Casablanca Conference
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The Casablanca Conference (codenamed SYMBOL) was held at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, then a French protectorate, from January 14 to 24, 1943, to plan the European strategy of the Allies during World War II. Present were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and many French representatives to file reports for the French. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had also been invited but declined to attend in light of the ongoing conflict at Stalingrad. General Charles de Gaulle had initially refused to come but changed his mind when Churchill threatened to recognize Henri Giraud as head of the Free French Forces in his place. Giraud was also present at Casablanca, and there was notable tension between the two men during the talks, notably leading Roosevelt to force the two men to shake hands, which they did reluctantly and so quickly that photographers had to ask them to repeat for the shoot. Both men also limited their exchange to offering the other to serve under him.[1]
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[edit] Casablanca Declaration
The conference's Casablanca Declaration called for the Allies to seek the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers. It also called for Allied aid to the Soviet Union, the invasion of Sicily and Italy, and the recognition of joint leadership of the Free French by de Gaulle and Giraud. All the terms were agreed upon. Roosevelt presented the results of the conference to the American people in a radio address on February 12, 1943. Also decided during the Casablanca Conference was that there would be no "cross channel invasion" in 1943. Instead of invading Europe across the English Channel, an invasion into Sicily and then Italy would take place.
[edit] Other important decisions
The decision to open a second front in France instead of the Balkans opened the path for the Red Army to eventually advance through Eastern Europe towards the Central Europe, outrunning the Allied advance, and was one of the first steps in the abandoning of Poland and the rest of Eastern and Central Europe to the Soviets (the Western betrayal).[2]
During the Conference, Roosevelt also spoke with the French resident general at Rabat, Morocco, about postwar independence and Jewish immigrants in North Africa. Roosevelt proposed that:
"[t]he number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc.) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population.... [T]his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50 percent of the lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, college professors, etc., in Germany were Jews."[3][4]
This remark was made in response to an early move of the National Socialist Party of Germany (the Nazi Party), which on April 25, 1933 passed the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Institutions of Higher Learning. This stated that "in admissions, care is to be taken that the number of Reich Germans...of non-Aryan descent [i.e. Jews], out of the total attending each school and each faculty, does not exceed the proportion of the non-Aryans [Jews] within the Reich population." The ratio for admissions was set at 1.5%, and a quota of 5% was imposed on Jewish attendance at any single university or school.
The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of April 27, 1933 described the rationale behind the act as follows: "Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin [Jews] in relation to their percentage of the population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected."[5]
[edit] See also
- Atlantic Charter
- Casablanca directive the Allied strategic bombing directive issued shortly after the Casablanca Conference.
- List of World War II conferences
[edit] References and notes
- ^ Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn
- ^ Józef Garliński (April 1975). "The Polish Underground State 1939-1945". Journal of Contemporary History (Sage Publications, Ltd.) 10 (2): 219–259. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260146. Retrieved 4 April 2011. P. 231
- ^ Manfred Jonas, Harold D. Langley, and Francis L. Lowenheim, eds., Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Correspondence, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Saturday Review Press, 1975, p. 308. This quote is taken from a conversation memorandum prepared by Captain John L. McCrae, Roosevelt's naval aide.
- ^ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/tguide/index.html
- ^ Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. First published 1997 by HarperCollins; this edition, HarperPerennial 1998, p. 30–31.
[edit] Further reading
- Farrell, Brian P. "Symbol of paradox: The Casablanca Conference, 1943," Canadian Journal of History, (April 1993) 28#1 pp 21-40
- Stoler, Mark. Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II (2006) excerpt and text search
- Wilt, Alan F. "The Significance of the Casablanca Decisions, January 1943," Journal of Military History (1991) 55#4 pp 517-529 in JSTOR
[edit] External links
- Casablanca Conference of 1943
- United States Department of State Foreign Relations of the United States. The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943
| Preceded by Cherchell Conference October 21–22, 1942 |
World War II Conferences Casablanca Conference January 14–24, 1943 |
Succeeded by Washington Conference (1943) May 12–17, 1943 |
