Operation Texas

Operation Texas was an alleged undercover operation to relocate European Jews to Texas, USA, away from Nazi persecution, first reported in a 1989 Ph.D. dissertation by Louis Stanislaus Gomolak at the University of Texas at Austin titled Prologue: LBJ's foreign-affairs background, 1908-1948.[1] The following are some of the key arguments of the dissertation:

  • In 1938, Lyndon B. Johnson, then a Congressman and later the 36th President of the United States of America, worked covertly to establish a refuge in Texas for European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.[2] Johnson helped hundreds of European Jews enter Texas through Cuba, Mexico and South America.
  • In part, Johnson was influenced in his attitude towards the Jews by the religious beliefs that his family, especially his grandfather (Samuel Ealy Johnson Sr.), who was a member of the Christadelphian church, shared with him.[3][4] Christadelphians believe that the Jews are God's chosen people,[5] and LBJ's grandfather once said to him, "Take care of the Jews, God’s chosen people. Consider them your friends and help them any way you can."[3]

Various details of Gomolak's dissertation have been cited by other historians.[2][3][6] In 2008, Larry Ben David began an online campaign to collect documentation to submit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, Israel to have LBJ awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, often referred to as a Righteous Gentile.[7]

Additional primary research on Operation Texas was done for a 1998 Houston Chronicle article[8] and a 2016 article on the aish.com website.[9]

More recently, many of the arguments of Gomolak's thesis have been disputed following extensive research by Claudia Wilson Anderson, an archivist at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.[10][11] Although his research materials (e.g., written interview notes, interview recordings and primary documents not located in archives) could support his arguments, Gomolak has not made them available for external review.[11]

References
  1. Gomolak, Louis Stanislaus (1989). Prologue : LBJ's foreign-affairs background, 1908-1948. University of Texas at Austin, Department of History, Ph.D. dissertation. OCLC 670540426.
  2. Dallek, Robert (1991). Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. Oxford University Press US. ISBN 0-19-505435-0. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
  3. Smallwood, James M. "Operation Texas: Lyndon B. Johnson's Attempt to Save Jews from the German Nazi Holocaust". SFA ScholarWorks. Retrieved 2015-08-31.
  4. Banta, Joseph (January 1964). "President Lyndon B. Johnson". The Christadelphian. 101: 26.
  5. Pearce, David M. "Israel: God's People, God's Land". The Christadelphian Magazine and Publishing Association. Retrieved 2008-04-04.
  6. Smallwood, James (2012). "Operation Texas: Lyndon B. Johnson, The Jewish Question and the Nazi Holocaust". East Texas Historical Journal. 50 (2): 88–106. Retrieved 12 September 2016.
  7. "Lyndon B. Johnson -- A Righteous gentile". lyndonjohnsonandisrael.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2016-09-13.
  8. Feldman, Claudia (September 27, 1998). "LBJ's Rescue Mission/ The little-known story of Lyndon Baines Johnson and friends helping Jews the Holocaust in Europe". Texas Magazine. Houston Chronicle. pp. Cover Story.
  9. Koop Kuper, Ivan (February 13, 2016). "Operation Texas: LBJ's Mysterious Mission to Save Jews". aish.com. Retrieved January 28, 2017.
  10. Anderson, Claudia Wilson (2012). "Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, Operation Texas, and Jewish Immigration". Southern Jewish History. 12. Retrieved September 13, 2016.
  11. "Operation Texas: LBJ's Mysterious Mission to Save Jews". Retrieved 2016-09-13.
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