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U.S. Ignored Diplomats Who Raised Alarm about Hitler before WWII
(Times of Israel) Rich Tenorio - In Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler, author David McKean recalls that in 1938, William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Nazi Germany, publicly declared that Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews not just in Germany, but in the entire European continent. The author, a former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg during the Obama administration, also describes how William Bullitt, who served as ambassador to the USSR and France, helped get Sigmund Freud out of Austria after the Anschluss in 1938. When Roosevelt first took office in 1933, "the United States, frankly, was also quite an anti-Semitic country at the time," said McKean. Breckenridge Long, an ambassador to Italy who praised Benito Mussolini, hindered Jewish refugees from reaching the U.S. while serving as assistant secretary of state during WWII. However, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt overruled Long to save the mostly Jewish passengers on the refugee ship SS Quanza in 1940. The U.S. was "quite isolationist. The American people wanted to keep it that way," said McKean.