigning supervisors to cases, the group said.

Laura Davis, who directs the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Holocaust programs for low-income residents, said the fraud caused even more delays.

“They became very skittish and worried that people are trying to cheat them, so things are much more prolonged,” she said.

Schneider said the anti-fraud measures are not intended to “needlessly alarm” survivors.

“We don’t have an interest in rejecting people,” he said.

Photo: Claims Conference via Facebook