The 34th President of the United States (1953 to 1961), Five Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower (October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was not Jewish; he was of German and Swiss extraction, and was primarily of Lutheran and Mennonite ancestry. He was a Christian with a sense of moral responsibility for the Jewish and all other victims of the WWII German Nazi's horrific Holocaust.
Just weeks after being sworn-in as president, Eisenhower was baptized into the Presbyterian Church, and he was considered the most religious U.S. president in history at the time.
In office, he would hold "Prayer Breakfasts," and the press was invited. He waged a crusade to bring back what he considered the decline in American religious values and he passed a law, putting the words "Under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance. He said:
"In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war."
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a descendant on the paternal side from Hans Nicol Eisenhower, who settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1741. He was descended on the maternal side from Rhineland Germans, who settled in Pennsylvania in 1730. His parents' religion was Mennonite River Brethren, a Protestant sect. The foregoing information is contained in the book, "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America," by David Hackett Fischer.
According to Mr. Fischer, President Eisenhower's ancestors were Swiss Mennonites and German Pietists. His ancestors were pacifists in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. He was raised in the Pietist sect called River Brethren. which promoted the virtues of "hard work, simplicity, decency, and strict self-discipline" (page 878).
The German people are known for their militant spirit, frugality and efficiency, in addition to which, the future president was fair skinned and blond haired, traits which caused his classmates to jocularly combine traits of his personality and complexion in a humorous commentary describing him in the West Point yearbook "The Howitzer," as a "terrible Swedish-Jew."
Anti-Semites unfailingly seize on this incident of a few meager words from classmates, spoken in jest, to accuse this deceased great General and U.S. President: 1) of being a Jew (as though this would within itself have been a crime, had it been true), and 2) showing unwarranted favoritism to the Jewish people. He is also called "Señor" in that yearbook blurb but it is not assumed that he is of Spanish ancestry.
Following WWII, as Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces during World War II, then General Eisenhower made it a point to personally tour a Nazi concentration camp in order to witness firsthand the Holocaust that had been perpetuated by Germany against their own citizens: the Jewish, the Jehovah Witnesses, the Gypsies, the handicapped, - and the citizens of other European countries.
The following paragraphs are excerpts of: "From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans" (Africa World Press, 2015), by Historian Harold Brackman:
"The labor camp of Ohdruf in Thuringia was liberated by American armored forces on April 4, 1945. Days before this, the Germans made many of the 13,000 inmates participate in death marches to Buchenwald. Others prisoners were evacuated on railroad cars; those too weak to walk to the rail yard were lured with the promise of food, where the SS shot them and left their bodies in the open. Back in Ohdruf, mass graves were reopened so that the SS could burn the corpses. Over half the inmates were worked to death, starved, or shot."
"On April 12, Eisenhower and Generals Bradley and Patton toured Ohrdruf. Eisenhower later cabled General George C. Marshall about what he saw at a nearby camp:
'The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda.'"
"General Patton wrote in his diary:
'When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos…'"
"On April 19, Eisenhower again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about German Nazi atrocities to the American public.
As president, Eisenhower allowed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to minimize US relations with Israel. He ordered the Israelis, British, and French to withdraw during their 1956 conflict with Nasser’s Egypt. Even so, the US continued its commitment to the survival of the Jewish state.
Gehry’s monument memorializes Eisenhower as the resolute Kansas farm boy destined to carry the moral weight of civilization’s survival on his shoulders.
Eisenhower's Greatest Presidential Accomplishments
7. Admitted Alaska and Hawaii as 49th and 50th states of U.S.
6. He founded NASA in 1958
President Eisenhower created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Act of 1958 (NASA), a civilian space agency responsible for the space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research.
5. He Sponsored and Signed the Civil Rights Bill of 1957.
This was the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. - Congress amended the bill and critically weakened its effectiveness.
4. He Sponsored and Signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.
This gave birth to America's interstate highway system. It was his favorite piece of legislation.
3. He Balanced the Budget, Not Just Once, But Three Times.
He also refused to cut taxes and raise defense spending. His fiscal policy contributed to the prosperity of the 1950's.
2. He Ended the Korean War.
He alone had the prestige to persuade Americans to accept a negotiated peace and convince the Chinese that failure to reach an agreement would lead to dire consequences. Eisenhower considered this to be his greatest presidential accomplishment.
1. He Kept America at Peace.
Eisenhower was confronted with major Cold War crises every year he was in office: Korea, Vietnam, Formosa, Suez, Hungary, Berlin, and the U-2. While more than once America seemed on the brink of war and those around him clamored to drop the Bomb, Eisenhower always kept a level head. He dealt calmly and rationally with each situation, always finding a solution that avoided war without diminishing America's prestige.
Eisenhower is considered one of the greatest presidents of the United States and he is usually rated in the top 10 in surveys of academic historians and political scientists or popular opinion.
Today, American soil seems no longer to nurture such great men.'"
b The 34th President of the United States (1953 t... (
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