Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by Lenni

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:38 am

16. THE JEWISH PARTIES OF EASTERN EUROPE

Czechoslovakia—2.4 Per Cent of an Empire


With the downfall of the three great empires of Eastern Europe in the wake of the First World War a new arrangement of power emerged under the domination of French and British imperialism. Isolation of Germany and the Soviet Union were their two main goals, and their determination to confine the Germans led the Allies to encourage the Lithuanians, Poles and Czechs to carve themselves pieces of ethnic German land. Hungary and Bulgaria, as allies of the Germans, also suffered territorial losses. The result was the creation of a group of states cursed with intense national cleavages. Anti-Semitism was inevitable in this maelstrom of communal hatred.

Zionism succeeded in generating enough strength in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe to send representatives to the parliaments of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Austria; even in Yugoslavia, where the total Jewish population was less than 70,000, efforts were made to run Jewish slates in the municipal council elections in Zagreb. However, Zionism –as the separatist ideology of the weakest of the ethnic groups in the region– was never able to cope with the crisis of East European nationalism.

Czechoslovakia had a fine reputation in the 1930s as a democratic oasis amid the region's dictatorships, but it was little more than a Czech version of the Habsburg Empire. The Czech bourgeoisie dominated the Slovaks and crudely incorporated pieces of German, Hungarian, Polish and Ukrainian territory into their mini-empire. The Czech leaders were also sui generis anti-Semites; the Jews were seen as German and Magyar culture agents, and the early days of the Czech republic saw anti-Semitic riots. [363] The army was dominated by former Czech legionnaires who had deserted the Habsburgs for the Russians during the First World War, and then fought alongside the White Guards on their way out of Russia; the generals were outspoken anti-Semites. The Hasidic youths of Carpatho-Ukrainia, where Jews made up 15 per cent of the population, were always the butt of their officers' ill-humour, and a Jew from Slovakia was assumed to be a Magyariser. It was unthinkable that a Jew could become a high officer. No one had any rights in the Czechoslovak Army except Czechs and those Slovaks who accepted Czech domination. [364]

The Czech bourgeoisie did not want the Jews to mix with the Germans or Magyars, but only the Czech Social Democrats encouraged Jews to enter the Czech community. [365] The bourgeois formula was patronage of 'national Jewry', and Jews were allowed to list themselves as Jews by nationality on the census. There were 356,820 Jews in the country in 1930 –2.4 per cent of the total population; of these 58 per cent listed themselves as Jews, 24.5 per cent as Czechs, 12.8 per cent as Germans and 4.7 per cent as Magyars.

The Czechoslovakian Zionists operated in local politics through the Jewish Party, the Zidovska Strana. From 1919 they were able to put members on the municipal councils in Prague and other cities and towns, but it always proved impossible to elect anyone to the national Parliament on a straight Jewish vote. In the 1920 elections a United Jewish Parties ballot received only 79,714 votes, and in the 1925 poll the Jewish Party, standing alone, garnered 98,845 votes. By 1928 even the most committed Jewish separatists realised that they had to ally themselves to some non-Jews if they were ever going to get into Parliament, and they found suitable partners in the Polish Middle-Class Party and the Polish Social Democrats of the Cieszyn area. In 1929 their joint effort won 104,539 votes, enough to send two Zionists and two Poles to Parliament. But the alliance was strictly for the election: the Zionists remained loyal to the Czech government, whereas the Poles oriented toward Poland. In Parliament the Zionists ran into another problem, because speaking rights in debates were alotted by voting strength. They were therefore compelled to find refuge in the Czech Social Democratic faction as 'guests'. The Social Democrats already had Jews in their party as good Czechs, and they took in the two Zionists simply to get two more votes for the government which they supported. The Jewish Party’s extremely narrow interests, opposition to Sunday closing laws and their efforts to get the government to subsidise Hebrew-language schools in the Carpatho-Ukraine, did not disturb Czech domination of the state. The Zionists always looked toward the Czechs for fulfilment of their ambitions, and they never saw themselves as the allies of the subordinate ethnic groups, not even the Poles with whom they had an electoral pact. For all their Jewish nationalism, they were simply an adjunct of the Czech supremacy. In their own fight against linguistic assimilation they had come to regard the fight for the rights of the other nationalities as a form of radical assimilationism. Their prime goal was central government support for their fledgeling school system, and to get this they remained loyal to the Czechoslovakian state and Thomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes.

After the surrender of the Sudeten in 1938, and the concomitant fall of Benes’s government, the patronage of the rump Czech state for 'national’ Jewry evaporated. The new Czech leaders, actually the right wing of the previous government, were determined to adapt to the new reality of Nazi domination of Central Europe, and they knew that Hitler would never consider coming to terms with them if the Jews had the free run of their new 'Czecho-Slovakia'. The new Prime Minister, Rudolph Beran, leader of the Agrarian Party, which had been the dominant party in the Cabinet under the Benes Republic, informed Parliament after the Munich Conference that anti-Semitism would now be the official policy of his government. It was necessary to 'limit the tasks of the Jews in the life of the nations which are the bearers of the state idea'. His declaration was accepted with one dissenting vote. A Czech rightist rose in defence of the Jews, but the deputy of the Jewish Party, who had never spoken up on behalf of the oppressed under Benes, now did not raise his voice in defence of his own people. [366]

Romania—'Yids to Palestine!'

Romania before 1914 was determinedly anti-Semitic. Most of its Jews had come as refugees from Russia, and the Romanian government simply denied them and their descendants the right to become citizens. The fact that Romania sided with the Allies during the First World War provided new territories at Versailles, which brought many thousands of additional Jews into the expanded state. Now the Jews received citizenship rights, as the Versailles powers insisted that Bucharest grant minimal rights to its millions of new non-Romanian subjects. Discrimination against the Jews continued of course, and began for the other non-Romanians, but ethnic hostility was only one of the country's problems. Apart from the fundamental economic problems, the government was notably corrupt: 'Rumania is not a country, it is a profession’, became a celebrated Yiddish proverb of the day.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s there was some improvement in the status of the Jews. They were 5.46 per cent of the population and the politicians began to court their vote; the King, Carol II, even took a Jewish mistress, the famous Magda Lupescu.

Image

-- Magda Lupescu and Carol II of Romania


All progressive elements saw anti-Semitism as an integral part of the general backwardness that the country had to overcome. Although the Social Democrats were extremely timid, the National Peasant Party (NPP) and the Radical Peasant Party were more vigorous in opposing anti-Semitism.

They wanted land reform and more democracy, and realised that those who would deny the Jews their rights were also opposed to democracy in general.

Jews supported all parties except the extreme anti-Semites. Many of the prosperous Romanian-speakers even voted for the more moderate anti-Semitic parties, as long as they used the police against hoodlums. Other Jews, in Transylvania, were passionate Hungarian nationalists. A minority voted for the Social Democrats or backed the outlawed Communists. The Zionists, based on the non-Romanian-speakers, slowly put together a Jewish Party which, after some experience in the local elections, ran for the national Parliament in 1931. They did well, in their own terms, and gained 64,175 votes –over 50 per cent of the Jewish vote, and four seats in the Parliament, although this only amounted to 2.19 per cent of the total vote. In the July 1932 elections they did slightly better, getting 67,582 votes or 2.48 per cent of the poll, and they held their four seats.

The leaders of the Jewish Party were from the small-town middle class. They appreciated that the NPP opposed anti-Semitism and they allied themselves loosely with the peasants in the Parliament, but they were, at best, only lukewarm supporters of the peasant cause. Their middle-class base saw itself threatened economically by the co-operative movement, which always followed on the heels of a peasant awakening. Instead of facing up to the real political challenge confronting Romania during the inter-war period, the Zionist leaders busied themselves in Jewish communal activities, not realising that they were weakening the Jewish position by remaining isolated from the struggle for democratic changes.

The extreme anti-Semites were already violent in the 1920s. Corneliu Codreanu, the founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael and its terrorist Iron Guard, had been acquitted of murdering the chief of police in Jassy in 1924.

Historian Stanley G. Payne writes in his study of Fascism, "The Legion was arguably the most unusual mass movement of interwar Europe." The Legion contrasted with most other European fascist movements of the period in its overt religiosity (in the form of an embrace of the Romanian Orthodox religion). According to Ioanid, the Legion "willingly inserted strong elements of Orthodox Christianity into its political doctrine to the point of becoming one of the rare modern European political movements with a religious ideological structure." The movement's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, was a religious mystic who aimed at a spiritual resurrection for the nation. According to Codreanu's heterodox philosophy, human life was a sinful, violent political war, which would ultimately be transcended by the spiritual nation. In this schema, the Legionnaire might have to perform fanatical and violent actions that would condemn him to damnation, which was considered the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. Like many other fascist movements, the Legion called for a revolutionary "new man". As for economics, there was no straightforward program, but the Legion generally promoted the idea of a communal or national economy, rejecting capitalism as overly materialistic. The movement considered its main enemies to be present political leaders and the Jews.

Style

Its members wore green uniforms (meant as a symbol of renewal, and the origin of the occasional reference to them as the "Greenshirts" - "Cămășile verzi"), and greeted each other using the Roman salute. The main symbol used by the Iron Guard was a triple cross (a variant of the triple parted and fretted one), standing for prison bars (as a badge of martyrdom), and sometimes referred to as the "Archangel Michael Cross" ("Crucea Arhanghelului Mihail").

The mysticism of the Legion led to a cult of death, martyrdom, violence, and self-sacrifice. They had an action squad that was called Echipa morții, or "Death Squad" who had the mission to go everywhere in Romania and to sing. It was called "Death Squad" because its members had to accomplish their mission even with the risk of being killed by the police, communist or any other enemies of the Legion. The members of it were: Ion Dumitrescu-Borșa (who was a Christian Orthodox priest), Sterie Ciumetti, Petre Țocu, Tache Savin, Traian Clime, Iosif Bozântan, Nicolae Constantinescu. A chapter of the Legion was called a cuib, or "nest," and was arranged around the virtues of discipline, work, silence, education, mutual aid, and honor. These groups observed rituals that included both the drinking of and writing oaths in blood....

Since the 1970s Mircea Eliade, a prominent historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher, has been criticized for having supported the Iron Guard in the 1930s.

-- Iron Guard, by Wikipedia


A Jewish student had been murdered in 1926 and the killer acquitted, and there were riots in 1929 and 1932, but there was no chance of the extreme right coming to power until after the impact of Hitler's victory in 1933. With the Nazi triumph, the slow trend away from anti-Semitism was sharply reversed. The Fascist forces now had a number of psychological advantages. If Germany, a highly civilised state, could turn anti-Semitic, the local extremists could no longer be written off as backward fanatics; nor were the Iron Guard part of the universal corruption.

Although the erosion of parliamentary democracy was fairly rapid, there was substantial resistance. The National Peasant Party spoke out against anti-Semitism until the 1937 election, when it suddenly changed direction and formed an alliance with the anti-Semites. The Radical Peasants continued to speak out and even, in some cases, physically defended the Jews, but they were no match for the far right.

'Put up their own . . . Candidates and Vote among Themselves'

Disaster had already hit the Jewish Party in the December 1933 elections. Hitler's triumph in Berlin made the election of Codreanu in Bucharest much more of a possibility, and many of the party's supporters realised that if they were going to live in safety in Romania they would have to have the protection of Romanian allies. The Jewish Party vote dropped to 38,565 (1.3 per cent) and all four seats were lost. In 1935 the Social Democrats raised the call for a Popular Front of all liberal forces, but excluding the Communists. They, in their turn, supported an alliance with the socialists and the NPP. Both parties wanted to combine with the NPP, not the other, but the NPP refused to unite with either, and signed a 'non-aggression pact' with the Fascists for the December 1937 elections. The Socialists, Radical Peasants and the Jewish Party all stood individually and the Communists, consistent with their view that the NPP were absolutely necessary for an anti-Fascist government, told their supporters to vote for the NPP. [367] The election was a rout for the fractured anti-Fascists; the Social Democrat vote dropped from an already anaemic 3.25 per cent to 1.3 per cent and they were wiped out as a parliamentary group. The Jewish Party hoped to go back into Parliament with the votes of Jews who could not now vote for the NPP. But their gain was too tiny, and they only achieved 1.4 per cent of the poll.

Had the Jewish Party and the Social Democrats joined forces, they at least would have gained the statutory 2 per cent required to obtain one seat but, of course, a united-front effort would have drawn other forces to them as well. For a separate Jewish party to stand for election alone was political suicide. It was exactly what the anti-Semites wanted; Octavian Goga, who became Prime Minister after the election, had told the Jews during the campaign to 'remain in their homes or put up their own lists of candidates and vote among themselves'. [368]

'Emigration Deals are in Order'

No wing of the Zionist movement had shown any interest in the struggle against the anti-Semitic wave in Romania. In November 1936 the American Labor Zionist Newsletter, which expressed the ideological guidance of Enzo Sereni and Golda Myerson (Meir), who were then the Poale Zion emissaries in the United States, stated the strategic position of the dominant tendency in the WZO: 'Unless the Peasant Party seizes power immediately the country will be taken over by the Nazis, and will become a satellite of Germany. Emigration deals are in order.’ [369] A pact was envisioned with the incumbent regime or its successor –be it the NPP or the Fascists– to encourage some of the Jews to emigrate to Palestine as a method of relieving some of the 'pressure’ of the presence of 'too many Jews'. But such a 'deal' would have been taken by the anti-Semites to mean that if they tried harder they would be able to get rid of even more Jews, and it would have triggered further demands by the anti-Semites in other countries for the Jews to start 'voluntarily' leaving Europe. Rather than help organise the struggle against the oncoming Fascists, the WZO was projecting a disastrous extension of its Ha'avara strategy to Eastern Europe.

'Jidanii in Palestina!' (Yids to Palestine!) had long been the warcry of the Iron Guards and other anti-Semites. The only sensible way for the Jews to respond to the menace was to seek unity with all others who were willing to make a common stand for liberty; but the Zionists, who had the electoral support of the majority of the Jews at the start of the right-wing upsurge, never made a move in that direction. Fascism did come to power, and the country was to witness the horrors of the Holocaust.

In January 1941 the Iron Guard broke with its allies in the government, and a short but furious civil war was waged in the capital. The Guard used the occasion to slaughter at least 2,000 Jews in the most barbaric fashion. Some 200 Jews were led to the slaughterhouse and had their throats cut in imitation of the Jewish rites of animal slaughter. Yet there was another side to the story. The dairy farmers of Dudesti Cioplea, a little village near Bucharest, sent messengers to the Jewish quarter: any Jews who could escape to their town would be protected. Over a thousand Jews fled there and were protected by peasants using their hunting rifles. The Iron Guard tried to break in, but was resolutely turned back. [370] That there were not more Dudesti Ciopleas was due to the failure of the anti-Fascist forces, including the Jewish Party, to unite against Codreanu's killers in the 1930s.

_______________

Notes:

363. Aharon Rabinowicz, 'The Jewish Minority' in The Jews of Czechoslovakia, vol. 1, p. 247; and Gustav Fleischmann, ‘The Religious Congregation, 1918-1938' in The Jews of Czechoslovakia, p. 273.

364. Yeshayahu Jelinek, 'The Swoboda Army Legend: Concealed Realities', Soviet Jewish Affairs (May 1980), pp. 76-7.

365. J .W. Brugel, 'Jews in Political Life', The Jews in Czechoslavakia, vol. 11, 244.

366. Solomon Goldelman, 'The Jews in the new Czecho-Slovakia', Contemporary Jewish Record (January 1939)' p. 13.

367. Bela Vago, 'Popular Front in the Balkans: Failure in Hungary and Rumania', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. V, no. 3 (1970), p. 115.

368. Bela Vago, 'The Jewish Vote in Rumania between the two World Wars', Jewish Journal of Sociology (December 1972), p. 241.

369. 'Diaspora', Labor Zionist Newsletter (15 November 1935), p. 12.

370. William Perl, The Four Front War, p. 349.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:40 am

17. SPAIN: THE NAZIS FIGHT, THE ZIONISTS DO NOT

Both Hitler and Mussolini recognised the full implications of the Spanish Civil War; a victory for the left there would have galvanised their enemies, and not the least of these the workers of Germany and Italy. They moved with alacrity, and later Hitler was to boast that the intervention of the 14,000 men of his Condor Legion was decisive in the struggle. Another 25,000 Germans were to serve with Franco's tank corps and artillery, and the Italians sent in another 100,000 'volunteers'. The Loyalist left also received substantial foreign support; individual radicals crossed the Pyrenees on their own to join the workers' militias; the Communist International organised 40,000 volunteers of the International Brigades (although by no means all were Communists); and ultimately the Soviets were to send in both men and material, although never in the quantities supplied by the Fascist states.

There is no certainty as to the number of Jews who fought in Spain. They identified themselves as radicals rather than as Jews, and few thought then to count them as Jews. The considered estimate of Professor Albert Prago, himself a veteran of the conflict, is that they provided 16 per cent of the International Brigades, proportionately the highest figure for any ethnic group. [371] It is believed that of the 2,000 Britons, at least 214 or 10.7 per cent were Jewish, and the numbers given for American Jews are between 900 and 1,250, about 30 per cent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The largest single Jewish national grouping consisted of Poles living in exile from the savagely anti-Communist regime in Warsaw. Of the approximately 5,000 Poles, 2,250 or 45 per cent were Jews. In 1937 the Brigades, for propagandist reasons, set up the Naftali Botwin Company, almost 200 Yiddish speakers in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Strangely, no one has ever estimated a figure for the Jews among the German Ernst Thaelmanns, the second largest national contingent, but they were well represented.

A few of the Italians were also Jews; the most notable of these was Carlo Rosselli, whom Mussolini considered his most dangerous opponent among the exile community. A maverick liberal who went to Spain some time before the Communists, he organised the first Italian column of 130 men –mostly Anarchists, with a few clusters of liberals and Trotskyists– to fight in the ranks of the militia of the Catalonian Anarcho-Syndicalists. Mussolini finally had Carlo and his brother Nello assassinated by thugs of the Cagoulards, a French Fascist group, on 9 July 1937. [372]

'The Question is not Why They Went, But Rather Why Didn't We Go?'

There were 22 Zionists from Palestine in Spain when the Civil War broke out. These were members of HaPoel, the Labour Zionist athletic association, who had come for a Workers’ Olympiad scheduled to be held in Barcelona on 19 July 1936 as a protest against the forthcoming Olympic Games in Berlin. [373] Almost all of them took part in the battles in Barcelona when the workers crushed the rising of the local garrison. [374]

Albert Prago mentions two other Zionists by name as having come to fight and doubtless there were others, but they came strictly as individuals. The Zionist movement not only opposed their members in Palestine going to Spain, but on 24 December 1937 Ha'aretz, the Zionist daily newspaper in Palestine, denounced the American Jews in the Lincoln Brigades for fighting in Spain rather than coming to Palestine to work. [375] There were, however, Jews in Palestine who ignored the strictures of the Zionist movement and went to Spain, but no one is certain of their number; estimates run from 267 to 500, proportionately the highest number for any country. [376] The Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel describes them as 'about 400 Communists'. [377] It is known that some Zionists, acting as individuals, were amongst their number, but almost all were members of the Palestine Communist Party.

In 1973 the Israeli veterans of the conflict held a reunion and invited veterans from other countries to attend. One of these, Saul Wellman, an American Jew, later described the most dramatic incident of the event, which occurred when they toured Jerusalem and met the mayor, Teddy Kolleck. They had been debating whether they had been right to go to Spain in the midst of the Arab revolt and Kolleck had his own answer to their discussion: 'The question is not why they went, but rather why didn't we go as well?' [378]

There were several reasons, all deeply rooted in Zionism –and particularly Labour Zionism– which explain why they did not go, when it was clear that the Nazis were crucially involved on Franco’s side. All Zionists saw the solving of the Jewish question as their most important task, and they sharply counterposed Jewish nationalism to any concept of international solidarity; none despised 'red assimilation’ more vigorously than the Labour Zionists. During the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, Berl Katznelson, the editor of the Histadrut's daily paper Davar, and a senior figure in the movement, wrote a pamphlet, entitled Revolutionary Constructivism, which was primarily an attack on their own youth for their growing criticism of the party’s supine line OI Revisionist Fascism and its increasing racism towards the Arabs. Katznelson’s polemic was also an assault on the very heart of Marxism: its internationalism. He denounced the youths in no uncertain terms:

They do not have the capacity to live their own lives. They can live only someone else's life and think someone else's thought. What queer altruism! Our Zionist ideologists have always denounced this type of Jew –this revolutionary middleman, who pretending to be an internationalist, a rebel, a warrior, a hero, is actually so abject, so cowardly, and spineless when the existence of his own nation hangs in the balance… The revolutionary speculator is continually begging, 'See my modesty, see my piety, see how I observe all significant and trivial revolutionary precepts., How prevalent is this attitude among us and how dangerous at this hour when it is imperative that we be honest with ourselves and straightforward with our neighbors. [379]


Nominally the Labour Zionists were part of the Socialist International, but for them international workers' solidarity only meant workers' support for them in Palestine. They raised small sums of money for Spain, but none of their number officially went to fight in 'someone else's battles’. At the 1973 veterans’ conference they had taken up the question of whether they had been justified in going off to Spain 'in the face of some criticism from Zionist and Histadrut leaders in 1936… at a time of anti-Jewish riots’. [380] But given the statements by Enzo Sereni and Moshe Beilenson in Jews and Arabs in Palestine, which was published in July 1936, the very month that the Fascists revolted in Spain, it is apparent that the Labour Zionists' thinking at that time was not defensive; their ambition was to conquer Palestine and economically dominate the Middle East. The 'riots' were the natural defence response to their ambitions and not the other way around. Although the Histadrut's ranks did sympathise with the left in Spain, with their ambitions the Zionist leaders were as far removed as ever from the fight against international Fascism. It was during the Spanish conflict that their approaches to the Nazis reached their height with the request in December 1936 that the Nazis testify on their behalf before the Peel Commission and then the further offers, by the Labour-dominated Haganah, to spy for the SS in 1937.

Only one Zionist tendency, the Hashomer Hatzair, ever tried to grapple with the deeper implications of the Spanish revolution. Its members had devoted considerable efforts to try to win over the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) to a pro-Zionist position, and they closely followed the fate of the ILP's sister party in Spain, the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM). The political failure of the Popular Front strategy in Spain prompted a broad critique of the Stalinists and Social Democrats. However, there is no evidence that any of their members went to Spain, certainly not in an official capacity, or that they did anything for the struggle there beyond the raising of an insignificant donation, in Palestine, for the POUM. Throughout the 1930s Hashomer's members took no part in political life, not even Jewish communal affairs, outside Palestine and were, in this regard, the most narrowly focused of all the Zionist groupings. Far from providing any theoretical leadership, on the Spanish question or on the larger problems of Fascism and Nazism, they lost followers to both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists as they offered nothing beyond isolationist and utopian rhetoric in the midst of a world catastrophe. [381]

In later years the bravery of the Jewish left-wingers who fought and died in Spain has been used to prove that 'the Jews' did not go as sheep to the slaughter during the Holocaust. Most zealous in pursuing this line have been those Jewish ex- Stalinists who have since sought to make their peace with Zionism. They cannot bring themselves to repudiate their venture or to claim that the Zionists were correct in denouncing them for fighting in Spain, but in retrospect they have sought to emphasise the 'national' Jewish aspect of their involvement and they have carefully counted every Jew in the long lists of those who fought. The majority of those who went to Spain went because they were committed Communists and they had become radicalised on the basis of many issues, of which Nazism was only one. Their bravery proves nothing about how 'the Jews' reacted to the Holocaust, any more than their involvement with the Communist movement implicates 'the Jews' in the systematic murder of the leaders of the POUM by the Soviet secret police.

Stalin's crimes in Spain are part of the Civil War and they cannot be minimised. Nevertheless, those leftists were fighting and dying in the front lines of the world struggle against international Fascism, while the Labour Zionists were receiving Adolf Eichmann as their guest in Palestine and offering to spy for the SS.

_______________

Notes:

371. Albert Prago, Jews in the International Brigades in Spain, p. 6.

372. Charles Delzell, Mussolini's Enemies, pp. 147-61.

373. 'Anti-Nazi World Olympic Games in Spain on July 19', Palestine Post (13 July 1936), p.1.

374. Prago, Jews in the International Brigades in Spain, pp. 6-7.

375. Morris Schappes, 'An Appeal to Zionists: Keep War Out of Palestine', Jewish Life (April 1938), p. 11.

376. Prago, Jews in the International Brigades in Spain, p. 5.

377. 'Communists is Israel', Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, vol. 2, p. 204.

378. Saul Wellman, 'Jewish Vets of the Spanish Civil War', Jewish Currents (June 1973), p. 10.

379. Berl Katznelson, Revolutionary constructivism (1937), p. 22.

380. Wellman, 'Jewish Vets of the Spanish Civil War'.

381. Zvi Loker, 'Balkan Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War', Soviet Jewish Affairs, vol. VI, no. 2 (1976), p. 75.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:42 am

18. ZIONISM'S FAILURE TO FIGHT NAZISM IN THE LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

Zionism and the British Union of Fascists


There was no Western state that did not see the rise of pro-Nazi movements after 1933, but the extent of their influence varied from country to country. Although Western capital preferred Nazi Germany to a Communist take-over, there was never as much support in business circles for Hitler as for Mussolini. Hitler was too revanchist in his attitude toward Versailles, and Germany too potentially powerful, for there not to be strong ambivalence toward this latest anti-Communist saviour. Furthermore, Hitler's anti-Semitism was never popular with the capitalists. As long as the Jews were only a small element within their societies it was assumed that they would eventually be assimilated. The mass migration from Eastern Europe had revived anti-Semitism in the West, but if there was more prejudice against Jews in British and American ruling circles in 1933 than, say, 1883, none would go as far as Hitler. Nevertheless, during the Depression both Britain and America saw the rise of substantial anti-Semitic movements which physically threatened the Jewish communities.

In Britain the menace came from Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The Board of Deputies of British Jews tried to deal with the danger by ignoring it. From the beginning it told the Jews not to heckle at Mosley's meetings. The leaders insisted that Jews as such had no reason to quarrel with Fascism, and Neville Laski, President of the Board and chairman of the administrative committee of the Jewish Agency, emphasised that 'there is Fascism in Italy under which 50,000 Jews live in amity and safety… the Jewish community, not being a political body as such, should not be dragged into the fight against Fascism as such’. [382] The British Zionist Federation supported his position in the Young Zionist with an article on the question in its September 1934 issue. The Communists and the Independent Labour Party had been actively engaging the Mosleyites in the streets with at least 12,000 hostile demonstrators outside the BUF's Olympia rally on 7 June, and no less than 6,937 police had to protect 3,000 Fascists from 20,000 opponents in Hyde Park on 9 September. The East End Jewish community saw the Communist Party as its protector against the BUF supporters, and there was a growing mood amongst the Zionist youth to join the anti-Mosley campaign. However, the Zionist leadership was determined that this should not come about. What would happen if the Jews fought Mosley and the BUF won?

Suppose that under a Fascist regime reprisals are used against anti-Fascists, all Jews must suffer… So the question looms up once more -- should we?… Meanwhile there are three ideals which cry out aloud for the support of all Jews… 1. The unity of the Jewish People. 2. The need for a stronger Jewish pride. 3. The building of Eretz Yisrael. And we are wasting our time wondering whether we should join anti- Fascist societies. [383]


The next issue restated their case more 'thoroughly and unmistakenly':

Once we have realised that we cannot root out the evil, that our efforts so far have been in vain, we must do everything to defend ourselves against the outbursts of that infamous disease. The problem of anti-Semitism becomes a problem of our own education. Our defence is in the strengthening of our Jewish personality. [384]


In fact the Jewish masses largely ignored the Zionists' passive advice and backed the Communists. Eventually the Zionist position was reversed and some Zionists joined a community defence group called the Jewish People's Council (JPC), but anti-Fascism never became the priority for the Zionist movement.

The famous battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, when over 5,000 police failed to push a BUF march through 100,000 Jews and leftists, was the turning-point in the fight against Mosley. William Zukerman, one of the most distinguished Jewish journalists of the age and then still a Zionist, was present and wrote an account of it for New York’s Jewish Frontier:

no English-speaking city has ever seen anything like the scenes which marked this attempted demonstration… Those who like myself had the privilege of taking part in the event will never forget it. For this was one of those great communal acts of a mass of people aroused by a profound emotion or by a sense of outraged justice, which makes history… It was indeed the great epic of the Jewish East End. [385]


He reported that the demonstration had been called by the JPC which included 'synagogues, friendly societies, and Landsmanschaften' (immigrant societies). He wrote about the presence of Jewish ex-servicemen. He continued: 'The Communists and the Independent Labour Party must be given the credit for being the most active fighters of Mosley's Fascist anti-Semitism.' [386] Others among the local Zionists thought as he did and must have been there, but it is significant that a Zionist journalist, writing for a Zionist magazine, does not even mention the Zionists as being there. Gisela Lebzelter's book, Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918- 1939, mentions only that 'Zionist organisations' were present at the founding conference of the JPC on 26 July 1936. [387] She is silent about any further role they might have played in the campaign which lasted for several years. She confirms Zukerman's evaluation and fully acknowledges the leading role of the Communists.

The British Zionist movement of that day was not small. It sent 643 settlers to Palestine between 1933 and 1936. It had the strength to play a prominent role in the street-fighting, but in fact it did very little to defend the Jewish community, even after the abandonment of its 1934 stance. It was Cable Street -- that is, the illegal resistance of the Jews, led primarily by the Communists and the ILP -- that forced the government to stop protecting the 'rights' of the BUF and finally ban uniformed private militias.

Zionism and the German-American Bund

Fascist currents in the United States had been growing throughout the 1930s. The traditional Ku-Klux-Klan was still strong in the South, and many of the Irish in North America had become infected with Father Coughlan's clerical Fascism as Franco's armies smashed into Barcelona. Italian neighbourhoods saw organised Fascist parades, and many German immigrant organisations were under the influence of the Nazis' German-American 'Bund'. Anti-Semitism was growing powerful, and the Bund determined on a show of their new strength with the announcement of a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden for 20 February 1939. Other rallies were to follow in San Francisco and Philadelphia. Would the Jews respond?

The Jews in New York numbered at least 1,765,000 (29.56 per cent of the population) and there were additional hundreds of thousands in the near suburbs; yet not one Jewish organisation thought to organise a counter-demonstration. One, the right-wing American Jewish Committee, even sent a letter to the Garden's management supporting the Nazis' right to hold their meeting. [388] Only one group, the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), issued a call for a counter-demonstration. The SWP was a tiny group, with no more than a few hundred members, but as Max Shachtman the organiser of the action explained, it knew enough to 'mesh the small gear which it represents into the huge gear which the militant workers of New York represent, thus setting the latter into motion'. [389] The public found out about the SWP's demonstration when the city announced that the police would defend the Nazis against attack, and the press played up the possibility of violence.

There were two Yiddish daily newspapers then which were identified with Zionism: Der Tog, one of whose editors, Abraham Coralnik, had been a prime organiser of the anti-Nazi boycott; and Der Zhournal, whose manager, Jacob Fishman, had been one of the founders of the Zionist Organisation of America. Both papers opposed a protest against the presence of the Nazis. Der Tog begged its readers: 'Jews of New York, do not let your sorrows guide you! Avoid Madison Square Garden this evening. Don't come near the hall! Don't give the Nazis the chance to get the publicity they desire so much.' [390] The Socialist Appeal, the SWP's weekly paper, described the Zhournal's plea as combining the same language with 'an additional nauseating touch of rabbinical piety'. [391] Nor was the response of the Zionist organisations any more militant. During the preparations for the encounter a group of young Trotskyists went to the Lower East Side headquarters of the Hashomer Hatzair, but they were told: 'Sorry we can't join you, our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine.' [392]

Then as now, the Hashomer claimed to be the left wing of Zionism, but only ten months before, Hashomer's magazine had defended their rigid policy of abstentionism:

We can't divide our position as Jews from our position as socialists; in fact we place the stabilisation and normalisation of the first condition as a necessary preference to our work for the second condition… thus we don't take part in the socialist activities in which we could only participate as bourgeois, as an unstable, non-basic element, not imbedded in the true proletariat and speaking 'from above'… This does not call for the phrase-slinging, demonstration staging, castle building program of the usual 'radical' organisation… We are, and must be, essentially nonpolitical. [393]


Over 50,000 people turned up at Madison Square Garden. Most were Jews, but by no means all of them. A contingent from the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the nationalist followers of Marcus Garvey, came from Harlem. Although the CPUSA refused to support the demonstration through hatred for Trotskyism and their support for the Democratic mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, whose police were protecting the Bund, many of its multinational rank and file did attend. The area was the scene of a furious five-hour battle as the mounted police, part of a contingent of 1,780 armed police, repeatedly rode into the anti-Nazis. Although the anti-Nazis were unable to break the police lines, the victory was theirs. The 20,000 Nazis and Coughlanites in the Garden would have been mauled, had not the police been present.

The SWP immediately followed up its New York success by calling for another demonstration in Los Angeles on 23 February outside a Bund meeting at the Deutsche Haus. Over 5,000 people trapped the Fascists in their hall until the police came to their rescue. The Bund's offensive soon came to a halt and, thoroughly humiliated, they had to cancel their scheduled San Francisco and Philadelphia rallies.

The fact that, as late as February 1939, the SWP was alone in calling for a demonstration against a storm-trooper meeting in New York City testifies to a reality during the Nazi epoch: individual Zionists certainly took part in the battle of the Garden, but the entire range of Jewish organisations -- political or religious -- were never prepared to fight their enemies.

________________

Notes:

382. Gisela Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, 1918-1939, p. 142.

383. Raphael Powell, 'Should Jews join Anti-Fascist Societies?', Young Zionist (London, August 1934), p. 6.

384. C.C.A., 'Should Jews join Anti-Fascist Societies?', Young Zionist (London, September 1934), pp. 12, 19.

385. William Zukerman, 'Blackshirts in London', Jewish Frontier (November 1936), p. 41.

386. Ibid., pp. 42-3.

387. Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, p. 140.

388. 'Review of the Year 5699—United States', American Jewish Year Book, 1939-40, p. 215.

389. Max Shachtman, 'In This Corner', Socialist Appeal (28 February 1939), p. 4.

390. 'The Craven Jewish Press', Socialist Appeal (24 February 1939), p. 4.

391. Ibid.

392. 'An End to Zionist Illusions!', Socialist Appeal (7 March 1939), p. 4.

393. Naomi Bernstein, 'We and the American Student Union', Hashomer Hatzair (April 1938), p. 16.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:53 pm

19. ZIONISM AND THE JAPANESE EAST ASIA CO-PROSPERITY SPHERE

There were 19,850 Jews in China in 1935: one community in Shanghai and another in Manchuria. The Shanghai community was dominated by Sephardim of Iraqi origin, descendants of Elias Sassoon and his clerks, who had set themselves up in business after the Opium War and had grown fabulously wealthy in the development of Shanghai. The Manchurian community at Harbin was of Russian origin and dated from the construction of the tsarist Chinese Eastern Railway. It had later been swollen by refugees from the Russian civil war.

Zionism was weak among the 'Arabs', who were one of the wealthiest ethnic communities in the world, as they had no interest in leaving their good life. The Zionists in China were Russians. They, too, were part of the imperialist presence and had no desire to assimilate into the Chinese nation. Capitalist and middle class, they had no interest in returning to the Soviet Union, and their Jewish identity was reinforced by the presence of thousands of White Guard anti-Semitic refugees throughout northern China. Zionism's separatism had a natural attraction, and within the movement Revisionism had the most appeal. The Russian Jews were traders in an imperialist and militarised environment, and the Betar combined an enthusiastic capitalist and imperialist orientation with a militarism that was extremely practical in a context of White Guards who had become lumpenbandits. Revisionism seemed ideally suited to the harsh world they saw around them.

'An Active Part in the Construction of the New Order of East Asia'

The Harbin community thrived until the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931. Many of the senior Japanese officers had taken part in the 1918-22 expedition, which had fought the Bolsheviks by the side of Admiral Alexander Kolchak's army in Siberia, and they had picked up the White Guards' Jewish obsession. Soon the local White Russians became a central prop for Japan's puppet 'Manchukuo' kingdom, and many were directly recruited into the Japanese Army. White Russian gangs, protected by the Japanese police, started extorting money from the Jews, and by the mid-1930s most of Harbin's Jews had fled south into Nationalist-held China, rather than endure the severe anti-Semitism.

The flight of the Jews seriously affected the Manchurian economy, and by 1935 the Japanese had to reverse their course. The military had their own distinctive version of anti-Semitism: there was a world Jewish conspiracy, and it was very powerful, but it could be made to work in the Japanese interest. The Japanese would dangle Manchukuo before world Jewry as a potential haven for German Jewish refugees and they would also take a pro-Zionist line. Then, it was believed, American Jews would invest in Manchukuo and mollify American opinion over the invasion of China and even the growing Japanese friendship with the Nazis. This was a forlorn hope, as the Jews had little influence on American policy; furthermore, Stephen Wise and the other American Jewish leaders were deeply opposed to collaborating with the Japanese, whom they saw as the inevitable allies of the Nazis.

The Japanese had much more success convincing Manchukuo's remaining Jews that it was in their interest to collaborate, not least by curbing the White Russians and closing down Nash Put, the organ of the Russian Fascist Association. The leader of Harbin's Jews was a pious doctor, Abraham Kaufman, who was deeply involved in the local community. He was greatly encouraged by the change in Japanese policy and, according to a Japanese Foreign Office report, in 1936-7 he and friends asked permission to set up a Far Eastern Jewish Council. Its aims were to organise all the Jews in the Orient and to disseminate propaganda on Japan's behalf, particularly in taking a stand with Japan against Communism. [394]

The first of three conferences of the Jewish communities in the Far East was held in Harbin in December 1937. The decor of these conferences is seen in photographs in the January 1940 issue of Ha Dagel (The Banner) which, in spite of its Hebrew title, was the Russian-language magazine of Manchukuo Revisionism. The platforms were always festooned with Japanese, Manchukuo and Zionist flags. Betarim acted as guards of honour. [395] The meetings were addressed by such people as General Higuchi of the Japanese Military Intelligence, General Vrashevsky for the White Guards, and Manchukuo puppet officials. [396]

The 1937 conference issued a resolution, which it sent to every major Jewish organisation in the world, pledging to 'cooperate with Japan and Manchukuo in building a new order in Asia'. [397] In return, the Japanese acknowledged Zionism as the Jewish national movement. [398] Zionism became a part of the Manchukuo establishment, and the Betar was given official colours and uniforms. There were moments of embarrassment in the new relationship, as, for example, when the Betar had to be excused from the parade celebrating Germany's recognition of Manchukuo. [399] But, in general, the local Zionists were quite happy with their cordial relationship with the Japanese regime. As late as 23 December 1939, an observer at the third conference reported 'joy all over town’. [400] The gathering passed several resolutions:

This Convention hereby congratulates the Japanese Empire for her great enterprise of establishing peace in East Asia, and is convinced that when the fighting has ceased the people of East Asia will set on their national construction under the leadership of Japan. [401]


They went on to say that:

The Third Conference of Jewish Communities calls upon the Jewish people to take an active part in the construction of the New Order of Eastern Asia, guided by the fundamental ideals laid down of a struggle against the Comintern in close collaboration with all nations. [402]


Verdict: the Zionists Collaborated with the Enemy of the Chinese People

Did the Manchukuo Zionists gain anything for the Jews by their collaboration with the Japanese? Herman Dicker, one of the leading specialists on Far Eastern Jewry, concluded that: 'It cannot be said, in retrospect, that the Far Eastern Conference made it easier for large numbers of refugees to settle in Manchuria. At best, only a few hundred refugees were permitted entry.’ [403] In the last days of the Second World War the Soviets marched into Manchuria and Kaufman was arrested; ultimately he served eleven years in Siberia for collaboration. Certainly Manchukuo Zionism was deeply enmeshed in the Japanese structure in Manchukuo. The Zionists had not supported the Japanese conquest, but once the White Russians were curbed they no longer had any grievance against the Japanese presence. They had nothing to gain from a return of the Kuomintang, and they dreaded a Communist revolution. They were never pleased with Tokyo's connection with Berlin, but they hoped to temper that by using their influence with American Jewry to promote a compromise with Washington in the Pacific. There is no doubt that, despite their dissent from Japan's German policy, the Japanese saw the Manchurian Zionists as their willing collaborators.

_______________

Notes:

394. Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, pp. 45-7.

395. 'Otkrytiye Tryetyevo Syezda Yevryeiskikh Obshchin Dalnovo Vostoka', Ha Dagel (Harbin, 1 January 1940), pp. 21-8.

396. Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East.

397. Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan, p. 56.

398. David Kranzler, 'Japanese Policy towards the Jews, 1938-1941', Forum on the Jewish People, Zionism and Israel (Winter 1979), p. 71.

399. Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, p. 56.

400. David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis and Jews, p. 220.

401. Kranzler, 'Japanese Policy towards the Jews', p. 77.

402. Ha Dagel, p. 26.

403. Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, p. 51.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:55 pm

20. POLAND, 1918-1939

The collapse of the three empires ruling Poland gave the Polish capitalists an independent state that they had long ceased to want. After the failure of the 1863 insurrection against tsarism, they had begun to see the Russian empire as a huge market and saw no reason to cut themselves off from it. The enemy, they argued, was not Russia but the Jews and the German Protestants who dominated 'their' home market. Nationalism became the preserve of the working class and its Polska Partja Socjalistyczna (PPS). The First World War saw the capitalist National Democrats, the so-called Endeks, backing the Tsar, and the right wing of the PPS, lead by Jozef Pilsudski, setting up a Polish Legion for the Germans as the lesser of the two evils, since they intended to turn later on Germany. However, the imperialist collapse compelled the two factions to unite in order to set up a reborn Polish state. Pilsudski had left the PPS during the war and moved to the far right; thus the two camps could now agree on a programme of anti-Bolshevism and the recreation of a Polish empire. 'Marshall' Pilsudski had welcomed Jewish soldiers into his legion and still despised anti-Semitism, which he identified with tsarist backwardness; however, he had no control over those generals who came into the army via the Endeks' tsarist military, and he backed Petliura's pogromists. Murder and persecution of Jews reached such proportions that the Allies had to intervene and impose a minority-rights clause into the Polish constitution as a condition of recognition. Only when the Endeks realised that Jewish pressure could affect Warsaw's credit with foreign bankers did the pogroms tail off. But the end of the pogroms only meant that anti-Semitism was changing its form. The regime determined to 'Polonise' the economy, and thousands of Jews lost their jobs as the government took over the railways, cigarette and match factories and the distilleries.

In the early 1920s the Polish Jewish community amounted to 2,846,000 –10.5 per cent of the population. It was far from politically homogeneous. On the far left were the Communists (KPP). Although the proportion of Jews in the KPP was always greater than 10.5 per cent, the Communists were never a significant proportion of the Jewish population. Although the PPS had always welcomed Jews into its ranks, it was imbued with Polish nationalism and was hostile to Yiddish; as a result the postwar PPS had little Jewish following. Instead the largest left-wing force among the Jews were the Yiddishists of the Bund, whose Polish section had survived its defeat in the Soviet Union, but they were still a distinct minority in the larger community. In the 1922 elections for the Polish Parliament (Seym) they received only a fraction over 87,000 votes and were unable to win a single seat. On the right stood Agudas Yisrael, the party of traditional orthodoxy, with approximately one-third of the community loosely behind it. Its members took the position that the Talmud required loyalty to any Gentile regime that did not interfere with the Jewish religion. With their passive conservatism they could have no influence on any of the more educated elements who sought an activist solution to anti-Semitism. A small following, primarily intellectuals, followed the Folkists, a group of Diaspora Yiddish nationalists. All of these elements, though each for different reasons, were anti-Zionist.

The dominant political force within the Jewish community were the Zionists. They had taken six of the thirteen Jewish seats in the 1919 Sejm, and the 1922 elections gave them an opportunity to demonstrate that they could counter the still virulent anti-Semitism. The largest faction within the movement, led by Yitzhak Gruenbaum of the Radical Zionists, organised a 'Minorities Bloc'. The non-Polish nationalities constituted almost one-third of the population and Gruenbaum argued that if they united they could be the balance of power within the Sejm. The Bloc, comprising Gruenbaum's Zionist faction, together with elements from the German, Byelorussian and Ukrainian nationalities, had 66 of its candidates elected, including 17 Zionists. Superficially the pact seemed to have succeeded, but in fact it quickly demonstrated the divisions both within the Zionist movement and the minorities in general. The Ukrainian majority in Galicia refused to recognise the Polish state and boycotted the elections. None of the other nationalist politicians would support the Ukrainians' fight and the Galician Zionists, anxious not to antagonise the Poles, stood in the election as rivals to the Minorities Bloc. The Galician Zionists won 15 seats, but as their success was due to the Ukrainian abstention they could not pretend to represent the region. Even within the Minorities Bloc there was no commitment to long-term unity, and after the election it fell apart. There were now 47 Jews in both houses of the Sejm, 32 of them Zionists, but their electoral opportunism had discredited them.

The failure of the Minority Bloc opened the way for another adventure to be organised by the Galician General Zionist leaders, Leon Reich and Osias Thon. In 1925 they negotiated a pact, the 'Ugoda' (compromise) with Wladyslaw Grabski, the anti-Semitic Prime Minister. Grabski was seeking an American loan, and needed to prove that he was not an unmovable fanatic. The deal with these two Zionists made it look, at least to unwary foreigners, as if his regime was capable of change. In fact the government only agreed to minor concessions: Jewish conscripts could have kosher kitchens and Jewish students would not have to write on Saturdays as all other students had to do. Even within the Zionist movement Thon and Reich were seen as having betrayed the Jewish community. [404]

Anti-Semitism was only a part of the reactionary line of the post-1922 governments, and the majority of the people, including the Jews, backed Pilsudski's May 1926 coup d'etat in the hope of a change for the better. The entire Jewish Sejm delegation voted for him for President on 31 May. [405] The position of the Jews did not improve, but at least Pilsudski made no efforts to increase discrimination and his police suppressed anti-Semitic riots until his death in 1935. The 1928 Sejm election was the last more or less free national election in Poland. The General Zionists were again split: Gruenbaum's faction entered another Minority Bloc, and the Galicians supported their own candidate. Pilsudski was popular with conservative Jews for putting down attacks and many voted for his supporters out of gratitude. This, together with the entry of the Galician Ukrainians into the electoral arena, served to reduce the Jewish representation to 22, of whom 16 were Zionists. [406] By 1930 the Pilsudski regime had tightened into an intense police state with severe brutality towards political prisoners. Pilsudski kept the Sejm alive, but he rigged the election and ruled above it and the results of the 1930 elections were largely meaningless. The Jewish representation declined again, to eleven, six of whom were Zionists.

With the intensification of the dictatorship the Zionist parliamentarians showed more interest in the anti-Pulsudski opposition, but these tendencies were brought short by Hitler's victory in neighbouring Germany. Polish Zionism had originally underestimated the Nazis. Before he came to power the Zionist daily newspapers Haint, Der Moment and Nowy Dziennik had assured their readers that once he took office Hitler would be restrained in his anti-Semitism by the presence of the conservatives like von Papen and Hugenburg in his coalition Cabinet. They thought the needs of the German economy would soon make him adopt a more moderate approach. [407] A few weeks of the New Order destroyed such fantasies and the Polish Zionists' next worry was that the Nazis' success would trigger a wave of extremism in Poland. All interest in an opposition bloc ceased, and Pilsudski became the man of the hour again as he made sounds against the regime in Berlin. [408] The Zionists' sharp reversal of opinion toward the dictator brought cries of protest from the opposition parties resisting Pilsudski. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on a debate on the Jewish question in the Sejm on 4 November 1933:

Deputy Rog, the leader of the Peasant Party… denounced the anti-Jewish attitude of Hitler Germany. The crime which is being committed against the German Jews is a world crime, he said. Poland will never, he declared, take an example from Hitler Germany. He could not understand, however, he went on, how Jewish politicians who are fighting against German dictatorship can reconcile with their conscience the support they are giving in Poland to the Polish dictatorship. It is not a good thing, he said, for the Polish masses to bear in mind how the Jews are supporting their oppressors. [409]


On 26 January 1934 Pilsudski signed a ten-year peace pact with Hitler. That same year the Warsaw authorities, observing the impotence of the League of Nations in dealing with the German problem, decided to repudiate the Minorities Treaty signed under duress at Versailles. Nahum Goldmann met Jozef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, in Geneva on 13 September 1934, to try to persuade him to change his mind, but without success. As usual the WZO refused to organise mass protest demonstrations abroad, and relied instead on diplomatic intervention from London and Rome. [410] The Polish Zionists remained loyal to Pilsudski until his death on 12 May 1935, and then Osias Thon and Apolinary Hartglas, the President of the Polish Zionist Organisation, proposed a 'Pilsudski Forest' in Palestine in his memory. [411] The Palestinian Revisionists announced that they were going to build an immigrants' hostel to be named in his honour. [412]

'The Workers have not been Contaminated'

Hitler's victory excited the extremists among the Polish anti-Semites, but as long as the marshall lived his police were under strict orders to repress any kind of street agitation. However, his sucessors, the 'Colonels', could no longer afford politically to maintain his policy. They lacked his prestige and knew that they had to adopt a policy with popular appeal or they would be overthrown. Anti-Semitism was an obvious choice as it pandered to the traditional prejudices of much of the Polish middle class. However, they still tried to maintain order; restrictions on the Jews would have to proceed strictly according to law. The hardcore anti-Semites of the Endeks and their offshoot, the pro-Nazi National Radicals or Naras, understood that the Colonels' capitulation to the anti-Semitic mood stemmed from their weakness, and they frequently defied the police. The country soon was swept by a wave of pogroms. The outrages frequently started in the universities, where the Endeks and Naras tried to establish 'ghetto benches' and a numerus clausus for the Jews. Soon a boycott of Jewish stores was set into effect and roving bands of Jew-haters began terrorising Poles who patronised Jewish shops. Street assaults on Jews became an everyday occurrence.

The Jewish resistance to the pogromists was largely the work of the Bundists. Although they were numerically much smaller than the Zionists until the mid- 1930s, nevertheless they had always been the dominant force in the Jewish labour movement. Now they organised 24-hour flying squads at their Warsaw headquarters. On hearing of an attack their Ordener-gnspe would sally out, sticks and pipes in hand to enter into combat. At times there were hundreds of Bundists, Jewish unionists and their friends from the PPS militia, the Akcja Socyalistyczna, engaged in pitched battles with the Endek and Nara supporters. [413] The most important of these street fights was the battle in the Saxonian Garden, Warsaw's famous park, in 1938, when the Bund found out that the Naras planned a pogrom in the park and the streets surrounding it. Bernard Goldstein, the leader of the Ordener-grupe, later described the battle in his memoirs.

We organised a large group of resistance fighters which we concentrated around the large square near the Iron Gate. Our plan was to entice the hooligans to that square, which was closed off on three sides, and to block the fourth exit, and thus have them in a trap where we could give battle and teach them an appropriate lesson… When we had a fair number of Nara hooligans in the square… we suddenly emerged from our hiding places, surrounding them from all sides… ambulances had to be called. [414]


Earlier, on 26 September 1937, the Naras bombed the Bund's headquarters. The Bund promptly put together a group of thirty: ten Bundists, ten members of a Zionist splinter group, the Left Poale Zion, and ten Poles from the PPS. They went to the Nara's headquarters. The Poles, pretending to be repairmen, went in first and cut the phone wires. Then the rest of the attackers raided the place. Hyman Freeman, one of the Bundists, later told of the raid:

There was a fight, but they really did not have a chance to put up much of a resistance. We attacked them in blitzkreig fashion. We really ruined the place and beat them up quite badly . . . It was really an extraordinary piece of work. [415]


Although there is a common misconception that anti-Semitism was endemic to all classes in Polish society, the evidence shows that anti-Semitism was primarily a middle-class and, to a much lesser extent, a peasant phenomenon. The bulk of the Polish working class followed the PPS, and they understood from the beginning that the Bund's fight was their fight and their aid to the beleaguered Jews was, as in the retaliation against the Naras, vital. In 1936 the Palestine Post told its readers that whenever the Fascist student gangs would swarm out of their sanctuaries in the universities to start a pogrom:

the non-Jewish Polish workers and students speedily come to the aid of the Jews. Recently the Polish Socialist Party [PPS] has arranged a number of huge propaganda meetings… very stirring addresses were heard from non-Jewish Poles who seemed pathetically eager to disassociate themselves from the 'Endek' rowdyism. [416]


Jacob Lestchinsky, one of the leading Zionist scholars of the day, described the Polish labour movement's mentality to the readers of Jewish Frontier in a July 1936 article:

the Polish labor party may justly boast that it has successfully immunised the workers against the anti-Jewish virus, even in the poisoned atmosphere of Poland. Their stand on the subject has become almost traditional. Even in cities and districts that seem to have been thoroughly infected by the most revolting type of anti- Semitism the workers have not been contaminated. [417]


There were others who were pro-Jewish. Among the Ukrainian masses, anti- Semitism had grown alarmingly as many nationalists had become pro-Nazi. They deluded themselves that Germany, out of hostility to both the Polish Colonels and Stalin, would help them win their independence at some unspecified time in the future. However, the tiny stratum of Ukrainian students, who had to confront the chauvinism of the Polish middle class in its university strongholds, never became infected with the folk anti-Semitism. They understood what would happen to their career chances, if the Endeks and Naras triumphed In December 1937 the Palestine Post reported that:

In Wilno and in Lemberg [Lvov] Universities the White Russian and Ukrainian students have joined almost in a body the anti-Ghetto front and are helping the Jews in their fight against the medieval measures. [418]


The peasants were divided on the Jewish question. The richer ones tended toward anti-Semitism, particularly in western Poland. In the south, and to a lesser degree in the central region, the rural masses followed the Peasant Party. In 1935 the Peasants had taken an inconsistent position, simultaneously insisting on the principle of democratic rights for all Jews in the country and calling for Polonisation of the economy and Jewish emigration to Palestine and other places. [419] However, by 1937 the party was insisting that the anti-Semitic campaign was nothing but a ruse to divert attention from the real political issues, particularly the need for land reform. In August 1937 a large proportion of the peasantry came out in a ten-day general strike. Although the police killed fifty demonstrators, in many areas the strike was complete. Alexander Erlich of Columbia University, then a Bund youth leader, reports that: 'During the strike you could see bearded Chassidim on the picket lines together with peasants.' [420] The government was only able to survive because the old-guard Peasant 1eaders were unwilling to work with the socialists.

The Bund and the PPS involved the masses in the struggle against the anti- Semites. The murder of two Jews and serious injury to dozens more in Przytyk on 9 March 1936 compelled a definitive response, and the Bund called a half-day general strike for 17 March with the PPS Supporting the action. All Jewish businesses –a significant proportion of the economic life of the country– stopped. The PPS unions in Warsaw and most of the major cities supported the strike, and much of Poland closed down. It was truly the 'Sabbath of Sabbaths!' as it was described in the Jewish press.

In March 1938 the Bund declared a two-day protest strike against the ghetto benches and the continual terror in the universities. Despite Fascist attacks, which were driven off, many of Poland's most distinguished academics joined the Jewish community and the PPS unions in the streets, a magnificent accomplishment in a country where mothers quietened their children by threatening to have a Jew take them away in a sack.

Electoral Victories that Lead Nowhere

The masses began moving towards the Bund in the Jewish community elections in 1936, and the Bund and the PPS both registered a strong increase in support in the municipal elections that same year. However, here the severe limitations of the PPS were sharply revealed. In Lodz, Poland's most industrialised city, the PPS refused to unite electorally with the Bund, because its leadership was concerned that they would lose votes if they identified with the Jews. Nevertheless, in practice, the two parties did ally themselves in daily working life and they continued to gain support. The Social Democratic reformists of the PPS could never abandon their electorally opportunist mentality and again they refused to run a joint slate in the city council elections of December 1938 and January 1939. The Bund had to run separately, but they then cross-endorsed in areas where either was a minority. De facto allied, they won majorities in Lodz, Cracow, Lvov, Vilna and other cities, and prevented a government majority in Warsaw. The PPS won 26.8 per cent of the vote, the Bund another 9.5 per cent and, although they were only loosely combined, their 36.3 per cent was seen as socially much more influential than the 29.0 per cent for the Colonels' slate or the Endeks' 18.8 per cent. The New York Times wrote of the 'striking victory' of the left, and the loss of ground suffered by the deeply divided anti-Semites. [421] In the Jewish districts the Bund devastated the Zionists and received 70 per cent of the vote, which gave them 17 of the 20 Jewish seats in Warsaw with the Zionists holding only one seat. [422]

‘I Wish that a million Polish Jews might be Slaughtered’

The Jewish masses began abandoning the Zionists in the late 1930s. When the British cut the immigration quotas after the Arab revolt, Palestine no longer seemed a solution to their problems. Polish emigration to Palestine fell from 29,407 in 1935 to 12,929 in 1936, and to 3,578 in 1937, and finally to 3,346 in 1938. However, there was another basic reason for the move away from Zionism. The movement was discredited by the fact that all the anti-Semites, from the government to the Naras, favoured emigration to Palestine. 'Palestine, took on a morbid quality in Polish political life. When Jewish deputies spoke in the Sejm the government and Endek representatives would interrupt with shouts of 'go to Palestine!' [423] Everywhere the anti-Jewish boycott pickets carried the same sign: 'Moszku idz do Palestyny!' (Kikes to Palestine!) [424] In 1936 the Endek delegates to the Piotrkow city council typically made a symbolic gesture proposing an allocation of one zloty 'to further the mass-emigration of the Jews of Piotrkow to Palestine'. [425] On 31 August 1937, ABC, the organ of the Naras, declared:

Palestine alone will not solve the question but it may be the beginning of mass emigration of Jews from Poland. Consequently it must not be neglected by Polish foreign policy. The voluntary emigration of Jews to Palestine can reduce the tension of Polish Jewish relations. [426]


The Colonels were hardly in need of any prompting from the Naras; they had always been enthusiastic philo-Zionists and warmly supported the Peel Commission's proposed partition of Palestine. Weizmann met Jozef Beck in September 1937 and was assured that, when the frontiers of the new state were defined, Warsaw would do its utmost to guarantee the Zionists the largest territory possible. [427]

The Zionist movement had never believed it was possible for Poland's Jews to solve their problems on Polish soil. Even in the 1920s, while he was manoeuvring with the other national minorities, Gruenbaum had become notorious for his proclamations that the Jews were just so much 'excess baggage' in the country and that 'Poland has a million more Jews than it can possibly accommodate'. [428] When the British discovered Abba Achimeir's diary after the Arlosoroff murder, they found that view expressed more forcefully: 'I wish that a million Polish Jews might be slaughtered. Then they might realize that they are living in a ghetto.' [429]

The Zionists consistently played down the efforts of the PPS to help the Jews. The Palestine Post, in the same article in January 1936 which recorded the workers' street battles against the anti-Semites, wrote that 'it is decidedly worth while putting on record this hopeful manifestation slight as it admittedly is'. [430] In June 1937 the American Labor Zionist Newsletter reiterated this scepticism:

It is true that the PPS is now showing its solidarity with the Jewish masses in Poland with unprecedented courage and vigor. But it is very doubtful whether the Socialists and genuinely liberal elements in Poland are in a position to muster enough effective resistance to block the forward march of the Polish brand of Fascism. [431]


In fact, although the Labour Zionists were supposed to be a part of the same Socialist International as the PPS, they hoped to be able to ignore the latter and negotiate a deal directly with the enemies of the Polish socialists. In an editorial in its 20 September 1936 issue the Newsletter wrote:

Attention was attracted in the world of international politics by a statement that the Polish government is preparing to press its demand for colonies… Realistic observers are of the opinion that the question of the redistribution of colonies is on the way to becoming a vital one. For this reason such plans and proposals on the part of countries with large Jewish populations should be given due attention by Jewish world leadership. [432]


In reality, Poland had no possibility of 'a place in the sun', but in giving credence to the lunatic fringe of the Polish right the Zionists hoped to persuade world opinion that the answer to Polish anti-Semitism lay outside the country.

Although the WZO was eager to accommodate the Warsaw regime, after the British had abandoned the Peel partition plan and cut the immigration quotas, its followers no longer had anything to offer the Polish Colonels and it was the Revisionists who became the most intimate collaborators with the regime. Jacob de Haas summed up the Revisionists' attitude to the Polish Jews in October 1936:

Of course it is unpleasant to be told that the Jews are anywhere 'superfluous'. On the other hand to be thinskinned about the phrases that are being used, and will be used, in matters of this kind is to expose oneself to unnecessary pain. We ought to be capable of swallowing a whole lot more if a healthy result is produced. [433]


Jabotinsky had proposed to 'evacuate' 11/2 million Jews from Eastern Europe over a ten-year period, and most of these would come from Poland. He tried to put a good gloss on this surrender to anti-Semitism, but in 1937 he admitted that he had difficulty in finding an appropriate term for his proposition:

I had first thought of 'Exodus', of a second 'departure from Egypt'. But this will not do. We are engaged in politics, we must be able to approach other nations and demand the support of other states. And that being so, we cannot submit to them a term that is offensive, that recalls Pharaoh and his ten plagues. Besides, the word 'Exodus' evokes a terrible picture of horrors, the picture of a whole nation-mass-like disorganised mob that flees panic stricken. [434]


In 1939 the Revisionists sent Robert Briscoe, then a Fianna Fail member of the Irish Parliament (later famous as the Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin) to make a proposition to Colonel Beck:

On behalf of the New Zionist Movement… I suggest that you ask Britain to turn over the Mandate for Palestine to you and make it in effect a Polish colony. You could then move all your unwanted Polish Jews into Palestine. This would bring great relief to your country, and you would have a rich and growing colony to aid your economy. [435]


The Poles did not waste their time asking for the Mandate. It will be recalled that Jabotinsky planned to invade Palestine in 1939. That operation was first planned in 1937, when the Poles agreed to train the Irgun and arm it for an invasion of Palestine in 1940. [436] In spring 1939 the Poles set up a guerrilla training camp for their Revisionist clients at Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. [437] Twenty-five members of the Irgun from Palestine were taught the arts of sabotage, conspiracy and insurrection by Polish officers. [438] Weapons for 10,000 men were provided, and the Revisionists were preparing to smuggle the guns into Palestine when the Second World War broke out. Avraham Stern, the prime mover behind the Zakopane camp, told the trainees that a passage to Palestine through Turkey and Italy was a 'matter of diplomatic negotiations that have possibilities', but there is no evidence that the Italians, and certainly not the Turks, were involved. [439] Stern was one of the hard-core Fascists within Revisionism, and he thought that if Mussolini could see that they really meant to challenge the British he could be induced to revive his pro-Zionist policy. The invasion had originally been planned as a serious bid for power, and when Jabotinsky proposed to turn it into a symbolic gesture aimed at creating a government-in-exile there was a bitter debate within the Irgun command. The discussion was cut short by their arrest by the British on the eve of the war.

It will be difficult to believe that any Jewish group could have seriously concocted such a utopian plan and persuaded the Poles to back them. However, it did have the advantage to the regime of keeping thousands of Betarim out of action against the anti-Semites. They boxed and wrestled and did a little shooting but, unless they were attacked, they never fought the Fascists. According to Shmuel Merlin, who was then in Warsaw as the NZO's Secretary-General:

It is absolutely correct to say that only the Bund waged an organised fight against the anti-Semites. We did not consider that we had to fight in Poland. We believed the way to ease the situation was to take the Jews out of Poland. We had no spirit of animosity. [440]

The Failure of the Socialists and the Betrayal of the Zionists

It must not be thought that the Polish workers were all strong supporters of the Jews. The PPS was hostile to Yiddish and looked upon the fanatic Hasids with good-natured contempt. However, the party always had assimilated Jewish leaders, as with Herman Liebermann, its most prominent parliamentarian, and many of its leaders were married to Jews. In 1931 the PPS made a momentous offer to the Bund: the PPS militia, the Akcja Socjalistczyna, would protect the Bund's section of their joint May Day demonstration and the Bund's Ordener-grupe would protect the PPS's contingent. The Bund turned down the magnificent proposal. It appreciated the spirit of the gesture, but declined on the grounds that it was the duty of Jews to learn to protect themselves. [441] The unwillingness of the leaders of the PPS to build a united front with the Bund for the last crucial municipal elections was not based on their own anti-Semitism but on a Polish application of the uniformly baneful Social Democratic preoccupation with winning votes. Instead of trying to win the votes of the most backward workers, they should have been calling for the unity of the most advanced workers and peasants for an assault on the regime. But by its incapacity to recognise the immense potentials that flowed from the 1931 defence proposal, and its general inability to understand that the Jews could never irrevocably defeat their foes –nor attain socialism with their own party, isolated from the Polish working class, the Bund also contributed to the nationalist rift in the working class. Both parties were reformist in essence; the Colonels had suffered a severe defeat in the municipal elections, but they had no forward thrust, and they waited passively for the regime to fall of its own weight. In the interests of ‘national unity' they called off their 1939 May Day rallies when Poland's only possible salvation lay in their militantly putting the masses before the regime with the demand for the arming of the entire people.

But if the Bund and the PPS failed the ultimate test, at least they did fight the Polish anti-Semites. The Zionists did not. On the contrary, they competed for the support of the enemies of the Jews.

_______________

Notes:

404. Ezra Mendelsohn, 'The Dilemma of Jewish Politics in Poland: Four Responses' in B. Vago and G. Mosse (eds.), Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe, p. 208.

405. Joseph Rothschild, Pilsudski's Coup D’Etat, p. 207.

406. 'Zionism in Poland'' Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, vol. 11, p. 899.

407. Nana Sagi and Malcolm Lowe, 'Research Report: Pre-War Reactions to Nazi anti-Jewish Policies in the Jewish Press', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p. 401.

408. Pawel Korzec, 'Anti-Semitism in Poland as an Intellectual, Social and Political Movement', Studies on Polish Jewry, 1919-1939, p. 79.

409. 'Jewish Debate in Polish Parliament', Jewish Weekly News (Melbourne, 29 December 1933), p. 5.

410. Zosa Szajkowski 'Western Jewish Aid and Intercession for Polish Jewry 1919-1939', Studies on Polish Jewry, p. 231.

411. Ezra Mendelsohn, 'The Dilemma of Jewish Politics in Poland: Four Responses', p. 26.

412. 'Pilsudski Wood', Palestine Post (16 May 1935), p. 1.

413. Leonard Rowe, 'Jewish Self-Defense: A Response to Violence', Studies on Polish Jewry, p. 121.

414. Ibid., p. 123.

415. Ibid., p. 124.

416. 'The Anti-Jewish Excesses in Poland', Palestine Post (29 January 1936), p. 3.

417. Jacob Lestchinsky, 'Night over Poland', Jewish Frontier (July 1936), pp. 11-12.

418. William Zukerman, 'Jews in Poland', Palestine Post (1 December 1937), p. 4.

419. Joel Cang, 'The Opposition Parties in Poland and their Attitudes toward the Jews and the Jewish Problem', Jewish Social Studies (April 1939), p. 248.

420. Alexander Erlich et al., Solidarnosc, Polish Society and the Jews, p. 13.

421. 'Democrats win in Polish Elections', New York Times (20 December 1938); and The Times (London, 20 December 1938).

422. Bernard Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, p. 224; and Edward Wynot, Polish Politics in Transition, pp. 234-5.

423. American Jewish Year Book 1937-1938, p. 392.

424. S. Andreski, 'Poland' in S. Woolf (ed.), European Fascism, p. 179.

425. 'Endeks propose mass emigration of Jews', World Jewry (London, 13 March 1936), p. 5.

426. 'The Jewish Situation in Poland during August and September 1937', Information Bulletin (American Jewish Committee), nos. 8-9 (1937), p. 3.

427. 'Agreement Outside Mandate Sought', Palestine Post (15 September 1937), p. 8.

428. Szajkowski, ' "Reconstruction" vs. "Palliative Relief" in American Jewish Overseas Work (1919-1939)', Jewish Social Studies (January 1970), p. 24.

429. Jewish Daily Bulletin (8 September 1933), p. 1.

430. Palestine Post (29 January 1936), p. 3.

431. 'Poland', Labor Zionist Newsletter (4 June 1937), pp. 1-2.

432. 'The Diaspora', Labor Zionist, Newsletter (20 September 1936), p. 10.

433. Jacob de Haas, 'They are willing to go', Chicago Jewish Chronicle (2 October 1936), p. 1.

434. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Evacuation–Humanitarian Zionism' (1937), published in Selected Writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky (South Africa, 1962), p. 75.

435. Robert Briscoe, For the Life of Me, p. 28.

436. J. Bower Bell, Terror Out of Zion, p. 28.

437. Daniel Levine, David Raziel The Man and His Times, pp. 259-60.

438. Nathan Yalin-Mor, 'Memories of Yair and Etzel', Jewish Spectator (Summer 1980), p. 33.

439. Levine, David Raziel, p. 260.

440. Author's interview with Shmuel Merlin, 16 September 1980.

441. Rowe, 'Jewish Self-Defense', pp. 113-14.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

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21. ZIONISM IN HOLOCAUST POLAND

As soon as the Nazis invaded Poland, the Jews were doomed. Hitler intended that the conquest of Poland would provide 'lebensraum’ for German colonists. Some Poles, the racially better stock, would be forcibly assimilated to the German nation, the rest would be ruthlessly exploited as slave labourers. Given these radical goals for the Slav population, it was obvious that there could be no place for the Jews in the expanded Reich. The Nazis permitted, and even forcibly encouraged, Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria until late in 1941, but from the beginning emigration from Poland was reduced to a trickle in order that the flow from Greater Germany would not be obstructed. At first the occupiers allowed American Jews to send in food packages, but that was only because Hitler needed time to organise the new territory and conduct the war.

The Working Class does not Capitulate

Within days of the German invasion the Polish government declared Warsaw an open city, and ordered all able-bodied men to retreat to a new line on the River Bug. The Bund’s central committee considered whether it would be better for the Jews to fight to the end in Warsaw rather than see their families fall to Hitler, but they doubted that the Jews would follow them in resisting, nor would the Poles tolerate their bringing ruin to the city; thus they decided to fall back with the army. They appointed a skeleton committee to remain, and ordered all other party members to follow the military eastward. Alexander Erlich has explained their position:

It must sound naive, because we now know that Stalin was about to invade from the East, but we thought the lines would stabilize. We felt certain we would be more effective even with a beleaguered army than we could ever be in territory held by the Germans. [442]


When the Bund Committee drew near the Bug, they heard that the evacuation order had been countermanded. Mieczyslaw Niedzialkowski and Zygmunt Zaremba of the PPS had convinced General Tshuma, the military commandant, that it was psychologically crucial for the future resistance movement that Poland's capital should not fall without a fight. The Bund instructed two of its senior leaders, Victor Alter and Bernard Goldstein, to return to Warsaw. The road back was hopelessly clogged, and they decided to head south and then try to approach Warsaw again from that position. They got as far as Lublin, where they split up. Alter never succeeded, but Goldstein did reach Warsaw on 3 October. By then the city had fallen, but only after a determined defence by troops from the surrounding area and worker battalions organised by the PPS and the Bund.

The Zionist Leadership Disperses

Most of the prominent Zionist leaders left Warsaw when the army evacuated the city but, unlike the Bundists, none returned when they heard that the capital was to be held. After the Soviets crossed the border, they either escaped into Romania or fled northward to Vilna, which they heard had been handed over to Lithuania by the Soviets. Among the refugees were Moshe Sneh, the President of the Polish Zionist Organisation, Menachem Begin, then the leader of Polish Betar, and his friends Nathan Yalin-Mor and Israel Scheib (Eldad). Sneh went to Palestine and was to command the Haganah from 1941 to 1946. Begin was eventually arrested in Lithuania by the Russians and, after an ordeal in Stalin's camps in Siberia, he was released when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He left the USSR as a soldier in a Polish army-in-exile and arrived in Palestine in 1942; later he headed the Irgun in the 1944 revolt against Britain. Nathan Yalin-Mor and Israel Scheib (Eldad) [443] later rose to become two of the three commanders of the 'Stern Gang', a group which had split from the Irgun. Of the Zionists only the youth of Hashomer and He-Chalutz sent organisers back into the Polish maelstrom. The others sought, and some obtained, Palestine certificates and left the carnage of Europe.

Did they abandon their people to push on to Palestine? With Begin the record is clear. He told an interviewer, in 1977:

With a group of friends, we reached Lvov [Lemberg] in a desperate and vain effort to try to cross the border and try to reach Eretz Yisroel -- but we failed. At this point, we heard that Vilna would be made the capital of an independent Republic of Lithuania by the Russians. [444]


When Begin was arrested, in 1940, he was intending to continue on his journey to Palestine and he had no plans to return to Poland. In his book, White Nights, he wrote that he told his Russian jailors in Vilna's Lukishki Prison that:

I had received a laissez-passer from Kovno for my wife and myself. and also visas for Palestine. We were on the point of leaving, and it is only my arrest that prevented me from doing so.


A few pages later he added: 'We were about to leave . . . but we had to surrender our places to a friend.' [445]

Two of his most recent biographers, fellow Revisionists Lester Eckman and Gertrude Hirschler, have recorded that he was condemned by his movement for his flight, but they claim he thought of returning:

he received a letter from Palestine criticizing him for having fled from the Polish capital when other Jews were stranded there. As captain of Betar, the letter stated, he should have been the last to abandon the sinking ship. Begin was torn by feelings of guilt; it took strenuous efforts on the part of his comrades to keep him from this impulsive act, which probably would have cost him his life. [446]


Begin does not refer to this in White Nights, but explains that 'there is no doubt that I would have been one of the flrst to be executed had the Germans caught me in Warsaw’. [447] In fact there was no special persecution against Zionists in general or Revisionists in particular in Warsaw or anywhere else. On the contrary, even as late as 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans appointed Josef Glazman, the head of the Lithuanian Betar, as the inspector of the Jewish police in the Vilna ghetto. Begin wanted to go to Palestine because he had been the one at the 1938 Betar Congress who had shouted the loudest for its immediate conquest. An interesting postscript to this emerged on 2 March 1982, during a debate in the Israeli Parliament. Begin solemnly asked: 'How many people in Parliament are there who had to wear the Star of David? I am one.' [448]

Begin fled from the Nazis and there were no yellow stars in Lithuania when he was there as a refugee.

The Judenrats

Upon their arrival in Warsaw the Germans found Adam Czerniakow, a Zionist and President of the Association of Jewish Artisans, as the head of the rump of the Jewish community organisation and they ordered him to set up a Judenrat (Jewish Council). [449] In Lodz, Poland's second city, Chaim Rumkowski, also a minor Zionist politician, was similarly designated. They were not, in any way, authorised representatives of the Zionist movement, and both were insignificant figures prior to the war. Not all the councils were headed by Zionists; some were headed by assimilationalist intellectuals or rabbis and even, in one city (Piotrkow), by a Bundist. However, more Zionists were chosen for membership or leadership of the puppet councils than all the Agudists, Bundists and Communists combined. The Nazis most despised the pious Hasids of the Aguda, and they knew the Bundists and the Communists would never act as their tools. By 1939 the Nazis had a number of dealings with the Zionists in Germany and also in Austria and Czechoslovakia, and they knew that they would find little resistance in their ranks.

The vacuum of experienced Zionist leadership was augmented by the fact that for some months the Nazis permitted certificate-holders to leave Poland for Palestine. The WZO used the opportunity to pull out more of the local leadership, including Apolinary Hartglas, who had preceded Sneh as head of the Zionist Organisation. In his Diary Czerniakow told how he had been offered one of the certificates and how he had contemptuously refused to abandon his post. [450] In February 1940 he recorded how he raged at one man who left when he came to pay his final farewells:

You louse, I will not forget you, you louse, how you pretended to act as a leader and are now running away with the others like you, leaving the masses in this horrid situation. [451]


Yisrael Gutman, one of the scholars at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Institute, has written on this subject.

It is true that some of the leaders had good reason to fear for their personal safety in a country which had fallen to the Nazis. At the same time there was in the departure of these leaders an element of panic, which was not counterbalanced by an attempt to concern themselves with their replacement and the continuation of their former activities by others… Those left behind were mostly second or third rank leaders, who were not always capable of tackling the acute problems of the times, and they also lacked vital liaison contacts with the Polish public and its leadership. The leaders who remained included some who held aloof from underground activity and tried to obliterate traces of their past. [452]


Some scholars have shown that not all leaders or members of the Jewish Councils collaborated, but the moral atmosphere within them was extremely corrupting. Bernard Goldstein, in his memoir The Stars Bear Witness, described the Warsaw Council in the early months before the establishment of the ghetto; the council, in order to mitigate the terror of the press gangs, provided the Germans with labour battalions. They set up a subpoena system. Everyone was supposed to serve in rotation, but:

the operation very quickly became corrupt… rich Jews paid fees running into thousands of zlotys to be freed from forced labor. The Judenrat collected such fees in great quantity, and sent poor men to the working battalions in place of the wealthy. [453]


By no means every branch of the council apparatus was corrupt. They applied themselves briskly to education and social welfare, but few councils did anything to engender a spirit of resistance. Isaiah Trunk, one of the most careful students of the Judenrats, succinctly summed them up.

I explicitly said that most of the Judenrats had a negative approach to the matter of resistance… In the eastern regions the geographical proximity to partisan bases offered possibilities of rescue, and this to a certain extent influenced the attitude of the Judenrats… where there was no possibility of rescue through the partisans, the attitude of the great majority of the Judenrats toward the resistance was absolutely negative. [454]


There were some outright collaborators, like Avraham Gancwajch in Warsaw. At one time a 'right' Labour Zionist, he headed the '13', So-called after their headquarters at 13 Leszno Street. Their job was to catch smugglers, spy on the Judenrat and generally ferret out intelligence for the Gestapo. [455] In Vilna, Jacob Gens, a Revisionist, chief of the ghetto police and de facto head of the ghetto, certainly collaborated. When the Nazis heard about a resistance movement in the ghetto, Gens tricked its leader, the Communist Itzik Wittenberg, into coming to his office. Gens then had him arrested by Lithuanian policemen. [456] The General Zionist Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz ran his ghetto in singular style and 'King Chaim', as his subjects referred to him, put his portrait on the ghetto postage. Not all were as debased as these. Czerniakow cooperated with the Nazis and opposed resistance, but during the great 'aktion' in July 1942, when the Germans took 300,000 Jews, he committed suicide rather than co-operate further. Even Rumkowski insisted on going to his death with his ghetto, when the Nazis made it clear that not even collaboration would lead to the survival of a 'core' of his charges. In their minds they were justified in what they were doing, because they thought that only by abject co-operation could a few Jews survive. However, they were deluded; the fate of individual ghettos, and even of individual councils, was determined in almost every case either by Nazi whim or regional policy and not by whether a ghetto had been docile.

'The Parties haven't any Right to Give Us Orders'

All Jewish resistance has to be seen in the context of Nazi policy towards the Poles. Hitler never sought a Polish Quisling; the country was to be ruled by terror. From the beginning thousands were executed in collective punishments for any act of resistance. PPS members, ex-officers, many priests and academics, many of these likely to be believers in solidarity with the Jews, were murdered or sent to concentration camps. At the same time the Nazis sought to involve the Polish masses in the persecution of the Jews through material rewards, but there were always those who were prepared to help the Jews. The most important group was the PPS, which had stolen every type of official stamp and forged Aryan papers for some of its Bundist comrades. The Revisionists maintained contact with elements in the Polish military. Thousands of Poles hid Jews at the risk of certain death, if they were caught.

The most important advantage the Germans had was the absence of guns in the hands of the people, as the Colonels had always ensured that weapons were kept out of civilian reach. The PPS and the Bund had never developed their militias beyond occasional target shooting, and were now to pay the penalty. Effectively the only guns available were those hidden by the retreating army and these were now in the custody of the Armia Krajowa (AK), the Home Army, which took its orders from the government-in-exile in London. Under British pressure the exiles had to include token representation from both the PPS and the Bund, but control of the AK remained with the anti-Semites and their allies. They were loath to arm the people for fear that, after the Germans were driven out, the workers and peasants would turn the weapons against the rich; they developed the strategic doctrine that the time to strike was when the Germans were suffering defeat on the battlefield. They insisted that premature action would serve no purpose and just bring down Nazi wrath on the people. Naturally this meant that aid to the Jews was always ill-timed. The PPS, having no weapons of its own, felt obliged to join the AK, but they were never able to obtain sufficient weapons to assist the Jews independently in any serious way.

Those Jews who had resisted pre-war Polish anti-Semitism were the first to resist the Nazis. Those who had done nothing continued to do nothing. Czerniakow insisted that the Bund provide one member of the Warsaw Judenrat. The Bundists knew from the start that the council could only be a tool of the Germans, but felt obliged to agree and nominated Shmuel Zygelboym. Zygelboym had been the party leader in Lodz and had fled to Warsaw in the hope of continuing to fight after the Polish Army had withdrawn from his city. He then helped to mobilise the remnants of the Warsaw Bund alongside the PPS.

Zygelboym had reluctantly agreed to the setting up of a forced labour roster as preferable to arbitrary seizures by press gangs, but in October 1939, when the Judenrat was ordered to organise a ghetto, he would no go further. He told the council:

I feel I would not have the right to live if… the ghetto should be established and my head remained unscathed… I recognise that the chairman has an obligation to report this to the Gestapo, and I know the consequences this can have for me personally. [457]


The council feared that Zygelboym's stance would discredit them among the Jews if they meekly accepted the Nazi order, and they rescinded their initial decision to comply. Thousands of Jews arrived outside their headquarters to get further information, and Zygelboym used the occasion to speak. He told them to remain in their homes and make the Germans take them by force. The Nazis ordered him to report to the police the next day. The Bund understood this to be a death sentence and smuggled him out of the country; however, his action did succeed in having the order to establish a ghetto temporarily cancelled.

The last gallant battle of the Bund took place just before Easter 1940. A Polish hoodlum attacked an old Jew and began to tear his beard out of his face. A Bundist saw the incident and beat the Pole. The Nazis caught the Bundist and shot him the next day. Polish pogromists started raiding Jewish neighbourhoods as the Germans stood by. They wanted the raids to continue to prove that the Polish people supported them in their anti-Jewish policy. The assaults on the Jews far exceeded anything the Naras had ever mounted in independent Poland; the Bund felt it had no choice but to risk the wrath of the Nazis and went out to fight. To make sure no Polish deaths would be used as a pretext for further forays, no knives or guns were used; only brass knuckles and iron pipes. Hundreds of Jews, and PPS members in the Wola district, fought the pogromists over the next two days, until finally the Polish police broke up the street war. The Nazis did not interfere. They had taken their propaganda pictures and for the moment they chose not to punish the Jews for their action. [458] This episode marked the end of the leadership of the Bund within Polish Jewry.

Within a few months of the German occupation the leaders of the Hashomer and HeChalutz Zionist youth groups, who had also fled to Lithuania, sent representatives back into Poland, but not with any idea of organising a rising. They saw their duty as suffering with the people in their duress and in trying to maintain morale through maintaining high moral standards. The first military actions by a Zionist group came from Swit (Dawn), a Revisionist veterans, grouping. They had ties to the Korpus Bezpieczenstwa (KB or Security Corps), a small Polish unit then loosely connected with the AK, and as early as 1940 the KB sent several Jews, among them a number of physicians, into the area between the Rivers Bug and the San, where they worked with elements of the AK. [459] However, neither Swit nor the KB had any plans for largescale resistance or escape from the ghettos. [460]

Serious consideration of armed Jewish resistance only began after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the onset the Nazis abandoned all restraints in their activities in the Soviet Union. Einsatzgruppen (Special Duty Units) started systematically slaughtering Jews and by October 1941, four months after the invasion, over 250,000 Jews had been killed in mass executions in White Russia and the Baltic states. By December 1941 the first reports of gassings on Polish soil, at Chelmno, convinced the youth movements, the Bund, the Revisionists and the Communists that they had to assemble some military groups, but the bulk of the surviving leaders of the mainline WZO parties either did not believe that what had happened elsewhere would happen in Warsaw or else they were convinced that nothing could be done. Yitzhak Zuckerman, a founder of the Jewish Fighting Organisation (JFO) which united the WZO's forces with the Bund and the Communists, and later a major historian of the Warsaw rising, has put it baldly: 'The Jewish Fighting Organisation arose without the parties and against the wish of the parties.’ [461] After the war some of the writings of Hersz Berlinksi, of the 'left’ Poale Zion, were posthumously published. He told of an October 1942 conference between his organisation and the youth groups. The question before them was whether the JFO should have just a military command or a military-political committee, and the youth groups wanted to avoid the domination of the parties:

The comrades from Hashomer and HeChalutz spoke out sharply about the political parties: 'the parties haven’t any right to give us orders. Except for the youth they will do nothing. They will only interfere.' [462]


At the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance at the Yad Vashem Remembrance Authority in April 1968, bitter words were exchanged between those historians who had partaken in the struggle and those who still sought to defend the passive approach. Yisrael Gutman challenged one of the latter, Dr Nathan Eck:

Do you believe that if we had waited until the end and acted according to the advice of the party leaders, the revolt would still have taken place, or that there would then have been no point in it whatsoever? I believe there would have been no revolt at all and I challenge Dr Eck to offer convincing proof that the party leaders intended at all that there should be an uprising. [463]


Emmanuel Ringelblum, the great historian of the destruction of Jewish Warsaw, described the thinking of his friend Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer, the commander of the JFO:

The Mordechai who had matured so rapidly and risen so quickly to the most responsible post as commander of the Fighters Organisation now greatly regretted that his fellows and he had wasted three war years on cultural and educational work. We had not understood that new side of Hitler that is emerging, Mordechai lamented. We should have trained the youth in the use of live and cold ammunitions. We should have raised them in the spirit of revenge against greatest enemy of the Jews, of all mankind, and of all times. [464]

[210] The debate within the resistance focused on the key question of where to fight. Generally speaking, it was the Communists who favoured getting as many of the youth as possible into the forests as partisans, whereas the young Zionists called for last stands in the ghettos. The Communists had always been the most ethnically integrated party in the country and, now that the Soviet Union had itself been attacked, they were wholly committed to the struggle against Hitler. The Soviets had parachuted Pincus Kartin, a Spanish Civil War veteran, into Poland to organise the Jewish underground. The Communists argued that the ghettos could not be defended and the fighters would be killed for nothing. In the woods they might not only survive, but be able to start attacking the Germans. The Zionist youth raised real questions about retreating to the forests. The Red Army was still a long way off and the Polish Communist Gwardia Ludowa (Peoples' Guard) was viewed with great suspicion by the Polish masses, because of their previous support for the Hitler-Stalin pact which had led directly to the destruction of the Polish state. As a result the Gwardia had very few weapons and the countryside was full of anti-Semitic partisans, often Naras, who had no hesitation about killing Jews. However, there was an additional sectarian element in much of the young Zionists' thinking. Mordechai Tanenbaum-Tamaroff of Bialystok was the most vehement opponent of the partisan conception, yet the town was in an immense primeval forest. [465] He wrote:

In the vengeance that we want to exact the constant and decisive element is the Jewish, the national factor… Our approach is fulfillment of our national role within the ghetto (not to leave the old people to their bloody fate!)… and if we remain alive -- we will go out, weapon in hand, to the forests. [466]


This line was maintained in Warsaw where Mordechai Anielewicz, feeling that thoughts of a last-minute escape would destroy the iron will required to stand and face certain death, deliberately made no plans to retreat. [467]

The results were disillusioning; the Hashomer and HeChalutz had hoped their example would rally the ghettos, but they did not understand that the spirit of the people had been broken by the four years of humiliation and pain. The ghettos could not be armed, and therefore theY saw revolt as only increasing the certainty of their death. Yisrael Gutman was quite correct when he insisted:

The truth is that the Jewish public in most of the ghettoes neither understood nor accepted the path and assessment of the fighters… Everywhere the fighting organisations were engaged in bitter argument with the Jewish public… The youth movements achieved in Warsaw what they did not in other places of revolt. [468]


The Warsaw ghetto had two potential sources of arms: the People's Guard, which wanted to help but had few guns, and the Home Army that had guns but did not want to help. They ended up with few weapons, mostly pistols, and they battled bravely for a few days as long as their sparse arsenal held out. The Revisionists had to form their own separate 'National Military Organisation’ , because the other political tendencies refused to unite with a group they considered Fascist. However, the Revisionists were able to provide one of their detachments with German uniforms, three machine guns, eight rifles and hundreds of grenades. Some of their fighters escaped through tunnels and sewers and were driven to the forest by some Polish friends, were trapped by the Germans, escaped again, took refuge back in the Gentile sector of Warsaw and were finally surrounded and murdered. The end came for Anielewicz, in the ghetto, on the twentieth day of the rising. Marek Edelman, then a Bundist and deputy commander of the JFO, says he and 80 other fighters shot themselves in a bunker. [469] Zuckerman, another deputy commander, says Anielewicz was killed by gas and grenades tossed into the hide-out. [470]

'Jews Dream of Getting into me Homes of Wolkers'

Emmanuel Ringelblum, a Labour Zionist, had also returned to Poland from abroad. He was in Switzerland for the Zionist Congress in August 1939 when the war broke out, and he chose to return to Poland via the Balkans. He then set about the task of recording the momentous events. The value of his work was obvious to the entire political community and he was eventually chosen for a hiding-place on the Aryan side of Warsaw. He died in 1944, when his hiding-place was discovered, but not before he had written his masterpiece, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War. The writing was blunt: 'Polish Fascism and its ally, anti-Semitism, have conquered the majority of the Polish people', but he took great pains to analyse Poland class by class and even region by region. [471]

The middle-class population in toto has continued to adhere to the ideology of anti-Semitism and rejoices at the Nazi solution to the Jewish problem in Poland. [472]


He confirmed the pre-war evaluation of Lestchinsky and the other observers concerning the steadfastness of the workers in the struggle against anti-Semitism:

Polish workers had long before the war grasped the class aspect of anti- Semitism, the power-tool of the native bourgeoisie, and during the war they redoubled their efforts to fight anti-Semitism… There were only limited possibilities for workers to hide Jews in their homes. Overcrowding in the flats was the greatest obstacle to taking in Jews. In spite of this, many Jews did find shelter in the flats of workers… It must be stressed that in general Jews dream of getting into the homes of workers, because this guarantees them against blackmail or exploitation by their hosts. [473]


Ringelblum's testimony, that of an eyewitness and of a trained historian, shows the path the Jews should have taken both before and during the war. Whatever the failings of the PPS and KPP as parties, there is no doubt that many Polish workers stood with the Jews to the death, and that many workers did more in defence of the Jews than many Jews. It is not suggested that more than a few hundred or a couple of additional thousand Jews might have been added to those who were in fact saved, but revolts in the ghettos, when they lacked arms, never had a chance of success even as symbolic gestures. The Nazi commandant's internal report on the Warsaw rising acknowledged only sixteen deaths among the Germans and their auxiliaries and, although this figure may be too low, the rising was never a serious military matter.

Mordechai Anielewicz's apotheosis to historical immortality is entirely justified, and no criticism of his strategy should be construed as attempting to detract from the lustre of his name. He voluntarily returned from Vilna. He dedicated himself to his stricken people. However, the martyrdom of the 24-yearold Anielewicz can never absolve the Zionist movement of its pre-war failure to fight anti-semitism -- in Germany or in Poland -- when there was still time. Nor can his return make us forget the Right of the other Zionist leaders, even in the first months of the occupation, nor the unwillingness of the remaining party leaders to initiate an underground struggle.

_______________

Notes:

442. Author's interview with Alexander Erlich, 3 October 1979.

443. Yitzhak Arad, 'The Concentration of Refugees in Vilna on the Eve of the Holocaust', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. IX, p. 210.

444. Hyman Frank, 'The World of Menachem Begin' (Jewish Press, 2 December 1977).

445. Menachem Begin, White Nights, pp. 84-5, 87.

446. Lester Eckman and Gertrude Hirschler' Menachem Begin, p. 50.

447. Begin, White Nights, p. 79.

448. David Shipler' 'Israel Hardening Its Stand on Visits', New York Times (3 March 1982), p. 7.

449. Bernard Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness, p. 35; and N. Blumenthal, N. Eck and J. Kermish (eds.), The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, p. 2.

450. Blumenthal, Eckand Kermish, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, p. 117.

451. Ibid., p. 119.

452. Yisrael Gutman, 'The Genesis of the Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. IX, p. 43.

453. Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness, pp. 35-6.

454. Isaiah Trunk (in debate), Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, p. 257.

455. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, p. 250.

456. Lester Eckman and Chaim Lazar, The Jewish Resistance, p. 31.

457. Bernard Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, p. 231.

458. Goldstein, The Stars Bear Witness, pp. 51-3.

459. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, The Blood Shed Unites Us, p. 32.

460. Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi Occupied Europe, pp. 565-70.

461. Yitzhak Zuckerman (in debate), Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, p. 150.

462. Hersz Berlinski, 'Zikhroynes', Drai (Tel Aviv), p. 169.

463. Yisrael Gutman (in debate), Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, p. 148.

464. Emmanuel Ringelblum, 'Comrade Mordechai' in Yuri Suhl (ed.), They Fought Back, p. 102.

465. Joseph Kermish' 'The Place of the Ghetto Revolts in the Struggle against the Occupier', Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, p. 315.

466. Ibid.

467. Yisrael Gutman, 'Youth Movements in the Underground and the Ghetto Revolts', Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, p. 280.

468. Ibid., pp. 275, 279.

469. Marek Edelman, 'The Way to Die', Jewish Affairs (September 1975), p. 23.

470. Yitzhak Zuckerman, 'The Jewish Fighting Organisation -- ZOB -- Its Establishment and Activities', The Catastrophe of European Jewry, p. 547.

471. Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, p. 247.

472. Ibid., p. 197.

473. Ibid., p. 199, 203.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:58 pm

22. ZIONIST COLLUSION WITH THE POLISH GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE

News of the German invasion of the Soviet Union reached Menachem Begin while he was travelling on a prison train towards Siberia. He had been arrested by the Russians with all the other Polish non-Communist political activists who had fled into the territories allotted to Stalin by the German-Soviet Pact in 1939. The Polish government-in-exile and the Soviets were bitter enemies until the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but even then there were still irreconcilable conflicts between them, most notably over the eastern territories. Nevertheless Stalin announced a general amnesty for all Polish prisoners, and the Polish Prime Minister, Wladyslaw Sikorski, ordered all males to join a Polish army-in-exile.

'Those of Moses' Faith Step Forward'

In the last months prior to the war the Revisionists, prominent among whom was Begin (then heading Polish Betar), had negotiated with Captain Runge, head of the Security Police in Warsaw, to set up separate Jewish army units under Polish commanding officers. [474] They hoped that, after the Poles and Jews had beaten the German Army, the Jews, without their Polish commanders, would go on to conquer Palestine. [475] The scheme failed because of the hostility of the Bund, who opposed such plans to segregate the Jews. [476] In September-October 1941, in the Volga region of the Soviet Union, while the Nazis were stalking towards Moscow, the proposal was raised again by Miron Sheskin, Commander-in-Chief of the Brith HaChayal (Union of Soldiers), the Revisionists' veterans organisation, and Mark Kahan, editor of the Warsaw Yiddish daily newspaper Der Moment. The Polish exile army was dominated by anti-Semites, who were concerned to keep Jews out of their army, and this proposal of Jewish self-segregation was attractive to them. However, at the highest levels around the army's commander, General Wladyslaw Anders, it was understood that the proposal would not be acceptable to either the Soviets or the British. Nevertheless some of the officers at the army's staging area in Samara Oblast were old associates of the Revisionists and believed they would be doing the Jews a favour by separating them into their own units; and Colonel Jan Galadyk, the former commandant of the pre-war infantry officers' school, volunteered to lead such a battalion. After the war Kahan described the unit as a model for the hoped-for Jewish Legion and he gave a positive picture of it as a successful example of Jewish- Polish relations. But Yisrael Gutman has researched the history of 'Anders, Army' and warns us that Kahan is unreliable. [477] The truth was better served by rabbi Leon Rozen-Szeczakacz, an Agudist but a supporter of the Legion idea, in his Cry in the Wilderness.

On 7 October 1941 , at Totzkoye, all Jews were summoned to a field and an officer called out 'those of Moses' faith step forward'. Most of those who did so suddenly found themselves dismissed from the army. Those few, including Rozen- Szeczakacz who were not summarily discharged were totally segregated from the rest of the army. Barbarities commenced immediately. The majority of Jews were issued boots that were too small for them which meant that they had to try to protect themselves with rags in the -40° Soviet winter. They were transferred to another location and left out in the fields for days on end, and the army would 'forget' to feed them. [478] When Rozen Szeczakacz, whom the army’s top command had made into a chaz lain, arrived at the battalion’s new location at Koltubanka, his first task was to start burying the large number of dead. [479] Eventually, after much suffering and death, things improved as word of their plight reached the Polish ambassador and the exiled Bundist leaders, and the battalion turned into a smart military unit. However, the larger plan for a Jewish Legion disappeared.

Anders' Army finally left the Soviet Union for Iran, where they linked up with the British military; the anti-Semites tried to leave behind as many Jews as possible and healthy youths were rejected for service. Approximately 114,000 people were evacuated in March-April and August-September 1942. About 6,000 were Jews, 5 per cent of the soldiers and 7 per cent of the civilians. To put this into perspective, in the summer of 1941, before the anti-Semitic recruiting line was imposed, Jews had comprised about 40 per cent of the army's enlistees. Despite the discrimination against the Jewish troops, the Revisionists Kahan, Sheskin and Begin managed to get out through their military connections. [480]

Zionist Acceptance of Anti-Semitism in the Polish Army

One of the ironies of the Second World War is that a Polish Army-in-exile, with its large contingent of anti-Semites, was finally glad to arrive in Palestine. It was still there on 28 June 1943, when Eliazer Liebenstein (Livneh), then editing the Haganah's paper Eshnab, ran a secret Order of the Day that General Anders had issued in November 1941. He had told his officers that he 'fully understood' their hostility toward the Jews; however, they had to realise that the Allies were under Jewish pressure but, he reassured them, when they got back home 'we shall deal with the Jewish problem in accordance with the size and independence of our homeland'. [481] This was understood to mean that he was hinting at the post-war expulsion of any Jews who might have escaped Hitler's claws. The presence of the Polish Army in Palestine made it impossible for the WZO to ignore the scandal and finally, on 19 September, the 'Representation of Polish Jewry' confronted Anders with the Order at the home of the Polish Consul in Tel Aviv. The General declared that the whole thing was a forgery. He then spoke of the desertions of Jews from his army while in Palestine. He told them that he did not care that 3,000 of the 4,000 Jews in his ranks had walked away, he was not going to search for them, and the Zionists took the hint. [482] Shortly after the encounter the Consul sent the Polish Foreign Ministry in London a memorandum about another meeting between his deputy and Yitzhak Gruenbaum, then on the Jewish Agency Executive. The Deputy Consul had repeated the lie about the Order and asked the Zionist to help hush up the whole affair. After discussing the situation with the other members of his Executive, Gruenbaum agreed to concur with the Polish deception. [483] Later, on 13 January 1944 in London, Dr Ignacy Schwarzbart, the Zionist representative on the Polish National Council, and Aryeh Tartakower of the World Jewish Congress, met Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, a Peasant Party politician who had succeeded Sikorski as Prime Minister and, again, the Zionists agreed to lie about the Order. Schwarzbart told the Pole that:

there are witnesses, among them ministers, who fought against the order when it was issued. We know that one of the cables referred to the order as a forgery. I have no objection against making such a claim for external consumption, but on the inside, no one should expect me to believe that it was a forgery. [484]


Even in Britain Jewish soldiers were told by their commanders that they would be shot in the back when they went into battle, and Polish officers repeatedly made statements about deporting Jews after the war. Some bluntly announced that those Jews who might survive Hitler would be massacred; in January 1944, some of the Jews finally had enough. Sixty-eight deserted and threatened to go on hunger strikes, and even commit suicide, rather than stay with the Polish forces' although they had no objection to fighting in the British Army. In February, 134 more Jews deserted and in March more soldiers walked out. The Poles' first reaction was just to let them go, but finally they announced that 31 men would be court-martialled and that no further transfers would be allowed. Some Labour Party members took up their cause and Tom Driberg put down a question on the subject in the House of Commons. No sooner had he done so than Schwarzbart phoned, begging him to withdraw the question so as not to attract further attention to the matter. [485] Driberg ignored this suggestion; both he and Michael Foot denounced the forthcoming trials at a mass meeting on 14 May, and there were demonstrations in Downing Street. The government-in-exile was compelled to back down and drop the charges. Years later Driberg touched upon the incidents in his book, Ruling Passions. He was still amazed at the behaviour of the Anglo-Jewish misleadership:

The odd thing was that we had pursued this matter in the House against the advice -- the almost lachrymose pleading -- of the official spokesmen of the Jewish community in Britain. They felt that any publicity about this might lead to more anti-Semitism, perhaps directed against their own flock. [486]


Driberg's interpretation of the Anglo-Jewish leaders' motivation is undoubtedly correct. They eventually spoke out, but only after the Labour members had roused the public and they could be absolutely sure that it was safe to do so.

Schwarzbart had earlier participated in another rather shameful episode in Polish Jewish affairs. In 1942 Mme Zofia Zaleska, an Endek, had proposed to the exile Sejm that a Jewish homeland be established outside Poland and that the Jews be asked to emigrate. Rather than oppose this, Schwarzbart tried to amend Zaleska's resolution to name Palestine specifically as the homeland. His suggestion was defeated and Zaleska's original motion was accepted by the Sejm. Only Shmuel Zygelboym of the Bund and a representative of the PPS voted against it. Schwarzbart abstained. [487]

The Polish exiles were dependent on Britain and, after the arrival of the Polish Army in Palestine, the Zionists could have put extra pressure on the British. Anders was right when he told his officers that the Jews always had the ability to pressurise the British on the question of anti-semitism in the Polish armed forces, and the success of the Driberg-Foot intervention in 1944 shows what could be done. Instead the WZO, in both Palestine and London, colluded with the Poles to conceal the Anders' Order of the Day and intervened to persuade the Labour members to call off their protest. Similarly the Revisionists connived with the Polish Army while still in the Soviet Union, in the interests of a Jewish Legion to help conquer Palestine; in 1943 their good friend, Colonel Caladyk, helped train the Irgun in Palestine. [488]

Those who had sought the patronage of the anti-Semites in pre-war Poland never fought Polish anti-Semitism, even in Britain and Palestine where the advantages were all on their side.

_______________

Notes:

474. 'Menachem Begin Writes', Jewish Press (13 May 1977), p. 4.

475. Yisrael Gutman, 'Jews in General Anders' Army in the Soviet Union', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, pp. 255-6.

476. Bernard Johnpoll, The Politics of Futility, p. 248.

477. Gutman' 'Jews in General Anders' Army', pp. 262, 265 and 269.

478. Leon Rozen-Szeczakacz, Cry in the Wilderness, pp. 92-3.

479. Gutman, 'Jews in General Anders' Army', p. 266.

480. Rozen-Szeczakacz, Cry in the Wilderness, pp. 157-8.

481. Reuben Ainsztein, 'The Sikorski Affair', Jewish Quarterly (London, Spring 1969), p. 31.

482. Gutman, 'Jews in General Anders' Army', p. 295.

483. Ibid., p. 279.

484. Ibid., p. 280.

485. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, p. 128.

486. Ibid.

487. Johnpoll, pp. 247-8.

488. Mark Kahan, 'An Utmost Historical Documentation', in Cry in the Wilderness, app. p. 237.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:59 pm

23. ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

It is not known exactly how many illegal immigrants were smuggled into Palestine before and during the Second World War. Yehuda Bauer estimates that approximately 15,000 illegal immigrants entered in the years 1936-9. [489] He breaks down this number to 5,300 brought in by Revisionist ships, 5,000 by the Labour Zionists and 5,200 by private vessels. [490] The British listed 20,180 as having arrived prior to the end of the war. William Perl, the prime organiser of the Revisionist effort, doubles that figure to more than 40,000. [491] Yehuda Slutzky gives 52,000 as having reached Palestine during the war, but his number includes both legals and illegals. [492]

The first illegal boat, the Velos, organised by the Palestinian kibbutzim, arrived in July 1934. It tried again in September, but was intercepted and both the WZO and Labour Zionist leaderships opposed any further attempts; by 1935 the British were letting in 55,000 legal immigrants and they saw no reason to antagonise London for the sake of a few more. The first Revisionist effort was the Union, which was intercepted while landing in August 1934. These two failures discouraged any additional exertions, until the Revisionists tried again in 1937.

After the Holocaust, the post-1937 illegal immigration acquired a reputation as part of Zionism's contribution to the rescue of European Jewry from Hitler. However, at the time neither the Revisionists nor the WZO saw themselves as rescuing Jews per se; they were bringing in specially selected settlers to Palestine.

'Priority Went to Members of our own Betar'

The Revisionists returned to illegal immigration during the Arab revolt. The immigrants were mostly Betarim brought in as reinforcements for the Irgun, which was engaged in a terrorist campaign against the Arabs. [493] The first three groups, comprising 204 passengers, left Vienna in 1937 before the Nazi occupation. Except for four Austrians, they were all Eastern Europeans. All had been given weapon-training earlier at their camp at the Revisionist estate at Kottingbrunn, in preparation for what they knew would some day be 'the final battle against the British occupiers. [494] Their focus had always been the military needs of palestinian Revisionism. Die Aktion, the Viennese group organising the ‘free immigration’, passed a resolution proclaiming that they would only take young people: 'For the upcoming battle for the liberation of our Jewish homeland from the British colonial yoke, the first ones to be saved must be Jews able and willing to carry arms.' [495]

In the years to come there were occasions when the Revisionists did take others besides Betarim, but these were only accepted because of the contingencies of the situation. The money for the first expedition after the anschluss came from the Vienna Jewish community organisation, which was dominated by a right-wing Zionist coalition; Die Aktion was therefore sometimes compelled by political and financial considerations to include members of other groups among the passengers, but preference was always given to Betarim. William Perl, Die Aktion's main organiser, later discussed their first post-anschluss boat in his book, Four Front War, and he candidly admitted that:

Priority went to members of our own Betarim… next, to those whom we expected to stand the strain of the trip, to adjust to life in Palestine. One day these youngsters would have to be ready and be able to rise up in arms with the Betar. [496]


In dealing with events during the summer of 1939 Perl wrote further of: 'Jabotinsky himself… who now took a most active role in trying to arrange the escape of more Jews from Poland, particularly of as many as possible of our Betarim there’. [497] Yitshaq Ben-Ami, who had come from Palestine to assist the operations in Vienna, and then went to the USA to raise money for their vessels, has recently spoken of 'big arguments and tension’ between himself and Jabotinsky over how to appeal to the American public. Ben-Ami knew there would be a war in Europe and wanted to organise a rescue operation, whereas Jabotinsky saw fund-raising as a party project. [498] Even in November 1939, two months after the outbreak of the war, Perl, far from rescuing Jews as such, was still thinking: 'If paying fully, the Betarim always had preference.' [499] He mentions one case where they took 'a few' Zionist- Socialists and he and other Revisionist writers list some members of the right-wing Macabbi sports club and General Zionist groups as part of their convoys, but there were only two ways non-Zionists managed to board a Revisionist boat. Either the Nazis -- or some other government along the Danube -- insisted that they be taken along or else, as in the case of some Agudists from Budapest, a shortage of cash obliged Perl to go outside the Zionist orbit for paying customers so that one of his stranded Betar contingents might continue its trip. Even here his Central concern for Palestine came through. Although the Aguda hated zion. ism, he felt that 'for the sake of the future state they were valuable. To them Palestine was not just a temporary haven.' [500] The 1947 statement of Otto Seidmann, the former leader of the Viennese Betar, who wrote that: 'We had to save the lives of Jews — be they Communists or capitalists, members of Hashomer Hatzair or General Zionists', was simply untrue. [501] Betarim were always preferred over any other Zionists, right Zionists over left Zionists, and any kind of Zionist over a non-Zionist.

'Whom a Jewish Homeland in the Process of Construction Needs Most'

The German Zionist Federation opposed illegal immigration until Kristallnacht. They were legalists who had done nothing to oppose Nazism and they were not about to turn against the British. When the WZO re-entered the field of illegal immigration again, it was with great trepidation, and even after Kristallnacht Ben- Gurion warned the Director of the ZVfD Central Committee: 'We shall never be able to fight both the Arabs and the British.' [502] Weizmann, after years of collaboration with the British, was instinctively against anything illegal. At first the WZO could not bring themselves to accept that a Britain seriously preparing for war could not afford to antagonise the Arab and Muslim world by any further patronage of Zionist immigration. What finally compelled the Labour Zionists to move was the prestige which the Revisionists were gaining inside the Zionist camp by their putting European Jews on Palestine's coast. But even then their strictly selective approach remained unchanged. In 1940 the Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, the WZO's official voice in America during the Second World War, published a pamphlet, Revisionism: A Destructive Force, which gave their full case for selectivity:

It is quite true that Palestine should be a refuge for every homeless Jew. Is there a Jew or Zionist who would wish otherwise? But we are faced by the tragic compulsion of facts. Only a number of those who seek entrance can for the present be taken. Selection is inevitable. Shall the choice be haphazard, dependent merely on the accident of who clambered abroad first, or shall profounder motives determine the nature of the immigration? We know that in emigration from Germany preference is given to the Youth Aliyah. Is the reason for this preference a brutal disregard for the aged, or does it spring from the difficult but honest effort to save those whose need is greatest and whom a Jewish Homeland in the process of construction needs most?

When the force of events places on human beings the terrible burden of allocating salvation, the question is not solved by a helter-skelter opening of doors to whoever manages to crowd in. That too is a choice -- a choice against the present and the future. [503]


The selection process for WZO-chartered boats was later spelt out by Aaron Zwergbaum in his description of an expedition from Nazioccupied Czechoslovakia:

The Zionist authorities treated this Aliya Bet like regular migration; it was highly selective, demanding [at least of younger people] Hakshara [agricultural training], a certain knowledge of Hebrew, affiliation to a Zionist body, good health, and so on. There was a rather low age limit, and the passage money was fixed on the principle that the well-to-do should pay not only for themselves but also for those without means. [504]


Again, as with the Revisionists, there had to be exemptions to the rules. Some veteran Zionists were rewarded for their services by a place in the boats, sometimes other forms of influence performed the necessary miracle, as with relatives of Zionists who were taken along, or a rich Jew, carried for financial reasons. And, of course, those imposed upon them by the Nazis and other governments. Not being nearly as military-minded as their rivals, children were less frowned upon; some day they would have their own children in Palestine, thus increasing the Jewish percentage of the population. But, for an example, a 45-year-old non-Zionist piano-tuner, without the ability to pay for someone else, and unrelated to a Zionist, would never be considered for such a voyage.

‘They will Co-operate with Us in Matters in which We are vitally Interested'

The Revisionists were more daring in organising the illegal immigration, because they did not care what London thought. They had come to understand that they would have to fight Britain, if they were ever to realise their Zionist state; the WZO, however, still expected to get a Jewish state with the approval of the British at another Versailles Conference after the Second World War. They argued that Britain would only reward them if they accommodated to her plans during the war, and London most definitely did not want more refugees in Palestine. Therefore, in November 1940, when the British Navy tried to deport 3,000 illegals to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Weizmann tried to convince the Zionist Executive that 'they must not have anything to do with this business just for the sake of getting an additional 3,000 people into Palestine -- who might later turn out to be a millstone around their neck'. [505] He claimed to be concerned about the Gestapo's involvement in the voyages. [506] Obviously the ships could not have left German-held territory without their permission, but it is doubtful that he seriously believed the British imputation that the Nazis were putting spies aboard these squalid boats. However, Weizmann's argument was consistent with his lifetime strategy of getting British patronage for Zionism. He knew that a serious illegal operation would jeopardise his relations with the British and, in particular, make it impossible to attain London's assent for a Jewish Legion within the British Army.

The British, who had learnt from the experience of having worked with the Zionists for decades, decided to use the Zionist ambition for a Jewish state to eliminate illegal immigration. They knew the WZO hoped to attend the post-war peace conference with an impressive war record, so British Intelligence concocted an ingenious plan. The Mossad, the organisation behind the WZO immigration, owned one boat, the Darien II. In 1940, it had been arranged that the vessel would be sent up the Danube to pick up some refugees stranded in Yugoslavia. The British proposed instead that the ship should be loaded with scrap iron and explosives. Jewish refugee boats had become part of the river's life, and no one would suspect the Darien. When it reached a narrow point upstream, it would blow up, thereby blocking Romanian oil and grain from getting to the Reich. The corollary to this would be that refugee boats would no longer be able to come down the Danube, and the Nazis, who had been co-operating with the Mossad by clearing out Zionist training camps, would blame them for the explosion. Despite the grisly revenge which the Nazis were likely to exact, the WZO leadership decided to agree to the ploy being executed. However, there was a hitch. Some of the Mossad workers involved refused to cooperate. The ship was registered in the name of one of their number, an American, and he refused to sign the boat over to the British. David HaCohen, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive, was rushed to Istanbul to try to persuade them to agree. Ruth Kluger, who was present with the Mossad, later gave HaCohen's arguments in her memoir, The Last Escape:

'I've come with an order. From Shertok [Political Secretary of the Jewish Agency] himself… Shertok would not have given the Darien so much time and consideration if he did not feel that the matter was one which came into his realm of operations. He feels, we all feel, that the plan proposed for the Darien will, without doubt, end the war sooner. And the sooner it ends, the more lives will be saved. Including Jewish lives. Furthermore -- and this point I cannot stress enough -- if we cooperate with British Intelligence in this matter, one in which they happen to be vitally interested, we have every reason to believe' -- he repeated the words slowly, 'every reason to believe that they will co-operate with us in matters in which we are vitally interested. [Yehuda] Arazi has mentioned a Jewish Brigade in the British Army… There are many others which I'm not permitted to go into at this point. But I can say this, Zameret, the matter of the Darien is one which might even have bearing on our postwar future. Whether or not we Jews ever have our own nation may be in the lap of the gods. But it's definitely in the hands of the British. If we go back on our promises to them and use the ship in direct contradiction to British law -- if they see that the man who would be, in all likelihood our first Foreign Minister has no control over his countrymen in so vital a matter' -- HaCohen let the sentence hang, like a noose around our necks. [507]


The local Mossad agents would not comply, and the WZO had to use the Darien for one more voyage to save some more of its own members. However, that last voyage was the last successful illegal expedition during the war. William Perl is of the strong conviction that the Darien proposal was designed to ensnare the WZO into a situation whereby the trickle of refugees would be stopped by the Nazis. [508] Certainly HaCohen could not have put the point more forcefully: 'the matter of the Darien is one which might even have a bearing on our post-war future'. British Intelligence had appreciated the simple truth that the WZO would compromise their rescue operation, if it meant a significant step towards their supreme ambition.

The saga of the illegal immigrant ships ended on 24 February 1942, when the derelict Struma, carrying 767 Jews, was towed back into the Black Sea by the Turks, under British pressure, and sank with only one survivor. Dalia Ofer, an Israeli scholar, remarks: 'there was still no real perception of the nature of events in Nazi-occupied Europe, and hence there were no attempts to reorganise'. [509] Rescue attempts did not start again until 1943, during the full fury of the Holocaust.

Dogs Fight Dogs, but They Unite against the Wolf

As long as America was neutral, it would have been possible to raise large sums from American Jews for the rescue and relief of their fellows in occupied Europe, but such fund-raising could only have been done on a strictly non-partisan and humanitarian basis. Instead, the WZO, through its Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs and other outlets, attacked the Revisionist involvement in illegal immigration. They denounced their rivals, Fascist tendencies and accused them of not being selective about whom they let aboard their ships. Apparently the Revisionist propagandists concealed the political and even military basis of their selection process, and the WZO's publicists were fooled. The Emergency Committee's pamphlet of 1940 accused the Revisionists of 'an incorrigible love of dramatic gestures':

Among other things, the Revisionists made a virtue of the fact that their immigrants are not 'selected'. They take all -- the old, the sick, the psychologically unfit for pioneenng -- whereas the responsible Aliyah presumes to choose. [510]


By what authority could the WZO denounce anyone for trying to rescue the old and the sick, or even the psychologically unfit for pioneering? Had the WZO apparatus in America proposed unity with the Revisionists for a genuine nonexclusionary effort, the Revisionists would have had to live up to their propaganda or risk being exposed. However, the WZO was not interested in humanitarian rescue. Its leaders were openly picking and choosing strictly on the basis of what they saw as the interests of Zionism.

_______________

Notes:

489. Yehuda Bauer, From Diplomacy to Resistance, p. 391.

490. Yehuda Bauer, ‘Illegal Immigration', Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, vol. I, p. 532.

491. William Perl, The Four Front War, p. 1.

492. Yehuda Slutzky, The Palestine Jewish Community and its Assistance to European Jewry in the Holocaust Years', Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust, p. 421.

493. Daniel Levine, David Raziel, The Man and His Times, pp. 226, 229.

494. Perl, The Four Front War, p. 16.

495. Ibid., p. 23.

496. Ibid., pp. 60-1.

497. Ibid., p. 226.

498. Author's interview with Yitshaq Ben-Ami, 16 December 1980.

499. Perl, The Four Front War, p. 306.

500. Ibid., p. 302.

501. O. Seidmann, 'Saga of Aliyah Beth'' Tagar (Shanghai, I January 1947), p. 7.

502. David Yisraeli, 'The Third Reich and Palestine', Middle Eastern Studies (May 1971), p. 348.

503. Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs' Revisionism: A Destructive Force (1940), p. 24.

504. Aaron Zwergbaum, 'From Internment in Bratislava and Detention in Mauritius to Freedom', The Jews of Czechoslovakia, vol. II, p. 601.

505. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, p. 65.

506. Ibid.

507. Ruth Kluger and Peggy Mann, The Last Escape, pp. 456-7.

508. Perl, The Four Front War, p. 193.

509. Daha Ofer' 'The Activities of the Jewish Agency Delegation in Istanbul in 1943', Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust, p. 437.

510. Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, Revisionism: A Destructive Force, p. 24.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 9:04 pm

24. THE WARTIME FAILURE TO RESCUE

Aid to European Jewry during the Second World War can only be dealt with in the context of the general war aims of the Allies. At all times the main concern of Britain and France, and then the United States, was the preservation of their empires and the capitalist system. The Soviet Union had no quarrel with this vision, except where its own troops actually penetrated Central Europe. London and Paris entered the war on the defensive, fearing both victory and defeat: the First World War had led to the collapse of four empires and the rise of Communism.

The attitude of the British government towards helping Jews escape the Nazi fury was carefully set down by Roosevelt's intimate, Harry Hopkins. He told of a meeting on 27 March 1943 between the President, Anthony Eden and others, at which the question of at least saving the Jews of Bulgaria had arisen. Eden said:

We should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them. [511]


Britain's prime concern was that rescuing Jews would create problems with the Arabs, who feared that Jewish immigration to Palestine would lead to a post-war Jewish state. Naturally, London's solicitous regard for Arab sensitivities in this respect was solely based on imperial calculation; according to Churchill, the Arabs were no better than 'a backward people who eat nothing but camel dung'. [512] The British understood that the Zionists also saw the war and rescue through the Palestinian prism. The Zionists knew that the Arabs would be opposed to their British overlords, and they hoped to curry favour with Britain by their own loyalty. Their main wartime goal was the creation of a Jewish Legion, and with it they hoped to establish a military record which would compel Britain to grant them statehood as a post-war reward. Their first thought was how to turn the war to their advantage in Palestine. Yoav Gelber of the Yad Vashem Institute gives a good account of this view among the Labour Zionists in September 1939:

the majority of the leaders tended to view Palestine and its problems as the touchstone of their attitude towards the war. They were inclined to leave the frontline fighting as such, if unconnected to Palestine, to the Jews of the Diaspora. [513]


Hashomer Hatzair took the same position, and opposed any volunteering that involved service outside Palestine. As one of their writers, Richard Weintraub, put it on 28 September 1939: 'it would be politically unwise to attempt to revive an updated version of Jewish “missions” in the world at large and to make sacrifices for their sake'. [514]

During 1940 and 1941 the Jewish Agency Executive rarely discussed the Jews of occupied Europe and, aside from their half-hearted efforts at illegal immigration, the Agency did nothing for them. [515] Nor were their colleagues in neutral America much more helpful, despite the fact that Goldmann had arrived there for the duration in 1940 and both Ben-Gurion and Weizmann went there for several extended visits in 1940 and 1941. Furthermore, the American Zionist leadership campaigned against those Jews who were trying to aid the stricken. Aryeh Tartakower, who was in charge of aid work for the World Jewish Congress in America in 1940, has told some of the story in an interview with the distinguished Israeli historian, Shabatei Beit-Zvi:

we received a call from the American Government, from the State Department, and they brought to our attention that sending parcels to the Jews in Poland was not in the interests of the Allies… The first one to tell us to stop immediately was Dr Stephen Wise… He said: 'We must stop for the good of England.' [516]


The British decided that it was the 'duty' of the Germans as belligerents to feed the population in the territories they occupied. Food packages from the outside only aided the German war efforts. The WJC-AJC apparatus not only stopped sending food, but it pressurised the non-Zionist Jewish relief agencies to stop as well, and almost all did except the Aguda. They told the Zionists that Britain was no authority on what was good for the Jews and sent more packages. This aroused Joseph Tanenbaum, a Zionist and leader of the barely existent Jewish anti-Nazi boycott. He had not previously seen food packages as his responsibility until the State Department had suggested it. He then attacked the Agudists in the Zionist daily newspaper, Der Tog in July and August 1941:

Why then do the English send, or the Yugoslavian representatives collect money to send food to the prisoners-of-war. This is a completely different issue. The prisoners-of-war are under the auspices of the Red Cross international convention which has already a long gray beard. [517]


Aguda's own grey beards continued to defy Tanenbaum, and his Joint Boycott Council of the AJC and the Jewish Labor Committee and -- eventually -- the British realised that they could never stop the Agudists and let them send 10,000 monthly packages. The anti-Semitism of British policy was later exposed when they supplied Canadian wheat to occupied Greece from 1942 to its liberation. The Greeks were conquered allies; the Jews were not.

Wise Suppresses News about Extermination of Jews

When did the Western Jewish establishment and the Allies discover that Hitler was systematically killing Jews? Reports of slaughter in the Ukraine started reaching the Western press in October 1941, and in January 1942 the Soviets issued a detailed report, the 'Molotov Announcement', which analysed the workings of the Einsatzgruppen. The memorandum was dismissed by the WZO in Palestine as 'Bolshevik propaganda'. [518] In February 1942 Bertrand Jacobson, the former representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Hungary, held a press conference on his return to the USA and relayed information from Hungarian officers about the massacre of 250,000 Jews in the Ukraine In May 1942 the Bund sent a radio message to London that 700,000 Jews had already been exterminated in Poland, and on 2 July the BBC broadcast the essence of the report in Europe. The Polish government in-exile used the Bund alarm in its own English-language press propaganda. Yet on 7 July 1942, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, then leading the Jewish Agency's Vaad Hazalah (Rescue Committee), refused to believe similar accounts of massacres in Lithuania, because the numbers of the estimated dead were larger than the pre-war Jewish population in the country. [519] On 15 August Richard Lichtheim in Switzerland sent a report to Jerusalem, which was based on German sources, about the scope and methods of extermination. He received a reply, dated 28 September:

Frankly I am not inclined to accept everything in it literally… Just as one has to learn by experience to accept incredible tales as indisputable facts, so one has to learn by experience to distinguish between reality -- however harsh it may be -- and imagination which has become distorted by justifiable fear. [520]

Gruenbaum and his Rescue Committee acknowledged that terrible things were going on, but he kept minimising them as 'only' pogroms.

On 8 August Gerhart Riegner of the Geneva office of the WJC obtained detailed accounts of the gassing programme from reliable German sources, and he forwarded these to the WJC's London and New York offices via British and American diplomats. The WJC in London received the material, but Washington withheld the message from rabbi Wise. On 28 August the British section of the WJC sent Wise another copy, and he called the State Department and discovered that they had kept back the information. They then asked him not to release the news to the public pending verification; he agreed and said nothing until 24 November -- 88 days later -- when the State Department finally confirmed the report. Only then did Wise make a public announcement of a Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews in their grasp. On 2 December he wrote a letter to 'Dear Boss', Franklin Roosevelt, asking for an emergency meeting and informing him that:

I have had cables and underground advices for some months, telling of these things. I succeed, together with the heads of other Jewish organisations, in keeping them out of the press. [521]


Wise and Goldmann, who was in the United States throughout the war, never doubted that Riegner's report was true. According to Walter Laqueur, they feared that publicity would add to the despair of the victims. [522] Yehuda Bauer is certain that the American Jewish leaders were already aware of the Bund report. [523]

‘There is no Need to Reveal Them in Public'

In November 1942 some 78 Jews holding Palestinian citizenship arrived from Poland in exchange for some Palestinian Templars. The Jewish Agency could no longer doubt the reports that had been coming into the country for months and, like Wise, they finally declared that the Nazis were systematically exterminating the Jews. But, as with Wise, some WZO leaders in Palestine had been convinced of the truth of the reports well before they chose to make the facts public. On 17 April 1942, even before the Bund broadcast, Moshe Shertok wrote to General Claude Auchinleck, the commander of the British Eighth Arm in North Africa. He was concerned with what might happen to Palestine's Jews, if the Afrika Korps broke through Egypt.

The destruction of the Jewish race is a fundamental tenet of the Nazi doctrine. The authoritative reports recently published show that that policy is being carried out with a ruthlessness which defies description… An even swifter destruction, it must be feared would overtake the Jews of Palestine [my emphasis]. [524]


In other words, while Gruenbaum, the official in charge of the rescue efforts of the WZO, was sceptical about the reliability of the reports about the massacre of the people he was supposed to be helping, the head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency was utilising these same reports to convince the British to arm the Zionist movement in Palestine.

With the announcements by Wise and the Jewish Agency, attention was turned to what could be done about it. The Jewish Agency’s statement triggered off a spontaneous feeling of guilt throughout the Yishuv, as the reality of the horror facing their own kin sank in. However, there was no change in political focus amongst the Zionists. A Jewish state after the war remained their priority, and the Holocaust was not going to jeopardise this. Accordingly, when the local Joumalists, Union cabled similar organisations abroad asking them to focus on the slaughter, Dov Joseph, the acting director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, cautioned them against:

publishing data exaggerating the number of Jewish victims, for if we announce that millions of Jews have been slaughtered by the Nazis, we will justifiably be asked where the millions of Jews are, for whom we claim that we shall need to provide a home in Eretz Israel after the war ends. [525]


Yoav Gelber tells us of the immediate effect of Dov Josephss inter vention: 'Vociferous protests were therefore toned down and instead, ways of responding more "constructively,, were sought.' [526] Ben-Gurion talked of 'requests' that the Allies should threaten retribution and try and rescue Jews, particularly children, or exchange Germans for Jews, etc. In the same breath, he continued to call for concentration on building support for the Jewish Army proposal. [527] The Jewish Agency just soldiered on; no special effort was made for the rescue operation. Gruenbaum continued with several other duties in addition to heading the Rescue Committee. [528] Professor Bauer has given a stark scholarly assessment of Gruenbaum's captaincy of their efforts:

On the basis of research done at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, I would say… the mood of some of the leaders -- especially of Yitzhak Gruenbaum… turned to utter despondency. He and some of his close associates thought that nothing could be done to save Europe's Jews, and that money sent to Europe for escape, resistance, or rescue would be wasted. But they felt that the effort was worthwhile in order to be able to say after the war that everything possible had been done. It should be stressed they did not say the effort should not be made; but they felt it would inevitably fail. [529]


But did Gruenbaum really do anything? There were many in Palestine who were appalled at the WZO's defeatism and its continuing preoccupation with the goals of Zionism while their relatives were being slaughtered, and these people cried out for action. They were no immediate threat to the hegemony of the WZO leaders, but the leadership felt the pressure. Most of it was directed at Gruenbaum, who finally gave way at a meeting of the Zionist Executive on 18 February 1943. He accused his critics and his friends of letting him take the blame, while they did nothing either. Later he set down his incredible speech in his post-war book, Bi-mei Hurban ve Sho'ah (In the Days of Holocaust and Destruction).

However, among us -- permit me to speak of this side of the picture -- there is one solution that is universal to every bad event, to every Holocaust. First of all, we attack the leaders; they are to blame… had we cried, had we demanded, everything possible would have been done to save, to help. And if nothing was done, that was because we did not cry or make demand…

I want to destroy this assumption… in order to save, to take out people from the occupied countries… it would be necessary for the neutral countries to provide refuge, that the warring nations open their gates to the refugees. And when we suggested demanding this through the help of our friends… there were those who said:

'Don't touch this matter; you know they won't admit Jews onto North Africa, to the United States, don't put our comrades into such a situation. The public is unable to accept these considerations, they don't understand them, nor do they wish to understand them'…

Meanwhile a mood swept over Eretz Yisrael, that I think is very dangerous to Zionism, to our efforts for redemption, our war of independence. I do not want to hurt any one, but I cannot understand how such a thing could occur in Eretz Yisrael, something that never happened abroad. How is it possible that in a meeting in Yerushalayim people will call: 'If you don't have enough money you should take it from the Keren Hayesod, You should take the money from the bank, there is money there.' I thought it obligatory to stand before this wave…

And this time in Eretz Yisrael, there are comments: 'Don't put Eretz Yisrael in priority in this difficult time, in the time of destruction of European Jewry.' I do not accept such a saying. And when some asked me: 'Can't you give money from the Keren Hayesod to save Jews in the Diaspora?', I said: ‘no! And again I say no' I know that people wonder, why I had to say it. Friends tell me, that even if these things are right, there is no need to reveal them in public, in time of sorrow and concern. I disagree. I think we have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row. Have I said this to glorify my own tenets? And because of this, people called me an anti-Semite, and concluded that I am guilty, because we do not give priority to rescue actions.

I am not going to defend myself. The same as I'm not going to justify or defend myself if they would blame me for killing my mother, so I'm not going to defend myself in this case. But my friends did not have to abandon me in this battle and then comfort my soul later: 'If you were connected with any political party we would have put the reins on you.' I think it necessary to say here Zionism is over everything…

I wish to end with suggestions. Naturally, it is incumbent upon us to continue all action for the sake of rescue and not neglect one chance to end the slaughter… At the same time we must guard Zionism. There are those who feel that this should not be said at the time a Holocaust is occurring, but believe me, lately we see worrisome manifestations in this respect: Zionism is above all -- it is necessary to sound this whenever a Holocaust diverts us from our war of liberation in Zionism. Our war of liberation does not arise from the fact of a Holocaust in a straightforward manner and does not interlock with actions for the benefit of the Diaspora in its time, and this is to our detriment. This situation does not exist for any other nationality. We have two areas of action, and they connect and interlock, but are actually two separate areas of svork though they sometimes touch. And we must guard -- especially in these times -- the supremacy of the war of redemption. [530]


In 1944 a Hungarian Zionist, Joel Brand, arrived in Jerusalem on an extraordinary mission (The mission will be described in greater detail in the following chapter; here it is sufficient to state that until 1944 the Germans had not occupied Hungary and that it had become a refuge for those fleeing Nazi territory.) Brand had been a prominent figure in Budapest's own Zionist Rescue Committee and as such had been taken to see Gruenbaum. He later told of one of his pathetic encounters with the director of the WZO's rescue operations:

He said to me at once, 'Why haven't you rescued my son, Herr Brand? You should have been able to get him out of Poland into Hungary.' I replied: 'We have not usually undertaken the rescue of individuals.' 'But you ought to have thought of my son, Herr Brand. It was your duty to do so.' I respected his gray hairs, and I said no more. [531]


'For only with Blood Shall We Get the Land'

The Nazis began taking the Jews of Slovakia captive in March 1942. Rabbi Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel' an Agudist, thought to employ the traditional weapon against anti-Semitism: bribes. He contacted Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's representative, and told him that he was in touch with the leaders of world Jewry. Would Wisliceny take their money for the lives of Slovakian Jewry? Wisliceny agreed for 50,000 in dollars so long as it came from outside the country. The money was paid, but it was actually raised locally, and the surviving 30,000 Jews were spared until 1944 when they were captured in the aftermath of the furious but unsuccessful Slovak partisan revolt.

Weissmandel, who was a philosophy student at Oxford University, had volunteered on 1 September 1939 to return to Slovakia as the agent of the world Aguda. He became one of the outstanding Jewish figures during the Holocaust, for it was he who was the first to demand that the Allies bomb Auschwitz. Eventually he was captured, but he managed to saw his way out of a moving train with an emery wire; he jumped, broke his leg, survived and continued his work of rescuing Jews. Weissmandel's powerful post-war book, Min HaMaitzer (From the Depths), written in Talmudic Hebrew, has unfortunately not been translated into English as yet. It is one of the most powerful indictments of Zionism and the Jewish establishment. It helps put Gruenbaum's unwillingness to send money into occupied Europe into its proper perspective. Weissmandel realised: 'the money is needed here -- by us and not by them. For with money here, new ideas can be formulated.' [532] Weissmandel was thinking beyond just bribery. He realised immediately that with money it was possible to mobilise the Slovak partisans. However, the key question for him was whether any of the senior ranks in the SS or the Nazi regime could be bribed. Only if they were willing to deal with either Western Jewry or the Allies, could bribery have any serious impact. He saw the balance of the war shifting, with some Nazis still thinking they could win and hoping to use the Jews to put pressure on the Allies, but others beginning to fear future Allied retribution. His concern was simply that the Nazis should start to appreciate that live Jews were more useful than dead ones. His thinking is not to be confused with that of the Judenrat collaborators. He was not trying to save some Jews. He thought strictly in terms of negotiations on a Europewide basis for all the Jews. He warned Hungarian Jewry in its turn: do not let them ghettoise you! Rebel, hide, make them drag the survivors there in chains! You go peacefully into a ghetto and you will go to Auschwitz! Weissmandel was careful never to allow himself to be manoeuvred by the Germans into demanding concessions from the Allies. Money from world Jewry was the only bait he dangled before them.

In November 1942, Wisliceny was approached again. How much money would be needed for all the European Jews to be saved? He went to Berlin, and in early 1943 word came down to Bratislava. For $2 million they could have all the Jews in Western Europe and the Balkans. Weissmandel sent a courier to Switzerland to try to get the money from the Jewish charities. Saly Mayer, a Zionist industrialist and the Joint Distribution Committee representative in Zurich, refused to give the Bratislavan 'working group' any money, even as an initial pay ment to test the proposition, because the 'Joint' would not break the American laws which prohibited sending money into enemy countries. Instead Mayer sent Weissmandel a calculated insult: 'the letters that you have gathered from the Slovakian refugees in Poland are exaggerated tales for this is the way of the ''Ost-Juden" who are always demanding money'. [533]

The courier who brought Mayer's reply had another letter with him from Nathan Schwalb, the HeChalutz representative in Switzerland Weissmandel described the document:

There was another letter in the envelope, written in a strange foreign language and at first I could not decipher at all which language it was until I realized that this was Hebrew written in Roman letters, and written to Schwalb's friends in Pressburg [Bratislava]… It is still before my eyes, as if I had reviewed it a hundred and one times. This was the content of the letter:

'Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must constantly have before them that in the end the Allies will win. After their victory they will divide the world again between the nations, as they did at the end of the first world war. Then they unveiled the plan for the first step and now, at the war's end, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel will become the state of Israel, and important steps have already been taken in this direction. About the cries coming from your country, we should know that all the Allied nations are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at the war's end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order to protect our blood -- for only with blood shall we get the land. But in respect to you, my friends, atem taylu, and for this purpose I am sending you money illegally with this messenger.' [534]


Rabbi Weissmandel pondered over the startling letter:

After I had accustomed myself to this strange writing, I trembled, understanding the meaning of the first words which were 'only with blood shall we attain land'. But days and weeks went by, and I did not know the meaning of the last two words. Until I saw from something that happened that the words 'atem taylu' were from 'tiyul' [to walk] which was their special term for 'rescue'. In other words: you, my fellow members, my 19 or 20 close friends, get out of Slovakia and save your lives and with the blood of the remainder -- the blood of all the men, women, old and young and the sucklings -- the land will belong to us. Therefore, in order to save their lives it is a crime to allow money into enemy territory -- but to save you beloved friends, here is money obtained illegally.

It is understood that I do not have these letters—for they remained there and were destroyed with everything else that was lost. [535]


Weissmandel assures us that Gisi Fleischman and the other dedicated Zionist rescue workers inside the working group were appalled by Schwalb's letter, but it expressed the morbid thoughts of the worst elements of the WZO leadership. Zionism had come full turn: instead of Zionism being the hope of the Jews, their blood was to be the political salvation of Zionism.

Minimal Response to the Extermination

Even after Wise's belated announcement of the extermination campaign, the response of the American Jewish establishment was minimal. They heeded a call from one of the Zionist chief rabbis in Palestine for a day of mourning, which they called for 2 December 1942, and the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Committee added a ten-minute Jewish work stoppage. But much more had to be done before the Roosevelt administration would ever take concrete action. He would have to be pushed hard, if he was going to do anything to help the Jews of Europe.

Roosevelt had ambivalent attitudes toward Jews. He had one in his Cabinet and had appointed another to the Supreme Court, and he had several among his confidential advisers. But he never made the slightest move in the 1930s to amend the anti-Semitic immigration laws. Although Jews were prominent in the northern and western Democratic machines, there were several outspoken anti-Semites among the Dixiecratic contingent in Congress and Roosevelt would never think of separating from them. He never expressed any public anti-Semitic sentiments, but there is no doubt that he held them. Years later, the United States government published the notes of the Casablanca Conference, held in January 1943, and it was revealed that he had told the French:

The 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 North African population… The President stated that 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 fifty per cent of the lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews. [536]


The inadequacy of the Jewish establishment's response was so glaring that it brought forth a furious denunciation by the veteran Labour Zionist, Chaim Greenberg, in the February 1943 issue of the Yiddishe Kemfer:

the few Jewish communities remaining in the world which are still free to make their voices heard and to pray in public should proclaim a day of fasting and prayer for American Jews… this American Jewish community has fallen lower than perhaps any other in recent times… We did not even display sufficient ability to set up (temporarily, for the duration of the emergency only) some kind of a general staff that should meet every day and think and consult and consider ways to engage the help of people who may, perhaps, be in a position to help us… One clique tries to outmaneuver the other -- Zionists and anti-Zionists… What has such rescue work to do with political differences and with the entire ideological clap-trap which we have produced during the past couple of generations? [537]


Greenberg's powerful attack on American Jewry's leaders spared no one, least of all his fellow Zionists, who were becoming the strongest force in the community. Without naming names, he denounced the defeatism and obsession with Palestine to be seen in many of the leading Zionist circles.

There have even appeared some Zionists in our midst who have become reconciled to the thought that it is impossible to stay the hand of the murderer and therefore, they say, it is necessary 'to utilize this opportunity' to emphasise to the world the tragedy of Jewish homelessness and to strengthen the demand for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. (A Home for whom? For the millions of dead in their temporary cemeteries in Europe?)


He attacked Wise's American Jewish Congress:

at a time when the Angel of Death uses airplanes, the AJ-Congress employs an oxcart-express… [it] delegated rescue work in Europe to a special committee… this committee permits itself the luxury of not meeting for weeks on end… It displayed a lack of the courage of despair, of that 'aggressiveness of spirit' which characterizes the hour of doom, of the ability to act on its own on a suitable scope or to attract people from other circles and activate them for such a generally self-evident cause as the attempt to rescue those who can still be rescued.


Greenberg lashed out at the Revisionists' Committee for a Jewish Army for expensive advertisements publicising a Jewish Army for 200,000 stateless Jews: 'knowing very well that this is a mythical figure… all the Jews in Europe, to the last one, would be murdered long before such a force could be recruited, organised and trained'. [538]

The Emergency Committee

Only one of the Zionist groups understood that rescue had to become their top priority. A small number of Irgunists had gone to the USA to raise funds for their illegal immigration, and when the war broke out they added a demand for a Jewish Legion which they, like the WZO, saw as Zionism's immediate goal. In April 1941 they noticed some articles by Ben Hecht, one of America's most famous journalists, in PM, a liberal New York daily paper, deploring the silence of Jewish social, political and literary figures on the situation of European Jewry. The Irgunists convinced Hecht to help them set up a 'Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews'. Hecht approved of the idea, because he could see they were fighters and that was what he wanted: a Jewish army that would kill Germans in revenge for the Jews Hitler humiliated and murdered. Hitherto the Irgunists had played a very minor role in the Jewish political scene; however, with Hecht on their committee the Revisionists became a semi-serious force. He knew everybody in Hollywood and the publishing world. When their advertisements appeared in the major newspapers they looked as if they were an actual part of wartime politics.

Although the Irgunists had missed the full significance of the earliest massacre reports, Wise's statement convinced their leader, Peter Bergson, that they had to push for American government action specifically on behalf of the Jews. They planned to bring a pageant, They Shall Never Die, to Madison Square Garden on 9 March 1943. Some of the most famous theatrical people of the age -- Kurt Weill, Billy Rose and Edward G. Robinson amongst many others -- started to put it together. This was too much for Wise, who was not willing to be upstaged by any Fascist interlopers. The Jewish establishment suddenly announced its own rally in the Garden for 1 March. The Committee for a Jewish Army tried to bring about unity by offering to withdraw as exclusive sponsor for the 9 March event, if the establishment would agree to cosponsor it, but it refused. [539] The result was that two separate rallies on the same Jewish tragedy took place in the Garden only nine days apart. Both were well attended; the Hecht-Weill pageant filled the arena twice on the same night. The real difference was that the circle of followers around Wise were primarily moved by their hostility to the Irgunists and had no genuine plans for a sustained mobilisation, whereas the Committee for a Jewish Army toured America's major cities with their pageant. Wise's American Jewish Congress, infuriated by their success, ordered its local branches around the country to try to keep the pageant out of auditoriums wherever it could, and the pageant was denied a performance at Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Buffalo at least. [540]

But what have we really achieved, Kurt Weill asked? 'The pageant has accomplished nothing. I know Bergson calls it a turning point in Jewish history, but he is stage struck. Actually all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment.' [541] In fact the pageant did establish the Committee for a Jewish Army as a force to be reckoned with. Nevertheless, latter-day apologists for the Holocaust Jewish establishment, like Bernard Wasserstein of Brandeis, still would argue that:

Congress, and the majority of the general public were at one in their adamant refusal to contemplate any tinkering with the strict letter of the national origins quota restrictions… It requires a vivid imagination to be convinced that a campaign of Jewish 'activism' would have changed these harsh realities. The more probable consequences would have been to arouse increased antipathy toward Jews… Jewish leaders were only too aware of this: hence their general scepticism as to the efficacy of activism. [542]


In fact there is no evidence to suggest that anti-Semitism increased as a result of the committee's activities. Rather the opposite: momentum built in Congress for action. The Irgunists, including the deeply committed Weill, felt that if they put all their strength and energy into rescue they could force the government to start doing something. From spring 1943 to the end of the year, the committee -- now renamed the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe -- virtually had the rescue field to itself, as the Jewish establishment either did nothing or else tried to sabotage their work.

Their practical experience in mobilising soon taught the committee that they had to move away from the Palestine issue. By 1943 Zionist sympathies were rapidly growing among Jews, but the anti-Zionist elements were still powerful and non-Jews had not the least interest in causing trouble for their British allies in the Middle East, although many ordinary Americans were convinced that their government should try to save the Jews. Now Wise and Goldmann brought a new charge against the Emergency Committee: they had betrayed the sacred cause of Palestine. Bergson tried to reason with Wise: 'If you were inside a burning house, would you want the people outside to scream ''save them", or to scream ''save them by taking them to the Waldorf Astoria”?’, It was all to no avail; Wise would never concede. [543]

The committee mobilised 450 orthodox rabbis for an October march to the White House, but Roosevelt would not see them; he rushed off to dedicate four bombers to the Yugoslav exile air force, but the campaign continued. Peter Bergson emphasises: 'The rich Jews, the establishment, always fought us. It was always the little Jews — and Gentiles—who sent in the money for our ads.' [544] Sensing that there was now clearly enough public support for the cause, their leading congressional friends, Senator Guy Gillette and Representatives Will Rogers Jr and Joseph Baldwin, put in a Bill for a rescue commission. They pointedly emphasised that their proposal had nothing to do with Zionism. Hearings in the Senate in September were friendly, but in the House Foreign Relations Committee the Chairman, Sol Bloom, a Jewish Tammany Democrat from Brooklyn, bitterly attacked Bergson and the hearings went against the proposition. For good measure, American Zionism's most prestigious figure, rabbi Stephen Wise, came to Washington to testify against the rescue Bill because it did not mention Palestine.

Wise's Congress Weekly boasted how the hearings were 'utilised by Dr Wise for lifting the discussion from the plane of abstract plans to the most immediate practical measures of rescue, and in the first place to the opening of Palestine'. But there was more to it; the article denounced the Emergency Committee for 'utter disregard of all existing Jewish organisations and their years of effort thru and with the government agencies created to deal with the rescue problem’. [545] For years the press and the politicians had deferred to Wise as the leader of American Jewry. Now an outsider, Ben Hecht, and a group of the hated Revisionists were trying to tell Roosevelt how to save the Jews.

Bloom's action against the Bill could not stop the pressure for a rescue commission. Before the Emergency Committee could launch a new plan, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morganthau Jr, handed Roosevelt a report on a plot by a group of State Department officials to suppress information on the massacres. Breckenridge Long, the former ambassador to Italy, a pre-war admirer of Mussolini, whom the department had assigned to handling refugee problems during the Holocaust, had been found to have altered a vital document to obstruct exposure. At the congressional hearings Long had been the administration's main witness against the proposal for a rescue commission, and now Morganthau had to warn the President that the situation could easily 'explode into a nasty scandal'. [546] Roosevelt knew he was beaten, and on 22 January 1944 he announced the establishment of a War Refugee Board.

Credit for the establishment of the Refugee Board has been debated by Holocaust historians. Those who identify with the Zionist establishment derogate the work of the Emergency Committee and argue that the Board was wholely the work of Morganthau. Thus Bernard Wasserstein insists that 'activism' did not and could not get results for the Jews. The Board was the result of Morganthau's intervention and nothing else: 'Morganthau's protests yielded some results… It is an example of what was feasible as a result of energetic behind-the-scenes activity by Jewish leaders.' [547] However, Nahum Goldmann conceded that John Pehle, who drafted Morganthau's report and became the Director of the WRB, 'had taken the position that Bergson's Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe had inspired the introduction of the Gillette-Rogers resolution, which in turn had led to the creation of the War Refugee Board'. [548] Yet Goldmann and Wise continued their own campaign against Bergson. Goldmann went to the State Department on 19 May 1944 and, according to a department memorandum, he 'alluded to the fact that Bergson and his associates were in this country on temporary visitors' visas… He added that he could not see why this government did not either deport Bergson or draft him.' In the same memorandum the reporter noted that Wise 'had gone so far as to inform Mr Pehle that he regarded Bergson as equally great an enemy of the Jews as Hitler, for the reason that his activities could only lead to increased anti- Semitism'. [549]

The Board turned out to be only of minimal help to the Jews. Arthur Morse wrote in his book, While 6 Million Died, of 50,000 Romanians directly saved, and indirectly, through pressure on the Red Cross, neutrals, clergy and underground forces, the Board saved an additional few hundred thousand. [550] More recent calculations lower the figure to approximately 100,000. [551] The Board was never a powerful agency. It never had more than thirty staff, and it could not circumvent the State Department in dealing with the neutrals or the collapsing Nazi satellites. It had no power to guarantee that escaped Jews would eventually be given refuge in America, where so many had kin. Shmuel Merlin, who directed the public relations aspects of the Emergency Committee's work, has explained why the Board was so relatively weak:

We knew we were defeated when the Jewish organisations offered to put up the money for the Board. Naturally we had envisioned a serious program on the part of the Administration. That meant the government had to lay out money in exactly the same way it does for anything else it really wanted. Instead Roosevelt and Congress were taken off the hook by the Jewish establishment. They offered to pay the Board's basic expenses. They put up about $4,000,000,000 seed money and a total of $15,000,000 during the WRB's entire existence. The sum was so paltry they could always laugh and say 'first wait until the Jews put up some real money'. [552]


The Joint Distribution Committee put up $15 million of the $20 million spent by the Board. Other Jewish groups added $1.3 million. If the board had more money, it could have done far more. If the Jewish establishment had united with the Irgunists in a further campaign for government funding, it is highly likely that the money would have been forthcoming. Before the Board was set up, the government warded off demands for such a commission on the grounds that other agencies were doing all that could be done. Once the Board had been established, there was a formal government commitment to rescue; however, the Jewish establishment remained implacably opposed to the Irgun activists and they continued to demand the deportation of Bergson, instead of uniting with the Emergency Committee.

In 1946 the Revisionists re-entered the WZO and eventually some of the enmity evaporated, but Bergson, Merlin, Ben-Ami and other committee veterans could never listen to the establishment figures who dominated Israel until 1977 without recalling their previous obstructionism. In recent years, they have been able to prove the perfidious backstage role of Wise, Goldmann and others by means of previously secret documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; as a result the controversy over the conflicting rescue efforts has never really died down. Thus Wasserstein insists that the silence of the leaders is a 'myth’:

It is no accident that this legend has grown up. On the contrary, this is an accusation first voiced during and immediately after the war by a specific group: the Revisionist Zionists and their various offshoots… This was their rallying cry which they used in their attempts to mobilize Jewish youth in a misguided and morally tainted campaign of invective and terror. [553]


In fact the first explanation of why the establishment was doing nothing came from the Trotskyist Militant on 1 2 December 1942.

Truth to tell, these organisations, like the Joint Distribution Board and the Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Labor Committee, feared to make themselves heard because they were afraid of arousing a wave of anti-Semitism here as a result. They feared for their own hides too much to fight for the lives of millions abroad. [554]


Certainly the former leaders of the Emergency Committee have tried to expose their old enemies, but since the war they have also been critical of their own efforts and they readily admit that they started too late. They did not understand the significance of the massacre reports until after Wise's announcement in November 1942. However, a broader criticism of the committee relates to their original demand for a Jewish army. This was pure Zionism and of no relevance either to the plight of the Jews or the fight against Nazism. A second criticism must be their failure to put the Jews directly on to the streets. A mass march to the immigration service in New York by many thousands of Jews would have been far more worrisome to the administration than the mobilisation of 450 rabbis. A hunger strike organised by the committee would have propelled the movement forward. The activists criticise themselves today for not having done so, and explain this omission in terms of their own political personalities. They were in America as the representatives of the Irgun, a military organisation that had always, preached against 'Jewish Gandhism’.

The Irgun Revolt in 1944

The American Irgunists were to commit many worse mistakes when the Irgun began its revolt in Palestine in January 1944. After Begin arrived in Palestine in May 1942 he found Revisionism in total disarray. He called for the reorganisation of the Irgun and was eventually appointed its commander. At no time was the Irgun representative of more than a small minority of the Jews in Palestine. Most Palestinian Jews saw them as crazy Fascists, who brought disaster to the Zionist cause by attacking Britain while she was fighting Hitler. They were even repudiated by the old-style Revisionist political apparatus. They were a tiny force; a few fulltime members and a few hundred more part-time. The Haganah, which saw them as Fascists, started rounding them up in collaboration with the British, although the Irgun refused to strike back against the Haganah as they knew that after the war they would join together to try to drive out the British. They also did not attack military targets, so that they should not appear to be interfering with the war effort.

In most respects therefore the revolt was largely symbolic, but in the United States and Britain it diverted attention from the Jews of Europe to the Jews of Palestine. Wise had a chance to regain credibility, and he accused the Emergency Committee of backing terrorism. However, the Americans -- now calling themselves the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation -- as well as the Emergency Committee, did not see the revolt as drawing attention from Europe, but rather as enhancing awareness of the Jewish plight. Peter Bergson still stoutly defends the revolt and the committee’s relation to it:

I know that there are some historians who say that in the end we were no better than the establishment, that we also diverted our energies from rescue work to presenting the case for the Irgun. They are wrong. You are supposed to revolt if the British are not rescuing your own kin in Europe. I would be ashamed for the Jews of Palestine, as people, if there was no one in the country that rose up. [555]


Shmuel Merlin maintains that the revolt upset some Jews more than it did the Gentiles. [556] Only Jews read the Jewish press and they were more influenced by the publicity put out by the establishment against the Irgun. However, once the Irgun revolted, the committee started back down its own road to political fanaticism. Hecht and others began to rant against all Germans in the columns of their organ, The Answer: 'Where ever a German sits or stands, weeps or laughs -- there is abomination. The years will never clean him.’ [557] Their inspiration became Hecht’s pathetic A Guide for the Bedeviled:

I consider the Nazi government not only as suitable for Germans, but ideal from the point of view of the rest of the world as a German government. It should be left to them, after they are defeated, as a gift from Tantalus. They should be allowed to remain Germans in the open, with a good spiked fence around them such as is used in rendering a zoo harmless. Within this Nazi zoo maintained by the world for the diversion of philosophers, the Germans could listen to Beethoven and dream of murder and inconvenience no one… Locked firmly in the middle of Europe as Nazis (with storm troops, concentration camps, hangmen and Gestapo intact) the Germans would handle their own problems of extermination their own way. Their massacre would not have to be on our conscience… But such sensible things never come to pass in the world. Our statesmen will insist… that the enemy resume its masquerade as members of the human race. Thus we will reap from the victory the reward of allowing the Germans to delude us again. [558]


That the American Irgunists did more than all other Zionists to help the Jews in occupied Europe is clear. That Begin's revolt did absolutely nothing to help those same Jews is also clear. The American Irgunists pushed for Begin to start his campaign; therein lay their strength and their weakness. They did not expect the British to give them Palestine; they had broken with them before the war and fully expected to fight them during and after the war. They saw themselves as having to tear 'what they wanted from out of the hands of the imperialists, and that psychology carried over into their approach to rescue. They outflanked Stephen Wise because they represented the 'little Jews'. The ordinary Jews wanted 'Action not Pity' and they supported the Emergency Committee because it articulated their own outrage at what was happening to the Jews of Europe. But in Palestine Begin did not have the sympathy of the ordinary Jews. Had the Irgun mobilised the Jewish masses in a direct challenge to Gruenbaum, it is possible that they could have overturned the supremacy of the WZO. As it was, the cause of Palestine was once again a distraction.

'We Must Not Disturb the War Effort… by Stormy Protests'

It is impossible to excuse the delay on the part of the leaders of the WZO to acknowledge publicly the Nazi extermination, although, again, Wasserstein has attempted to defend them:

Given the nature and extent of the terrible reality it is hardly surprising that it was only when the early, uncorroborated, and incomplete reports were confirmed beyond doubt that the Jews in the West could bring themselves to face the grim truth. [559]


Others had brought 'themselves' to foresee the likelihood of the extermination of millions of Jews even before the war. After Kristall nacht, on 19 November 1938, a statement was issued by the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). 'Let the Refugees into the US!' it read. 'The Brown-shirted monsters do not even bother to conceal their aim: the physical extermination of every Jew in Great Germany.' [560] Again, on 22 December 1938, Trotsky foresaw the annihilation of the Jews.

It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews… Only audacious mobilisation of the workers against reaction, creation of workers' militia, direct physical resistance to the fascist gangs, increasing self-confidence, activity and audacity on the part of all the oppressed can provoke a change in the relations of forces, stop the world wave of fascism, and open a new chapter in the history of mankind. [561]


While the American Jewish Congress was co-operating with the State Department in suppressing the Reigner report, it was divulged from Stephen Wise's office and on 19 September 1942 the Trotskyist Militant ran an article obviously based on the information.

The State Department has meantime -- so we are informed -- suppressed information that it received from its consular agents in Switzerland. This information has to do with the treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Evidence of the greatest atrocities has occurred there in connection with the renewed campaign to exterminate all Jews. Rumor even has it that the Ghetto no longer exists, that the Jews there have been completely wiped out. The reason this report has been suppressed by the State Department is that it does not wish any mass protests here that will force its hand on policy. [562]


It was not merely the State Department that was suppressing the report, and it was not merely the State Department that had no wish for protests in America. The final verdict on the record of the Zionists in the rescue of European Jewry should be left to Nahum Goldmann. In his article 'Jewish Heroism in Siege', published in 1963, he confessed that:

we all failed. I refer not only to actual results -- these at times do not depend on the abilities and wishes of those who act, and they cannot be held responsible for failures resulting from objective considerations. Our failure was in our lack of unwavering determination and readiness to take the proper measures commensurate with the terrible events of the times. All that was done bv the Jews of the free world, and in particular those of the United States, where there were greater opportunities than elsewhere for action, did not go beyond the limits of Jewish politics in normal times. Delegations were sent to prime ministers, requests for intervention were made, and we were satisfied with the meagre and mainly platonic response that the democratic powers were ready to make.


He went even further:

I do not doubt (and I was then closely acquainted with our struggle and with day-to-day events) that thousands and tens of thousands of Jews could have been saved by more active and vigorous reaction on the part of the democratic governments. But, as I have said, the main responsibility rests on us because we did not go beyond routine petitions and requests, and because the Jewish communities did not have the courage and daring to exert pressure on the democratic governments by drastic means and to force them to take drastic measures. I will never forget the day when I received a cable from the Warsaw Ghetto, addressed to Rabbi Stephen Wise and myself, asking us why the Jewish leaders in the United States had not resolved to hold a day-and-night vigil on the steps of the White House until the President decided to give the order to bomb the extermination camps or the death trains. We refrained from doing this because most of the Jewish leadership was then of the opinion that we must not disturb the war effort of the free world against Nazism by stormy protests. [563]


_______________

Notes:

511. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, p. 717.

512. Anthony Howard, 'Duplicity and Prejudice', New York Times Book Review (16 September 1979), p. 37.

513. Yoav Gelber, 'Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-1942)', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XIII, p. 171.

514. Ibid., p. 170.

515. Ibid., p. 192.

516. Shabatei Beit-Zvi' Post-Ugandan Zionism During the Holocaust, post p. 251 (unpublished English translation).(full text available at : http://aaargh-international.org/fran/livres/livres.html)

517. Joseph Tanenbaum, 'A Final Word Regarding Packages to Poland', Der Tog (10 August 1941) (unpublished English translation).

518. Gelber, 'Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry'' p. 190.

519. Yehuda Bauer, 'When Did They Know?', Mid stream (April 1968), p. 51.

520. Gelber, 'Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry', p. 191.

521. Eliyhu Matzozky, 'The Responses of American Jewry and its Representative Organizations, November 24, 1942 and April 19, 1943', unpublished Masters thesis, Yeshiva University, app. II.

522. Walter Laqueur, 'Jewish Denial and the Holocaust', Commentary (December 1979), p. 46.

523. Bauer, 'When Did They Know?', p. 53.

524. Laqueur, 'Jewish Denial and the Holocaust'' p. 53.

525. Gelber, 'Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry', p. 195.

526. Ibid.

527. Ibid.

528. Beit-Zvi, Post Ugandan Zionism During the Holocaust (unpublished English synopsis), p. 1. ).(full text available at : http://aaargh-international.org/fran/livres/livres.html)

529. Yehuda Bauer, From Diplomacy to Resistance, pp. viii-ix.

530. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, BiMeiHurban ve Sho'ah, pp. 62-70.

531. Alex Weissberg, Desperate Mission (Joel Brand's story as told by Weissberg), p. 206.

532. Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel, Min HaMaitzer (unpublished English translation).

533. Ibid.

534. Ibid. (Hebrew edn), p. 92.

535. Ibid., p. 93.

536. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, p. 207.

537. Chaim Greenberg, 'Bankrupt',Midstream (March 1964), pp. 5-8.

538. Ibid., pp. 7-10.

539. Matzozky, 'The Responses of American Jewry', p. 45.

540. Sarah Peck, 'The Campaign for an American Response to the Nazi Holocaust, 1943-1945', Journal of Contemporary History (April 1980), p. 374.

541. Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century, p. 540.

542. Wassersitein , 'The Myth of "Jewish Silence”’, Midstream (August 1980), p. 14.

543. Peck, 'Campaign for an American Response to the Nazi Holocaust', p. 384.

544. Author's interview with Peter Bergson' 27 February 1981.

545. 'On the Question of Rescue', Congress Weekly (10 December 1943), p. 3.

546. Arthur Morse, While 6 Million Died, p. 79.

547. Wasserstein, 'The Myth of "Jewish Silence'' '' p. 14.

548. 'Attitude of Zionists Toward Peter Bergson', memorandum of conversation, 867N.01/2347, Department of State (19 May 1944), pp. 3-4.

549. Ibid., pp. 2, 4.

550. Morse, While 6 Million Died, pp. 257, 307.

551. Eliyhu Matzozky (letter), Midstream (March 1982), p. 44.

552. Author's interview with Shmuel Merlin, 16 September 1980.

553. Wasserstein, 'The Myth of "Jewish Silence”’ p. 15.

554. A. Roland, 'The Slaughter of the Jews', Militant (12 December 1942), p. 3.

555. Interview with Bergson.

556. Interview with Merlin.

557. Ben Hecht, 'My Dark Prayer', The Answer (1 May 1944), p. 7.

558. Ben Hecht, A Guide for the Bedeviled (1944), pp. 126-7.

559. Wasserstein, 'The Myth of "Jewish Silence''', p. 10.

560. National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, 'Let the Refugees into the US!', Socialist Appeal (19 November 1938), p. 1.

561. Leon Trotsky, 'Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism'' On the Jewish Question, pp. 29-30.

562. A. Roland, 'The Plight of the Jews and the Democracies', Militant (19 September 1942), p. 3.

563 Nahum Goldmann, 'Jewish Heroism in Siege', In the Diaspersion (Winter 1963/4), pp.6-7.
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Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 9:08 pm

25. HUNGARY, THE CRIME WITHIN A CRIME

The destruction of Hungarian Jewry is one of the most tragic chapters in the Holocaust. When the Germans finally occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, the leaders of the Jewish community knew what to expect from the Nazis, as Hungary had been a refuge for thousands of Polish and Slovakian Jews, and they had been warned by the Bratislava working group that Wisliceny had promised that Hungary's 700,000 Jews would eventually be deported.

The Nazis summoned the Jewish community leaders and told them not to worry, things would not be so bad if the Jews co-operated. As Randolph Braham has written, 'History and historians have not been kind to the leaders of Hungarian Jewry in the Holocaust era.' [564] For as Braham admits, many 'tried to obtain special protection and favors for their families'. [565] Some did not have to wear the yellow star and, later, were allowed to live outside the ghettos and were permitted to look after their property. In post-war years the roles of two Hungarian Labour Zionists -- Rezso Kasztner and Joel Brand, leaders of the Budapest Rescue Committee -- were subjected to detailed scrutiny in Israeli courtrooms. Kasztner had been accused of betraying the Hungarian Jewish masses.

'They…Begged Them to Hush up the Matter'

On 29 March 1944 these two Zionists met Wisliceny and agreed to pay him the $2 million he had previously mentioned to Weissmandel, if he would not put the Hungarian Jews in ghettos or deport them. They also asked for transport along the Danube of 'some hundred people' with Palestine certificates, saying that it would make it easier for them to raise the cash from their people abroad. [566] Wisliceny agreed to take their bribe and to consider the transport, but was concerned that it be done secretly in order not to antagonise the Mufti who wanted no Jews released. The first instalments of the bribe were paid, but the Nazis nevertheless set up ghettos in the provinces. Then, on 25 April, Eichmann summoned Joel Brand and told him that he was to be sent to negotiate with the WZO and the Allies. The Nazis would allow a million Jews to leave for Spain in exchange for 10,000 trucks, soap, coffee and other supplies. The trucks were to be used exclusively on the eastern front. As a token of Nazi good faith, Eichmann would allow the Zionists the preliminary release of a Palestine convoy of 600.

Brand was confirmed by the Rescue Committee as their representative and the Germans flew him to Istanbul on 19 May in the company of another Jew, Bandi Grosz, a German and Hungarian agent who had additional contacts with various Allied intelligence services. Grosz was to conduct his own negotiations with Allied intelligence about the possibilities of a separate peace. On arrival, Brand met the local representatives of the WZO's Rescue Committee and demanded an immediate meeting with a Jewish Agency leader. The Turks, however, refused to grant a visa to Moshe Shertok, the head of the Agency's Political Department, and the Istanbul committee finally advised Brand to confer with him in Aleppo, on Syrian territory, which was then under British control. On 5 June, when Brand's train passed through Ankara, two Jews -- one a Revisionist, the other an Agudist -- warned him that he was being lured into a trap and would be arrested. Brand was reassured by Echud Avriel, a leading WZO rescue figure, that this warning was false and motivated by factional malice. [567] However, Brand was in fact arrested by the British.

Shertok interviewed Brand on 10 June in Aleppo. Brand described the encounter in his book, Desperate Mission (as told to Alex Weissberg):

Moshe Shertok withdrew into a corner with them [the British], and they talked softly but vehemently together. Then he came back to me and laid a hand on my shoulder… 'You must now go on further south… it is an order… I cannot change it'… 'Don't you understand what you're doing?' I shouted. 'This is plain murder! Mass murder!… You have no right to seize an emissary. I am not even an emissary from the enemy… I am here as the delegate of a million people condemned to death.'


Shertok huddled with the British and returned again: 'I will not rest until you are free once more… you will be set free.' [568] In fact Brand was escorted by a British officer to imprisonment in Egypt. They stopped in Haifa, where he strolled around the harbour:

I even considered the possibility of escape. But only those who have belonged to a party held together by the strongest ties of ideology will understand… I was a Zionist, a party member… I was bound by party discipline… I felt so small, so insignificant -- a man thrown by chance into the boiling cauldron of history -- that l dare not take on my own shoulders the responsibility for the fate of a hundred thousand people. I lacked the courage to defy discipline, and therein lay my true historical guilt. [569]


Brand never had any illusions that the Eichmann proposition would be accepted by the Western Allies. However, he believed that, as with the earlier negotiations with Wisliceny, some serious SS officers wanted to invest in their own future. Live Jews were now a negotiable currency. Brand hoped that it would be possible to negotiate for more realistic arrangements or, at least, to decoy the Nazis into thinking that a deal could be made. Possibly the extermination programme would be slowed down or even suspended while an accord was being worked out. However, the British were not interested in exploring the possibilities of Eichmann's scheme and notified Moscow of Brand's mission; Stalin naturally insisted that the offer be rejected. The story reached the press and on 19 July the British publicly denounced the offer as a trick to divide the Allies.

On 5 October Brand was finally allowed to leave Cairo and he rushed to Jerusalem. He tried to go on to Switzerland, where Rezso Kasztner and SS Colonel Kurt Becher had been sent to negotiate further with Saly Mayer of the Joint Distribution Committee. The Swiss were willing to allow him entry, providing the Jewish Agency would sponsor him. The British gave him a travel document under the name of Eugen Band, the name Eichmann had given him for reasons of secrecy. He went to Eliahu Dobkin, head of the Jewish Agency's Immigration Department, who was supposed to represent the WZO at the negotiations, to get his sponsorship paper; Dobkin refused:

'You will understand, Joel,' he said, 'that I cannot vouch for a man called Eugen Band, when your name is Joel Brand.' 'Are you aware, Eliahu, that many Jews in Central Europe have been sent to the gas chambers simply because officials have refused to sign documents that were not absolutely correct?’ [570]


Late in 1944, at a Tel Aviv Histadrut meeting, Brand was introduced, as '"Joel Brand, the leader of the Jewish workers’ movement in Hungary. He has brought with him the greetings of Hungarian Jewry"… I wondered where this Hungarian Jewry was., He tore into the meeting:

'You were the last hope of hundreds of thousands condemned to death. You have failed them. I was those people’s emissary yet you let me sit in a Cairo prison… You have refused to declare a general strike. If there was no other way, you should have used force.’… They hurried up to the reporters who were present and begged them to hush up the matter. [571]


An inquiry commission was hurriedly set up to appease Brand, but it met only once and decided nothing. Weizmann arrived in Palestine and Brand asked for an immediate interview. It took Weizmann 'a fortnight' to reply. [572]

29 Dec. 1944, Dear Mr Brand:… As you may have seen from the press, I have been traveling a good deal and generally did not have a free moment since my arrival here. I have read both your letter and your memorandum and shall be happy to see you sometime the week after next -- about the 10th of January. [573]


They finally met, and Weizmann promised to help him get back to Europe; Brand never heard from him again.

'Hardly likely to Achieve the Salvation of the Victims'

The WZO approach to the crisis in Hungary had been timid throughout. On 16 May 1944 rabbi Weissmandel had sent detailed diagrams of Auschwitz and maps of the railway lines through Slovakia to Silesia to the Jewish organisations in Switzerland demanding 'absolutely, and in the strongest terms', that they call upon the Allies to bomb the death camp and the railways. [574] His proposal reached Weizmann in London, who approached the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in an extremely hesitant manner. Eden wrote to the Secretary for Air on 7 July:

Dr Weizmann admitted that there seemed to be little enough that we could do to stop these horrors, but he suggested that something might be done to stop the operation of the death camp by bombing the railway lines… and bombing the camps themselves. [575]


A memorandum by Moshe Shertok to the British Foreign Office, written four days later, conveys the same hangdog scepticism:

The bombing of the death camps is… hardly likely to achieve the salvation of the victims to any appreciable extent. Its physical effects can only be the destruction of plant and personnel, and possibly the hastening of the end of those already doomed. The resulting dislocation of the German machinery for systematic wholesale murder may possibly cause delay in the execution of those still in Hungary (over 300,000 in and around Budapest). This in itself is valuable as far as it goes. But it may not go very far, as other means of extermination can be quickly improvised. [576]


After setting out all the reasons why the bombing would not work, Shertok then elaborated on the theme that 'the main purpose of the bombing should be its many-sided and far-reaching moral effect'. [577]

The Jews of occupied Europe, through Weissmandel and Brand, were imploring immediate action. The bombing of Auschwitz was not only possible, it happened by mistake. On 13 September 1944 American pilots, aiming for an adjacent Buna rubber works, hit the camp and killed 40 prisoners and 45 Germans. In July, when Eden had asked if the question could be discussed in Cabinet, Churchill had replied: 'Is there any reason to raise these matters at the cabinet? You and I are in entire agreement. Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.’ [578] Nothing happened. It was felt the cost to the attacking planes would be too high. Weizmann and Shertok continued to petition the British to bomb the camps, but lost the initiative. [579]

The British Zionist leadership likewise faltered in its reaction to the Hungarian crisis. When the Germans occupied Budapest, Alex Easterman, Political Secretary of the British section of the WJC, went to the Foreign Office; when the officials asked that the establishment not organise any street demonstrations, of course he agreed. Again, on 11 July, Selig Brodetsky, a member of the WZO Executive and the President of the Board of Deputies, rejected a call from the Palestinian Vaad Leumi (National Council) that they should put on a mass march in London. [580] Lady Reading, Eva Mond, was the President of the British section of the WJC, and she came out against 'nagging'. 'Don't let us drift into continental Jewish habits,' she admonished on 23 May, when the death trains were still rolling. [581]

'He Agreed to Help Keep the Jews from Resisting Deportation'

The destruction of Hungarian Jewry took place at a time when the Nazi structure was showing all the signs of collapse. Canaris's Abwehr Intelligence had concluded that the war was lost; it therefore started making its own contacts with Western Intelligence, and had to be taken over by the SD. Count Klaus von Stauffenberg's bomb on 20 July 1944 came in the middle of the Hungarian crisis and almost destroyed the Nazi edifice. The Germans had invaded the country because they knew that Admiral Miklos Horthy was planning to pull Hungary out of the war. The neutrals, under the prodding of the War Refugee Board, protested against the new murders, and some made efforts to extend diplomatic protection to some of the Jews. From the beginning Eichmann, who had responsibility for the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, was concerned that Jewish resistance or attempts at escape over the border to Romania, which by then was unwilling to hand over Jews to the Nazis, would trigger off political shock waves that could slow down his operation.

When Eichmann first went to work for von Mildenstein, the fervent philo- Zionist gave him Herzl's Judenstaat. He liked it. He was also fond of Adolf Bohm's Die Zionistische Bewegung (The Zionist Movement) and once, in Vienna, he recited an entire page of it by heart during a meeting with some Jewish leaders, including the mortified Bohm. He had even studied Hebrew for two and a half years, although, he conceded, he never really spoke it well. He had had many dealings with the Zionists before the Second World War. In 1937 he had negotiated with the Haganah's representative, Feivel Polkes, and had been their guest in Palestine. He had also had close contacts with the Czech Zionists. Now, again, he would negotiate with the local Zionists.

In 1953 the Ben-Gurion government prosecuted an elderly pamphleteer, Malchiel Gruenwald, for having libelled Rezso Kasztner as a collaborator for his dealings with Eichmann in 1944. The trial had considerable international coverage throughout 1954. Eichmann must have followed it in the press, for he described his relationship with Kasztner at length in taped interviews he gave to a Dutch Nazi journalist, Willem Sassen, in 1955, parts of which were later published in two articles in Life magazine after his capture in 1960. Gruenwald had denounced Kasztner for having kept silent about the German lies that the Hungarian Jews were only being resettled at Kenyermezo. In return, he was allowed to organise the special convoy, which ultimately became a train to Switzerland, and place his family and friends on it. Further, Gruenwald claimed, Kasztner later protected SS Colonel Becher from being hung as a war criminal by claiming that he had done everything possible to save Jewish lives. Eichmann described Kasztner as follows:

This Dr Kastner [many sources Anglicise Kasztner's name] was a young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation -- and even keep order in the collection camps -- if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000 Jews -- in the end there may have been more -- was not too high for me. Except perhaps for the first few sessions, Kastner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarettes as though he were in a coffeehouse. While we talked he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.

Dr Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel…

As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders who were fighting what might be their last battle. As I told Kastner: 'We, too, are idealists and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.'

I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood -- that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. 'You can have the others' he would say, 'but let me have this group here.’ And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews. [582]


Andre Biss, Joel Brand's cousin, who worked with Kasztner in Budapest, and who supported his policy, nevertheless corroborated Eichmann's statement in part in his book, A Million Jews to Save, when he described who boarded the famous train which reached Switzerland on 6 December 1944:

Then came the most numerous group, Kasztner’s pride -- the Zionist youth. These were composed of the members of various organisations of agricultural pioneers, of extreme right-wing 'revisionists’ who already possessed immigration certificates, and a number of orphans… Lastly came those who had been able to pay cash for their journey, for we had to collect the sum the Germans demanded. But of the 1684 in the train 300 at the most were of this category…

Kasztner's mother, his brothers, sisters and other members of his family from Klausenburg [Kluj] were passengers… Members of the families of those who had fought for the formation of this convoy formed at the most a group of 40 to 50 persons… In the confusion that ensued about 380 persons managed to clamber into the train which left Budapest, not with 1300 passengers as expected, but crammed full with more than 1700 travellers. [583]


The Israeli Labour Party got more than it bargained for when it set out to defend Kasztner. Shmuel Tamir, a former Irgunist, a brilliant cross-examiner, appeared for Gruenwald. Later, in 1961, Ben Hecht wrote his book, Perfidy, a remarkable expose of the Kasztner scandal, and he presented many pages of Tamir's masterly demolition of Kasztner’s defence.

Tamir How do you account for the fact that more people were selected from Kluj [Kasztner's home town] to be rescued than from any other Hungarian town?

Kastner That had nothing to do with me.

Tamir I put it to you that you specifically requested favoritism for your people in Kluj from Eichmann.

Kastner Yes, I asked for it specifically.

Kastner… All the local Rescue Committees were under my jurisdiction.

Tamir Committees! You speak in the plural.

Kastner Yes -- wherever they existed.

Tamir Where else except in Kluj was there such a committee?

Kastner Well, I think the committee in Kluj was the only one in Hungary.

Tamir Dr Kastner, you could have phoned the other towns, just as you phoned Kluj?

Kastner Yes, that's right.

Tamir Then why didn't you contact the Jews of all these towns on the phone to warn them?

Kastner I didn't because I didn't have time enough. [584]

There were 20,000 Jews in Kluj and only a limited number of seats on that train. Judge Benjamin Halevi began pressing Kasztner and he blurted out his criteria for choosing who to save:

Kastner… the witnesses from Kluj who testified here -- in my opinion, I don't think they represent the true Jewry of Kluj. For it is not a coincidence that there was not a single important figure among them. [585]

Levi Blum, also from Kluj, had attended a dinner for Kasztner in 1948, which had been arranged by the train passengers; he had spoiled the occasion by suddenly leaping up and calling the honoured guest a collaborator and daring him to take his accuser to court:

Blum… I asked him, 'why did you distribute post cards from Jews supposed to be in Kenyermeze?' Someone yelled out, 'This was done by Kohani, one of Kastner's men.' Kohani was also in the hall. He jumped up and yelled, 'Yes, I got those post cards.' I asked him, 'Who were they from?' He answered, 'That's none of your business. I don't have to explain what I do to you.'

Judge Halevi All of this happened in public?

Blum Yes, several hundred people were there. [586]

Kasztner was also involved in the affair of Hannah Szenes which was described at the trial. Szenes was a brave young Zionist from Hungary, whom the British finally allowed, together with 31 others, to parachute into occupied Europe to organise Jewish rescue and resistance. She landed in Yugoslavia on 18 March, one day before the German invasion of Hungary; she smuggled herself back into Hungary in June and was promptly caught by Horthy's police. Peretz Goldstein and Joel Nussbecher-Palgi followed her in and they contacted Kasztner, who conned them both into giving themselves up to the Germans and Hungarians for the sake of the train. Both were sent to Auschwitz, although Nussbecher-Palgi managed to saw through some bars on his train and escape. [587] Szenes was shot by a Hungarian firing squad. Kasztner's admission in court that he had failed to notify the Swiss, who represented Britain's interests in Budapest, of the Hungarians' capture of a British officer and spy -- 'I think I had my reasons' -- outraged the Israeli public, many of whom had read her poetry and knew of her bravery in the Hungarian prisons. [588]

'Are We Therefore to be Called Traitors?'

On 21 June 1955 Judge Halevi found there had been no libel of Kasztner, apart from the fact that he had not been motivated by considerations of monetary gain. His collaboration had crucially aided the Nazis in murdering 450,000 Jews and, after the war, he further compounded his offence by going to the defence of Becher.

The Nazis' patronage of Kastner, and their agreement to let him save six hundred prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews. Kastner was given a chance to add a few more to that number. The bait attracted him. The opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism. [589]


The Israeli Labour government remained loyal to their party comrade and the case was appealed. Attorney-General Chaim Cohen put the fundamental issue before the Supreme Court in his subsequent arguments:

Kastner did nothing more and nothing less than was done by us in rescuing the Jews and bringing them to Palestine… You are allowed -- in fact it is your duty -- to risk losing the many in order to save the few… It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine. Are we therefore to be called traitors?


Cohen freely conceded that:

Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the prominents to be saved, that the 'train of the prominents' was organized on Eichmann's orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people.


But Cohen insisted:

There was no room for any resistance to the Germans in Hungary and that Kastner was allowed to draw the conclusion that if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to do it but is also bound to act accordingly. [590]


On 3 March 1957 Kasztner was gunned down. Zeev Eckstein was convicted of the assassination, and Joseph Menkes and Dan Shemer were found guilty of being accessories on the basis of a confession by Eckstein. The assassin claimed that he was a government agent who had infiltrated a right-wing terrorist grouping headed by Israel Sheib (Eldad), a well-known right-wing extremist. [591] However, the matter did not end with Kasztner's death. On 17 January 1958 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Kasztner-Gruenwald case.

The court ruled, 5 to 0, that Kasztner had perjured himself on behalf of Colonel Becher. It then concluded, 3 to 2, that what he did, during the war, could not be legitimately considered collaboration. The most forceful argument of the majority was put forward by Judge Shlomo Chesin:

He didn't warn Hungarian Jewry of the danger facing it because he didn't think it would be useful, and because he thought that any deeds resulting from information given them would damage more than help… Kastner spoke in detail of the situation, saying, 'The Hungarian Jew was a branch which long ago dried up on the tree.' This vivid description coincides with the testimony of another witness about Hungarian Jews. 'This was a big Jewish community in Hungary, without any ideological Jewish backbone.’…The question is not whether a man is allowed to kill many in order to save a few, or vice-versa. The question is altogether in another sphere and should be defined as follows: a man is aware that a whole community is awaiting its doom. He is allowed to make efforts to save a few, although part of his efforts involve concealment of truth from the many; or should he disclose the truth to many though it is his best opinion that this way everybody will perish. I think the answer is clear. What good will the blood of the few bring if everyone is to perish? [592]


Much of the Israeli public refused to accept the new verdict. Had Kasztner lived, the Labour government would have been in difficulty. Not only had he perjured himself for Becher, but, between the trial and the Supreme Court decision, Tamir had uncovered further evidence that Kasztner had also intervened in the case of SS Colonel Hermann Krumey. He had sent him, while he was awaiting trial at Nuremberg, an affidavit declaring: 'Krumey performed his duties in a laudable spirit of good will, at a time when the life and death of many depended on him.’ [593]

Later, in the 1960s during the Eichmann trial, Andre Biss offered to testify. Because of his involvement with Kasztner he had more contact with Eichmann than any other Jewish witness -- 90 out of 102 had never seen him -- and it was apparent that his testimony would be important. An appearance date was set, but then the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, discovered that Biss meant to defend Kasztner's activities. Hausner knew that, despite the Supreme Court's decision in the case, had Biss tried to defend Kasztner there would have been an immense outcry. Hausner knew from the Sassen tapes of the Eichmann interviews how Eichmann might implicate Kasztner. Israel had gained great prestige from Eichmann’s capture and the government did not want the focus of the trial to shift away from Eichmann towards a re-examination of the Zionist record during the Holocaust. According to Biss, Hausner 'asked me to omit from my evidence any mention of our action in Budapest, and especially to pass over in silence what was then in Israel called the "Kasztner affair"‘. [594] Biss refused and was dropped as a witness.

Who Helped Kill 450,000 Jews?

That one Zionist betrayed the Jews would not be of any moment: no movement is responsible for its renegades. However, Kasztner was never regarded as a traitor by the Labour Zionists. On the contrary, they insisted, that if he was guilty, so were they. Kasztner certainly betrayed the Jews who looked to him as one of their leaders, despite Judge Chesin's opinion:

There is no law, either national or international, which lays down the duties of a leader in an hour of emergency toward those who rely on leadership and are under his instructions. [595]

However, by far the most important aspect of the Kasztner-Gruenwald affair was its full exposure of the working philosophy of the World Zionist Organisation throughout the entire Nazi era: the sanctification of the betrayal of the many in the interest of a selected immigration to Palestine.

_______________

Notes:

564. Randolph Braham, 'The Of ficial Jewish Leadership of Wartime Hungary', (unpublished manuscript), p. 1.

565. Randolph Braham, 'The Role of the Jewish Council in Hungary: A Tentative Assessment', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. X, p. 78.

566. Alex Weissberg, Desperate Mission (Joel Brand's story as told by Weissberg), p. 75.

567. Ibid., p. 158.

568. Ibid., pp. 163-5.

569. Ibid., pp. 165-6.

570. Ibid., p. 207.

571. Ibid., p. 210.

572. Ibid., pp. 208-9.

573. Moshe Shonfeld, 77ze Holocaust Victims Accuse, p. 38.

574. Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel, 'Letters from the Depths' in Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, p. 326

575. Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, p. 311.

576. Ibid., p. 310.

577. Ibid.

578. Ibid., p. 311.

579. Ibid., p. 313.

580. Meir Sompolinsky, 'Anglo-Jewish Leadership and the British Government', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XIII, p. 213.

581. Ibid., pp. 217-18.

582. Adolf Eichmann, 'I Transported Them to the Butcher', Life (5 December 1960), p. 146.

583. Andre Biss, A Million Jews to Save, pp. 92~4.

584. Ben Hecht, Perfidy, pp. 112-14.

585. Ibid., p. 118.

586. Ibid., p. 110.

587. Weissberg, Desperate Mission, pp. 236 47.

588. Hecht, Perfidy, p. 129.

589. Ibid., p. 180.

590. Ibid., pp. 194-5, 268.

591. Yitzhak Heimowitz, 'On the Kastner Case', Middle East and the West (31 January 1958), p. 3; Mordechai Katz, 'As I See It', ibid., (24 January 1958), p. 3; Katz, 'On Kastner and his Assassins', ibid., (7 February 1958), p. 3.

592. Hecht, Perfidy, pp.270-1.

593. Ibid., p. 199.

594. Biss, A Million Jews to Save, p. 231.

595. Hecht, Perfidy, p. 272.
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