Rabbi Marvin Hier, Founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, issued the following statement today:
“Today we pay tribute to the greatest generation the generation that 74 years ago saved mankind from Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. The cost ofD-Day was enormous, 210,000 Allied casualties, amongst them 53,000 killed as well as 20,000 French civilians killed during the D-Day invasion alone.
“But the alternative would have been the total collapse of Western civilization and our right to live freely as men and woman created in theimage of G-d. Today as we commemorate D-Day we owe it to the greatest generation to stand up to the terrorists, tyrants, and bigots of our generation so that their enormous sacrifice 74 yearsago was not in vain.
“On the eve of the D-Day, the Supreme Allied Commander Gen Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his wife Mamie and, fearing that the letter would beintercepted by Nazi spies, deliberately misleads her. Ike tells her “don’t jump to conclusions that I don’t want to write--I’ll simply have no opportunity to pick up a pen starting tomorrow Ihave a series of trips that will last without interruption from six to ten days.”
*General Eisenhower’s letter (right) to Mamie is now in the Wiesenthal Center’s Archives.
For more information, please contact the Center's Communications Department, 310-553-9036. Join the Center on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent direct to your Twitter feed.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the UnitedStates. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).
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