The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

The fact that Israel is an apartheid state oppressing Palestinians for pathological reasons does not mean that the holocaust of European Jewry did not happen or should be minimized with slaughterhouse statistics. Some things need to be rebutted with obvious facts and we do a little of that here.

The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Tue Apr 24, 2018 6:40 pm

April 23, 2018

The Scriptorium
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Re: The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany
The Economic Boycott of 1933
Article from The Barnes Review, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 41-45.
The Barnes Review, 645 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Suite 100, Washington D.C. 20003, USA.
by M. Raphael Johnson, Ph.D., assistant editor of TBR;
published here with kind permission from TBR.
https://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scrip ... ecwar.html

Dear Sirs or Mesdames:

You are happy to quote Lenni Brenner's "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal," as the authority for this page, but you're missing an extremely important point that he makes there, which is that it was Julius Streicher who started the boycott provocation, not the Jews, and the Jewish boycott was a counter-boycott to Julius Streicher's boycott:

Contact with a central figure in the new government came in March 1933, when Hermann Goering summoned the leaders of the major Jewish organisations. In early March, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Steurmer, had declared that, as of 1 April, all Jewish stores and professionals would be boycotted; however, this campaign ran into an immediate snag. Hitler's capitalist backers were extremely worried by the announcement by rabbi Wise of a planned counter-demonstration to be held in New York on 27 March, if the Nazis went ahead with their boycott. Jews were prominent throughout the retail trade both in American and Europe and, fearing retaliation against their own companies, Hitler's wealthy patrons urged him to call off the action. But the Nazis could hardly do that without losing face, and they decided to use German Jewry to head off Wise; thus Hermann Goering called in the Jewish leaders.
-- Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, by Lenni Brenner


After distorting the chronology in this fashion, you sensationalize the metaphorical "Declaration of War by Judea," which more properly, in today's language, would be called "An Invocation of Economic Sanctions." Having distorted the record in this way, you equate this purely economic "aggression" with the violent Nazi crack-down on German Jews that went far beyond any merely economic effect, depriving them of their property, their liberty, and for many, their lives. To equate the invocation of a boycott with the initiation of a pogrom is reprehensible. Crediting you with not having such a malignant intention, I ask that you please correct the record online, and quote Lenni Brenner fully and accurately in order to remedy this distortion.

Tara Carreon
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Tue Apr 24, 2018 7:07 pm

The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany: The Economic Boycott of 1933
Article from The Barnes Review, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 41-45.
The Barnes Review, 645 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Suite 100, Washington D.C. 20003, USA.
By M. Raphael Johnson, Ph.D., assistant editor of TBR;
published here with kind permission from TBR.
This digitized version © 2002 by The Scriptorium.

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
The London Daily Express, March 24, 1933

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Samuel Untermyer

Few people know the facts about the singular event that helped spark what ultimately became known as World War II - the international Jewish declaration of war on Germany shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power and well before any official German government sanctions or reprisals against Jews were carried out. The March 24, 1933 issue of The Daily Express of London (shown above) described how Jewish leaders, in combination with powerful international Jewish financial interests, had launched a boycott of Germany for the express purpose of crippling her already precarious economy in the hope of bringing down the new Hitler regime. It was only then that Germany struck back in response. Thus, if truth be told, it was the worldwide Jewish leadership -- not the Third Reich -- that effectively fired the first shot in the Second World War. Prominent New York attorney Samuel Untermyer (above right) was one of the leading agitators in the war against Germany, describing the Jewish campaign as nothing less than a "holy war."

Long before the Hitler government began restricting the rights of the German Jews, the leaders of the worldwide Jewish community formally declared war on the "New Germany" at a time when the U.S. government and even the Jewish leaders in Germany were urging caution in dealing with the new Hitler regime.

The war by the international Jewish leadership on Germany not only sparked definite reprisals by the German government but also set the stage for a little-known economic and political alliance between the Hitler government and the leaders of the Zionist movement who hoped that the tension between the Germans and the Jews would lead to massive emigration to Palestine. In short, the result was a tactical alliance between the Nazis and the founders of the modern-day state of Israel -- a fact that many today would prefer be forgotten.

To this day, it is generally (although incorrectly) believed that when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in January of 1933, the German government began policies to suppress the Jews of Germany, including rounding up of Jews and putting them in concentration camps and launching campaigns of terror and violence against the domestic Jewish population.

While there were sporadic eruptions of violence against Jews in Germany after Hitler came to power, this was not officially sanctioned or encouraged.
And the truth is that anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany (or elsewhere in Europe) were actually nothing new. As all Jewish historians attest with much fervor, anti-Semitic uprisings of various degrees had been ever-present in European history.

In any case, in early 1933, Hitler was not the undisputed leader of Germany, nor did he have full command of the armed forces. Hitler was a major figure in a coalition government, but he was far from being the government himself. That was the result of a process of consolidation which evolved later.

Even Germany's Jewish Central Association, known as the Verein, contested the suggestion (made by some Jewish leaders outside Germany) that the new government was deliberately provoking anti-Jewish uprisings.

The Verein issued a statement that "the responsible government authorities [i.e. the Hitler regime] are unaware of the threatening situation," saying, "we do not believe our German fellow citizens will let themselves be carried away into committing excesses against the Jews."

Despite this, Jewish leaders in the United States and Britain determined on their own that it was necessary to launch a war against the Hitler government.


On March 12, 1933 the American Jewish Congress announced a massive protest at Madison Square Gardens for March 27. At that time the commander in chief of the Jewish War Veterans called for an American boycott of German goods. In the meantime, on March 23, 20,000 Jews protested at New York's City Hall as rallies were staged outside the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American shipping lines and boycotts were mounted against German goods throughout shops and businesses in New York City.

According to The Daily Express of London of March 24, 1933, the Jews had already launched their boycott against Germany and her elected government. The headline read "Judea Declares War on Germany -- Jews of All the World Unite -- Boycott of German Goods -- Mass Demonstrations." The article described a forthcoming "holy war" and went on to implore Jews everywhere to boycott German goods and engage in mass demonstrations against German economic interests. According to the Express:

The whole of Israel throughout the world is uniting to declare an economic and financial war on Germany. The appearance of the Swastika as the symbol of the new Germany has revived the old war symbol of Judas to new life. Fourteen million Jews scattered over the entire world are tight to each other as if one man, in order to declare war against the German persecutors of their fellow believers.

The Jewish wholesaler will quit his house, the banker his stock exchange, the merchant his business, and the beggar his humble hut, in order to join the holy war against Hitler's people.

The Express said that Germany was "now confronted with an international boycott of its trade, its finances, and its industry.... In London, New York, Paris and Warsaw, Jewish businessmen are united to go on an economic crusade."


The article said "worldwide preparations are being made to organize protest demonstrations," and reported that "the old and reunited nation of Israel gets in formation with new and modern weapons to fight out its age old battle against its persecutors."

This truly could be described as "the first shot fired in the Second World War."

In a similar vein, the Jewish newspaper Natscha Retsch wrote:

The war against Germany will be waged by all Jewish communities, conferences, congresses... by every individual Jew. Thereby the war against Germany will ideologically enliven and promote our interests, which require that Germany be wholly destroyed.

The danger for us Jews lies in the whole German people, in Germany as a whole as well as individually. It must be rendered harmless for all time.... In this war we Jews have to participate, and this with all the strength and might we have at our disposal.


However, note well that the Zionist Association of Germany put out a telegram on the 26th of March rejecting many of the allegations made against the National Socialists as "propaganda," "mendacious" and "sensational."

In fact, the Zionist faction had every reason to ensure the permanence of National Socialist ideology in Germany. Klaus Polkehn, writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies ("The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941"; JPS v. 3/4, spring/summer 1976), claims that the moderate attitude of the Zionists was due to their vested interest in seeing the financial victory of National Socialism to force immigration to Palestine.
This little-known factor would ultimately come to play a pivotal part in the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Jews.

In the meantime, though, German Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath complained of the "vilification campaign" and said:

As concerns Jews, I can only say that their propagandists abroad are rendering their co-religionists in Germany no service by giving the German public, through their distorted and untruthful news about persecution and torture of Jews, the impression that they actually halt at nothing, not even at lies and calumny, to fight the present German government.


The fledgling Hitler government itself was clearly trying to contain the growing tension -- both within Germany and without. In the United States, even U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wired Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress and urged caution:

Whereas there was for a short time considerable physical mistreatment of Jews, this phase may be considered virtually terminated.... A stabilization appears to have been reached in the field of personal mistreatment.... I feel hopeful that the situation which has caused such widespread concern throughout this country will soon revert to normal.


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This New York Daily News front page headline hailed the massive anti-German protest rally held in Madison Square Garden on March 27, 1933. Despite efforts by the German government to alleviate tensions and prevent the escalation of name-calling and threats by the international Jewish leadership, the rally was held as scheduled. Similar rallies and protest marches were also being held in other cities during the same time frame. The intensity of the Jewish campaign against Germany was such that the Hitler government vowed that if the campaign did not stop, there would be a one-day boycott in Germany of Jewish-owned stores. Despite this, the hate campaign continued, forcing Germany to take defensive measures that created a situation wherein the Jews of Germany became increasingly marginalized. The truth about the Jewish war on Germany has been suppressed by most histories of the period.

Despite all this, the leaders of the Jewish community refused to relent. On March 27 there were simultaneous protest rallies at Madison Square Garden, in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland and 70 other locations. The New York rally was broadcast worldwide. The bottom line is that "the New Germany" was declared to be an enemy of Jewish interests and thus needed to be economically strangled. This was before Hitler decided to boycott Jewish goods.

It was in direct response to this that the German government announced a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany on April 1.
German Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels announced that if, after the one-day boycott, there were no further attacks on Germany, the boycott would be stopped. Hitler himself responded to the Jewish boycott and the threats in a speech on March 28 -- four days after the original Jewish declaration of war -- saying:

Now that the domestic enemies of the nation have been eliminated by the Volk itself, what we have long been waiting for will not come to pass.

The Communist and Marxist criminals and their Jewish-intellectual instigators, who, having made off with their capital stocks across the border in the nick of time, are now unfolding an unscrupulous, treasonous campaign of agitation against the German Volk as a whole from there....

Lies and slander of positively hair-raising perversity are being launched about Germany. Horror stories of dismembered Jewish corpses, gouged out eyes and hacked off hands are circulating for the purpose of defaming the German Volk in the world for the second time, just as they had succeeded in doing once before in 1914.


Thus, the fact -- one conveniently left out of nearly all history on the subject -- is that Hitler's March 28, 1933 boycott order was in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership just four days earlier. Today, Hitler's boycott order is described as a naked act of aggression, yet the full circumstances leading up to his order are seldom described in even the most ponderous and detailed histories of "the Holocaust".

Not even Saul Friedlander in his otherwise comprehensive overview of German policy, Nazi Germany and the Jews, mentions the fact that the Jewish declaration of war and boycott preceded Hitler's speech of March 28, 1933. Discerning readers would be wise to ask why Friedlander felt this item of history so irrelevant.

The simple fact is that it was organized Jewry as a political entity -- and not even the German Jewish community per se -- that actually initiated the first shot in the war with Germany.

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Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!
Placard text:
"Germans! Defend yourselves!
Don't shop at Jewish stores!"
Photo not part of original TBR article - added by The Scriptorium.


Germany's response was a defensive -- not an offensive -- measure. Were that fact widely known today, it would cast new light on the subsequent events that ultimately led to the world-wide conflagration that followed.

To understand Hitler's reaction to the Jewish declaration of war, it is vital to understand the critical state of the German economy at the time. In 1933, the German economy was in a shambles. Some 3 million Germans were on public assistance with a total of 6 million unemployed. Hyper-inflation had destroyed the economic vitality of the German nation. Furthermore, the anti-German propaganda pouring out of the global press strengthened the resolve of Germany's enemies, especially the Poles and their hawkish military high command.

The Jewish leaders were not bluffing. The boycott was an act of war not solely in metaphor: it was a means, well crafted, to destroy Germany as a political, social and economic entity. The long term purpose of the Jewish boycott against Germany was to bankrupt her with respect to the reparation payments imposed on Germany after World War I and to keep Germany demilitarized and vulnerable.

The boycott, in fact, was quite crippling to Germany. Jewish scholars such as Edwin Black have reported that, in response to the boycott, German exports were cut by 10 percent, and that many were demanding seizing German assets in foreign countries (Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement -- The Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, New York, 1984).

The attacks on Germany did not cease. The worldwide Jewish leadership became ever the more belligerent and worked itself into a frenzy. An International Jewish Boycott Conference was held in Amsterdam to coordinate the ongoing boycott campaign. It was held under the auspices of the self-styled World Jewish Economic Federation, of which famous New York City attorney and longtime political power broker, Samuel Untermyer, was elected president.

Upon returning to the United States in the wake of the conference, Untermyer delivered a speech over WABC Radio (New York), a transcript of which was printed in The New York Times on August 7, 1933.

Untermyer's inflammatory oratory called for a "sacred war" against Germany, making the flat-out allegation that Germany was engaged in a plan to "exterminate the Jews." He said (in part):

...Germany [has] been converted from a nation of culture into a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts.

We owe it not only to our persecuted brethren but to the entire world to now strike in self-defense a blow that will free humanity from a repetition of this incredible outrage....

Now or never must all the nations of the earth make common cause against the... slaughter, starvation and annihilation... fiendish torture, cruelty and persecution that are being inflicted day by day upon these men, women and children....

When the tale is told... the world will confront a picture so fearful in its barbarous cruelty that the hell of war and the alleged Belgian atrocities pale into insignificance as compared to this devilishly, deliberately, cold-bloodedly planned and already partially executed campaign for the extermination of a proud, gentle, loyal, law-abiding people...

The Jews are the aristocrats of the world. From time immemorial they have been persecuted and have seen their persecutors come and go. They alone have survived. And so will history repeat itself, but that furnishes no reason why we should permit this reversion of a once great nation to the Dark Ages or fail to rescue these 600,000 human souls from the tortures of hell....

...What we are proposing and have already gone far toward doing, is to prosecute a purely defensive economic boycott that will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends.

...We propose to and are organizing world opinion to express itself in the only way Germany can be made to understand....


Untermyer then proceeded to provide his listeners with a wholly fraudulent history of the circumstances of the German boycott and how it originated. He also proclaimed that the Germans were bent on a plan to "exterminate the Jews":

The Hitler regime originated and are fiendishly prosecuting their boycott to exterminate the Jews by placarding Jewish shops, warning Germans against dealing with them, by imprisoning Jewish shopkeepers and parading them through the streets by the hundreds under guard of Nazi troops for the sole crime of being Jews, by ejecting them from the learned professions in which many of them had attained eminence, by excluding their children from the schools, their men from the labor unions, closing against them every avenue of livelihood, locking them in vile concentration camps and starving and torturing them without cause and resorting to every other conceivable form of torture, inhuman beyond conception, until suicide has become their only means of escape, and all solely because they are or their remote ancestors were Jews, and all with the avowed object of exterminating them.


Untermyer concluded his largely fantastic and hysterical address by declaring that with the support of "Christian friends... we will drive the last nail in the coffin of bigotry and fanaticism...."

The Biggest Secret of WWII? Why Germany Began Rounding Up Jews and Deporting Them to the East

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Chaim Weizmann

Why did the Germans begin rounding up the Jews and interning them in the concentration camps to begin with? Contrary to popular myth, the Jews remained "free" inside Germany -- albeit subject to laws which did restrict certain of their privileges -- prior to the outbreak of World War II.

Yet, the other little-known fact is that just before the war began, the leadership of the world Jewish community formally declared war on Germany -- above and beyond the ongoing six-year-long economic boycott launched by the worldwide Jewish community when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933.

As a consequence of the formal declaration of war, the German authorities thus deemed Jews to be potential enemy agents.

Here's the story behind the story: Chaim Weizmann (above), president of both the international "Jewish Agency" and of the World Zionist Organization (and later Israel's first president), told British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a letter published in The London Times on September 6, 1939 that:

I wish to confirm, in the most explicit manner, the declarations which I and my colleagues have made during the last month, and especially in the last week, that the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies. Our urgent desire is to give effect to these declarations [against Germany].

We wish to do so in a way entirely consonant with the general scheme of British action, and therefore would place ourselves, in matters big and small, under the coordinating direction of His Majesty's Government. The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources, etc.


[Emphasis in red added by The Scriptorium.]


That his allegations against Germany were made long before even Jewish historians today claim there were any gas chambers or even a plan to "exterminate" the Jews, displays the nature of the propaganda campaign confronting Germany.

However, during this same period there were some unusual developments at work: The spring of 1933 also witnessed the beginning of a period of private cooperation between the German government and the Zionist movement in Germany and Palestine (and actually worldwide) to increase the flow of German-Jewish immigrants and capital to Palestine.

The modern-day supporters of Zionist Israel and many historians have succeeded in keeping this Nazi-Zionist pact a secret to the general public for decades and while most Americans have no concept of the possibility that there could have been outright collaboration between the Nazi leadership and the founders of what became the state of Israel, the truth has begun to emerge.

Dissident Jewish writer Lenni Brennar's [Brenner] Zionism In the Age of the Dictators, published by a small press and not given the publicity it deserves by the so-called "mainstream" media (which is otherwise obsessed with the Holocaust era), was perhaps the first major endeavor in this realm.

In response to Brennar [Brenner] and others, the Zionist reaction has usually consisted of declarations that their collaboration with Nazi Germany was undertaken solely to save the lives of Jews. But the collaboration was all the more remarkable because it took place at a time when many Jews and Jewish organizations demanded a boycott of Germany.

To the Zionist leaders, Hitler's assumption of power held out the possibility of a flow of immigrants to Palestine. Previously, the majority of German Jews, who identified themselves as Germans, had little sympathy with the Zionist cause of promoting the ingathering of world Jewry to Palestine. But the Zionists saw that only the anti-Semitic Hitler was likely to push the anti-Zionist German Jews into the arms of Zionism.

For all the modern-day wailing by worldwide supporters of Israel (not to mention the Israelis themselves) about "the Holocaust", they neglect to mention that making the situation in Germany as uncomfortable for the Jews as possible -- in cooperation with German National Socialism -- was part of the plan.

Note to readers of this article who can also read German: a booklet discussing the emigration of Jews from Third Reich Germany, and the Transfer Agreement that facilitated their emigration, may be found here!


This was the genesis of the so-called Transfer Agreement, the agreement between Zionist Jews and the National Socialist government to transfer German Jewry to Palestine.

According to Jewish historian Walter Laqueur and many others, German Jews were far from convinced that immigration to Palestine was the answer. Furthermore, although the majority of German Jews refused to consider the Zionists as their political leaders, it is clear that Hitler protected and cooperated with the Zionists for the purposes of implementing the final solution: the mass transfer of Jews to the Middle East.

Edwin Black, in his massive tome The Transfer Agreement (Macmillan, 1984), stated that although most Jews did not want to flee to Palestine at all, due to the Zionist movement's influence within Nazi Germany a Jew's best chance of getting out of Germany was by emigrating to Palestine. In other words, the Transfer Agreement itself mandated that Jewish capital could only go to Palestine.

Thus, according to the Zionists, a Jew could leave Germany only if he went to the Levant.

The primary difficulty with the Transfer Agreement (or even the idea of such an agreement) was that the English [!!!; Scriptorium] were demanding, as a condition of immigration, that each immigrant pay 1,000 pounds sterling upon arrival in Haifa or elsewhere. The difficulty was that such hard currency was nearly impossible to come by in a cash-strapped and radically inflationary Germany. This was the main idea behind the final Transfer Agreement. Laqueur writes:

A large German bank would freeze funds paid in by immigrants in blocked accounts for German exporters, while a bank in Palestine would control the sale of German goods to Palestine, thereby providing the immigrants with the necessary foreign currency on the spot. Sam Cohen, co-owner of Hanoaiah Ltd. and initiator of the transfer endeavors, was however subjected to long-lasting objections from his own people and finally had to concede that such a transfer agreement could only be concluded on a much higher level with a bank of its own rather than that of a private company. The renowned Anglo-Palestine Bank in London would be included in this transfer deal and create a trust company for [this] purpose.


Of course, this is of major historical importance in dealing with the relationship between Zionism and National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. The relationship was not one merely of mutual interest and political favoritism on the part of Hitler, but a close financial relationship with German banking families and financial institutions as well. Black writes:

It was one thing for the Zionists to subvert the anti-Nazi boycott. Zionism needed to transfer out the capital of German Jews, and merchandise was the only available medium. But soon Zionist leaders understood that the success of the future Jewish Palestinian economy would be inextricably bound up with the survival of the Nazi economy. So the Zionist leadership was compelled to go further. The German economy would have to be safeguarded, stabilized, and if necessary reinforced. Hence, the Nazi party and the Zionist organizers shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany.


Thus one sees a radical fissure in world Jewry around 1933 and beyond. There were, first, the non-Zionist Jews (specifically the World Jewish Congress founded in 1933), who, on the one hand, demanded the boycott and eventual destruction of Germany. Black notes that many of these people were not just in New York and Amsterdam, but a major source for this also came from Palestine proper.

On the other hand, one can see the judicious use of such feelings by the Zionists for the sake of eventual resettlement in Palestine. In other words, it can be said (and Black does hint at this) that Zionism believed that, since Jews would be moving to the Levant, capital flight would be necessary for any new economy to function.

The result was the understanding that Zionism would have to ally itself with National Socialism, so that the German government would not impede the flow of Jewish capital out of the country.

It served the Zionist interests at the time that Jews be loud in their denunciations of German practices against the Jews to scare them into the Levant, but, on the other hand, Laqueur states that "The Zionists became motivated not to jeopardize the German economy or currency." In other words, the Zionist leadership of the Jewish Diaspora was one of subterfuge and underhandedness, with only the advent of German hostility towards Jewry convincing the world's Jews that immigration was the only escape.

An End to the Experiment

On the fifth night, some visiting parents asked me to contact a lawyer in order to get their son out of prison. They said a Catholic priest had called to tell them they should get a lawyer or public defender if they wanted to bail their son out! I called the lawyer as requested, and he came the next day to interview the prisoners with a standard set of legal questions, even though he, too, knew it was just an experiment.

At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation -- a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the "good" guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work.

I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.

Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other's shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!" Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended.

And so, after only six days, our planned two-week prison simulation was called off.

-- The Stanford Prison Experiment, by Philip Zimbardo


The fact is that the ultimate establishment of the state of Israel was based on fraud. The Zionists did not represent anything more than a small minority of German Jews in 1933.

On the one hand, the Zionist fathers of Israel wanted loud denunciations of Germany's "cruelties" to the world's Jews while at the same time demanding moderation so that the National Socialist government would remain stable, financially and politically. Thus Zionism boycotted the boycott.

For all intents and purposes, the National Socialist government was the best thing to happen to Zionism in its history, for it "proved" to many Jews that Europeans were irredeemably anti-Jewish and that Palestine was the only answer: Zionism came to represent the overwhelming majority of Jews solely by trickery and cooperation with Adolf Hitler.

For the Zionists, both the denunciations of German policies towards Jews (to keep Jews frightened), plus the reinvigoration of the German economy (for the sake of final resettlement) was imperative for the Zionist movement. Ironically, today the Zionist leaders of Israel complain bitterly about the horrific and inhuman regime of the National Socialists. So the fraud continues.
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Tue Apr 24, 2018 7:53 pm

Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal [EXCERPT]
by Lenni Brenner

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5. GERMAN ZIONISM OFFERS TO COLLABORATE WITH NAZISM

Werner Senator, a leading German Zionist, once remarked that Zionism, for all its world Jewish nationalism, always politically assimilates to the countries within which it operates. No better proof of his remark exists than the political adaptation of the ZVfD to the theories and policies of the new Nazi regime. Believing that the ideological similarities between the two movements -- their contempt for liberalism, their common volkish racism and, of course, their mutual conviction that Germany could never be the homeland of its Jews -- could induce the Nazis to support them, the ZVfD solicited the patronage of Adolf Hitler, not once but repeatedly, after 1933.

The goal of the ZVfD became an 'orderly retreat', that is, Nazi backing for emigration of at least the younger generation of Jews to Palestine, and they immediately sought contact with elements in the Nazi apparatus whom they thought would be interested in such an arrangement on the basis of a volkish appreciation of Zionism. Kurt Tuchler, a member of the ZVfD Executive, persuaded Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein of the SS to write a pro-Zionist piece for the Nazi press. The Baron agreed on the condition that he visited Palestine first, and two months after Hitler came to power the two men and their wives went to Palestine; von Mildenstein stayed there for six months before he returned to write his articles. [86]

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Baron Leopold von Mildenstein, Gerda Tuchler, Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein, and Dr. Kurt Tuchler

-- The Flat, written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger


Nazi anti-Jewish policy functioned on two primary levels: legal measures to expel the Jews from society and strip them of their rights and property while simultaneously engaging in campaigns of incitement, abuse, terror and violence of varying proportions. There was one goal: to make the Jews leave Germany.

On March 9, 1933, several weeks after Hitler assumed power, organized attacks on Jews broke out across Germany. Two weeks later, the Dachau concentration camp, situated near Munich, opened. Dachau became a place of internment for Communists, Socialists, German liberals and anyone considered an enemy of the Reich. It became the model for the network of concentration camps that would be established later by the Nazis. Within a few months, democracy was obliterated in Germany, and the country became a centralized, single-party police state.

On April 1, 1933, a general boycott against German Jews was declared, in which SA members stood outside Jewish-owned stores and businesses in order to prevent customers from entering.

Approximately one week later, a law concerning the rehabilitation of the professional civil service was passed. The purpose of the legislation was to purge the civil service of officials of Jewish origin and those deemed disloyal to the regime. It was the first racial law that attempted to isolate Jews and oust them from German life. The first laws banished Jews from the civil service, judicial system, public medicine, and the German army (then being reorganized). Ceremonial public book burnings took place throughout Germany. Many books were torched solely because their authors were Jews. The exclusion of Jews from German cultural life was highly visible, ousting their considerable contribution to the German press, literature, theater, and music.


-- Rise of the Nazis and Beginning of Persecution, by Yad Vashem


Contact with a central figure in the new government came in March 1933, when Hermann Goering summoned the leaders of the major Jewish organisations. In early March, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Steurmer, had declared that, as of 1 April, all Jewish stores and professionals would be boycotted; however, this campaign ran into an immediate snag. Hitler's capitalist backers were extremely worried by the announcement by rabbi Wise of a planned counter-demonstration to be held in New York on 27 March, if the Nazis went ahead with their boycott. Jews were prominent throughout the retail trade both in American and Europe and, fearing retaliation against their own companies, Hitler's wealthy patrons urged him to call off the action. But the Nazis could hardly do that without losing face, and they decided to use German Jewry to head off Wise; thus Hermann Goering called in the Jewish leaders.

German Zionism's influence in Weimar did not merit its leaders’ participation, but because they conceived themselves as the only natural negotiating partner with the Nazis, they secured a late invitation. Martin Rosenbluth, a leading Zionist, later told of the incident in his post-war autobiography, Go Forth and Serve. Four Jews saw Goering: Julius Brodnitz for the CV, Heinrich Stahl for the Berlin Jewish community, Max Naumann, a pro-Nazi fanatic from the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (VnJ), and Blumenfeld for the Zionists. Goering launched into a tirade: the foreign press was lying about atrocities against Jews; unless the lies stopped, he could not vouch for the safety of German Jewry. Most important, the New York rally had to be called off: 'Dr Wise is one of our most dangerous and unscrupulous enemies.' [87] A delegation was to go to London to contact world Jewry.

The assimilationists declined, claiming that as Germans they had no influence with foreign Jews. This was false, but they hardly wanted to assist in their own destruction. Only Blumenfeld volunteered, but insisted he be allowed to speak truthfully about the Nazi treatment of Jews. Goering did not care what was said to get the rally called off; perhaps a description of the grim situation might make foreign Jews halt for fear of provoking worse. He did not care who went or what arguments were used as long as the deputation agreed to 'report regularly to the German embassy'. [88]

The ZVfD finally sent Martin Rosenbluth and Richard Lichtheim. Fearing exclusive responsibility for the outcome of their strange mission, they prevailed upon the CV to let them take along Dr Ludwig Tietz. Although not a Zionist personally, the wealthy businessman was 'a good friend of ours'. [89] The trio arrived in London on 27 March and immediately met forty Jewish leaders at a meeting chaired by Nahum Sokolow, then President of the WZO. They later met a battery of British officials. The delegates saw two tasks before them: to use the severity of the situation to promote Palestine as 'the logical place of refuge', and to head off all anti-Nazi efforts abroad. They called Wise in New York. Rosenbluth described the incident thus in his memoirs:

Mindful of Goering's charges… we conveyed the message… Getting the cryptic rest of our message across to him was somewhat more difficult, since it was necessary to speak in obscure terms in order to confound any possible monitors. Subsequent events proved we had made clear our hidden plea, and that Dr Wise had understood we wanted him to stand firm and under no circumstances cancel the meeting. [90]


There is no evidence that any effort was made to signal Wise to this effect. Through the research of an Israeli scholar, Shaul Esh, it is now known that the deputation tried to head off demonstrations in New York and Palestine. According to Esh, later that evening they sent cables:

not in their own name, but in the name of the Zionist Executive in London. The telegrams requested that the recipients immediately dispatch to the Chancellery of the Third Reich declarations to the effect that they do not condone an organised anti-German boycott… the Zionist Executive in London learned of this several hours later, they sent another cable to Jerusalem to delay the dispatch of an official declaration to Hitler. [91]


Later, in his own autobiography, Challenging Years, Stephen Wise mentioned receiving their cable, but he did not record any cryptic message from the delegation. [92] It is reasonable to assume that he would have recorded it, if he had thought any such attempt was made. In reality, Wise repeatedly raged at the ZVfD in the following years for persistently opposing every attempt by foreign Jews to struggle against the Hitler regime.

Dr. Ludwig Tietz, brilliant young leader of German Jewry who has been in the forefront in all efforts of German Jews in their own behalf since the Hitler regime began a drive on Jews in the Reich, died here suddenly this morning at the age of 37. Death was due to a hemorrhage. Dr. Tietz was a member of the executive board of the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith and was executive director of the Central Committee of German Jews for Relief and Rehabilitation, the organization formed to put German Jewish relief work on a nation-wide, coordinated basis and to supervise the work within the country.

Although he was a well-known medical specialist, Dr. Tietz had practically given up his profession to devote himself entirely to Jewish social work without remuneration. After the Hitler revolution, he became one of the most popular Jewish figures in Germany and was highly esteemed by British and American leaders in relief activities who had come into close contact with him.

Dr. Tietz was one of the twenty Jewish leaders attending the conference to plan relief measures for destitute German Jews in Berlin on June 20 who were arrested by Nazi storm troopers and mishandled by them. Political police secured the release of all the men but only after some of them had been painfully injured.

Dr. Tietz had been particularly elated a few hours before his death by his success in having won from the Nazi government yesterday some measure of recognition for the Jewish Youth Association of which he was president. His death came as a severe shock to the Jews in Germany.

-- Dr. L. Tietz Dead at 37, Leader in Social Work Among German Jews, by Jewish Telegraphic Agency


The London proceedings were typical of all further ZVfD behaviour. In 1937, after leaving Berlin for America, rabbi Joachim Prinz wrote of his experiences in Germany and alluded to a memorandum which, it is now known, was sent to the Nazi Party by the ZVfD on 21 June 1933. Prinz's article candidly describes the Zionist mood in the first months of 1933:

Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealings with the Nazi government. We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews, at which -- after the riots and atrocities of the revolution had passed -- the new status of German Jewry could be considered. The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!… In a statement notable for its pride and dignity, we called for a conference. [93]


The document remained buried until 1962, when it was finally printed, in German, in Israel. 'Pride' and 'dignity' are words open to interpretation but, it is safe to say, there was not one word that could be so construed today. This extraordinary memorandum demands extensive quotation. The Nazis were asked, very politely:

May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence… Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one's own tradition…

… an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry… a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life…

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible… Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group…

… fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one's own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence. The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development.

Thus, a self-conscious Jewry here described, in whose name we speak, can find a place in the structure of the German state, because it is inwardly unembarrassed, free from the resentment which assimilated Jews must feel at the determination that they belong to Jewry, to the Jewish race and past. We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state…

For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people.

The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda -- such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways -- is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build… Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state. [94]


This document, a treason to the Jews of Germany, was written in standard Zionist cliches: 'abnormal occupational pattern', 'rootless intellectuals greatly in need of moral regeneration', etc. In it the German Zionists offered calculated collaboration between Zionism and Nazism, hallowed by the goal of a Jewish state: we shall wage no battle against thee, only against those that would resist thee.

Obsessed with their strange mission, the ZVfD's leaders lost all sense of international Jewish perspective and even tried to get the WZO to call off its World Congress, scheduled for August 1933. They sent their world leadership a letter: 'It will have to express sharp protests,' their lives could be at stake at a time when 'our legal existence has enabled us to organise thousands and to transfer large sums of money to Palestine’. [95] The Congress did take place as we shall see, but the ZVfD had nothing to worry about as the Nazis chose to use the occasion to announce that they had made a deal with world Zionism.

'Seeking its own National Idealism in the Nazi Spirit'

The Jewish public knew nothing about von Mildenstein's journey to Palestine in the company of a member of the Zionist Executive, nor about Rosenbluth and Lichtheim’s trip to London; nor did they know about the memorandum, nor the request to call off the Zionist Congress. However, they could not miss what was appearing in the Rundschau, where assimilationalist German Jewry was roundly attacked. The CV complained bitterly of Zionist 'siegesfanfaren' as the Rundschau rushed to condemn the guilty Jews. [96] The editor, Robert Weltsch, took the occasion of the 1 April boycott to assail the Jews of Germany in an editorial: 'Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride’:

At times of crisis throughout its history, the Jewish people has faced the question of its own guilt. Our most important prayer says, 'We were expelled from our country because of our sins'… Jewry bears a great guilt because it failed to heed Theodor Herzl's call… Because the Jews did not display their Jewishness with pride, because they wanted to shirk the Jewish question, they must share the blame for the degradation of Jewry. [97]


Even as the Nazis were in the process of throwing the left into concentration camps, Weltsch attacked the left-wing Jewish journalists:

If today the National Socialist and German patriotic newspapers frequently refer to the type of the Jewish scribbler and the so-called Jewish press… it must be pointed out… Upright Jews have always been indignant at the raillery and the caricature directed by Jewish buffoons against Jews to the same extent, or even a greater extent, than they aimed them at Germans and others. [98]


Image
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, speaks at a rally in favor of the boycott of Jewish-owned shops. Berlin, Germany, April 1, 1933.
— National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.


Although the left-wing press had been under attack from the day the Nazis came to power, the Jewish newspapers were still legal. Naturally they were censored; if a journal printed something untoward, it would be closed down, temporarily at least. However, the Nazis did not force the Zionists to denounce their fellow Jews.

After the Holocaust Weltsch was quite contrite about the editorial, saying that he should have told the Jews to flee for their lives, but he never claimed that the Nazis made him write the piece. Weltsch was not a Fascist, but he was too much the Zionist sectarian to have really thought through his ideas about the world at large. As were most of the leaders of the ZVfD, he was quite convinced that 'egotistical liberalism’ and parliamentary democracy were dead at least in Germany. Internationally, they were still for the British in Palestine, but the Rundschau's correspondent in Italy, Kurt Kornicker, was quite openly pro-Fascist. [99] The ZVfD’s leaders became convinced that Fascism was the wave of the future, certainly in Central Europe, and within that framework they counterposed the 'good' Fascism of Mussolini to the 'excesses' of Hitlerism, which they thought would diminish, with their assistance, as time went by.

Racism was now triumphant and the ZVfD ran with the winner. The talk of blut began to take hold with a statement by Blumenfeld in April 1933 that the Jews had previously been masking their natural blood-sanctioned apartness from the real Germans, but it reached Wagnerian proportions in the 4 August Rundschau with a long essay, 'Rasse als Kulturfaktor', which pondered on the intellectual implications for Jews of the Nazi victory. It argued that Jews should not merely accept silently the dictates of their new masters; they, too, had to realise that race separation was wholly to the good:

We who live here as a 'foreign race' have to respect racial consciousness and the racial interest of the German people absolutely. This however does not preclude a peaceful living together of people of different racial membership. The smaller the possibility of an undesirable mixture, so much less is there need for 'racial protection'… There are differentiations that in the last analysis have their root in ancestry. Only rationalist newspapers who have lost feeling for the deeper reasons and profundities of the soul, and for the origins of communal consciousness, could put aside ancestry as simply in the realm of 'natural history'.


In the past, the paper continued, it had been hard to get Jews to have an objective evaluation of racism. But now was the time, indeed past time, for a bit of 'quiet evaluation': 'Race is undoubtedly a very important, yes, decisive momentum. Out of "blood and soil" really is determined the being of a people and their achievements.' Jews would have to make good for 'the last generations when Jewish racial consciousness was largely neglected. The article warned against 'bagatellised' race, and also against the CV, who were beginning to abandon their traditional assimilationist ideology in the wake of the disaster, but 'without changing basically'.

Challenging the racist bona fides of their rivals was not enough. To prove that the 'Jewish Renaissance Movement' had always been racist, the Rundschau reprinted two pre-1914 articles under the title 'Voices of the Blood'. 'Das singende Blut' by Stefan Zweig and ‘Lied des Blutes' by Hugo Salus rhapsodised about how 'the modern Jew… recognizes his Jewishness… through an inner experience which teaches him the special language of his blood in a mystical manner'.

But although these mimics of the Nazis were confirmed racists, they were not chauvinists. They did not think they were racially superior to the Arabs. The Zionists were even going to uplift their benighted Semitic cousins. Their volkism was only a warped answer to their own 'personality problem', as they put it: it allowed them to reconcile themselves to the existence of anti-Semitism in Germany without fighting it. They hastened to reassure their readers that many modern nations and states were racially mixed and yet the races could live in harmony. Jews were warned: now that they were to become racists, they should not become chauvinists: 'above race is humanity'. [100]

Although racism permeated through the ZVfD's literature, foreign Jewish observers always saw Joachim Prinz as its most strident propagandist. A Social Democratic voter before 1933, Prinz became rabidly volkist in the first years of the Third Reich. Some of the violent hostility towards Jews in his book Wir Juden could have been inserted directly into the Nazis' own propaganda. To Prinz the Jew was made up of 'misplacement, of queerness, of exhibitionism, inferiority, arrogance, self-deceit, sophisticated love of truth, hate, sickly, patriotism and rootless cosmopolitanism… a psychopathological arsenal of rare abundance’. [101]

Prinz was deeply contemptuous of the rational and liberal traditions which had been the common basis of all progressive thought since the American Revolution. For him the harm that liberalism had done was compensated for only by the fact that it was dying:

Parliament and democracy are increasingly shattered. The exaggerated harmful emphasis on the value of the individual is recognised to be mistaken; the concept and reality of the nation and the volk is gaining, to our happiness, more and more ground. [102]


Liberalism still permeates our minds and affects our attitude towards much of life....For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite....By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos....In religion, Liberalism may be characterised as a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and with nowhere to go.

-- The Idea of a Christian Society, by T.S. Eliot


Prinz believed that an accommodation between Nazis and Jews was possible, but only on the basis of a Zionist-Nazi accord: 'A state which is constructed on the principle of the purity of nation and race can only have respect for those Jews who see themselves in the same way. [103]

After he came to the United States Prinz realised that nothing he had been saying in Germany sounded rational in a democratic context and he abandoned his bizarre notions, further proof that the German Zionists had simply adapted ideologically to Nazism. [104] But perhaps the best illustration of the Zionists' Nazification was the curious statement by one of the Rundschau's editors, Arnold Zweig, made in his Insulted and Exiled, naturally written abroad and published in 1937:

of all the newspapers published in German, the most independent, the most courageous, and the ablest was the Judische Rundschau, the official organ of the Zionist Union of Germany. Although it sometimes went too far in its approval of the Nationalist State (seeking its own national idealism in the Nazi spirit), there, nevertheless, issued from it a stream of energy, tranquility, warmth, and confidence of which the German Jews and Jewry the world over stood in urgent need. [105]


'The Exclusive Control of German Jewish Life'

Not even the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 challenged the basic German Zionist belief in an ultimate modus vivendi with the Nazis. The HeChalutz (Pioneer) Centre, in charge of training youth for the kibbutz movement, concluded that the promulgation of laws making mixed marriage a crime was a suitable occasion for a new approach to the regime. The Pioneers came up with a plan for the emigration of the entire Jewish community over a period of 15-25 years. Abraham Margaliot, a scholar at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Institute, has explained the thinking at the Centre in that fateful year:

The HeChalutz leaders assumed that this underlying goal would prove so alluring to the German authorities that they would agree to extend aid towards further emigration abroad by liberalizing the laws governing the transfer of foreign currency abroad, by providing opportunities for vocational training and by 'political means'. [106]


The Rundschau published excerpts from a speech in which Hitler announced that his government still hoped to find a basis for 'a better attitude towards the Jews'. [107] The paper published a statement by A.I. Brandt, the head of the Nazis' press association, which informed a doubtlessly somewhat surprised world that the laws were:

both beneficial and regenerative for Judaism as well. By giving the Jewish minority an opportunity to lead its own life and assuring governmental support for this independent existence, Germany is helping Judaism to strengthen its national character and is making a contribution towards improving relations between the two peoples. [108]


The goal of the ZVfD became 'national autonomy'. They wanted Hitler to give Jews the right to an economic existence, protection from attacks on their honour, and training to prepare them for migration. The ZVfD became absorbed in trying to utilise the segregated Jewish institutions to develop a Jewish national spirit. The tighter the Nazis turned the screw on the Jews, the more convinced they became that a deal with the Nazis was possible. After all, they reasoned, the more the Nazis excluded the Jews from every aspect of German life, the more they would have need of Zionism to help them get rid of the Jews. By 15 January 1936 the Palestine Post had to make the startling report that: 'A bold demand that the German Zionist Federation be given recognition by the government as the only instrument for the exclusive control of German Jewish life was made by the executive of that body in a proclamation today.’ [109]

German Zionist hopes for an arrangement faded only in the face of the ever-mounting intimidation and terror. Even then there was no sign of any attempts at anti-Nazi activity on the part of the ZVfD leaders. Throughout the entire pre-war period there was only a tiny Zionist involvement in the anti-Nazi underground. Although the HeChalutz and Hashomer youth movements talked socialism, the Nazis were not concerned. Yechiel Greenberg of Hashomer admitted in 1938 that 'our socialism was considered merely a philosophy for export'. [110] But almost from the beginning of the dictatorship the underground KPD, always looking for new recruits, sent some of their Jewish cadre into the youth movements and, according to Arnold Paucker -- now the editor of London's Leo Baeck Institute Year Book -- some Zionist youth became involved with the resistance at least to the extent of some illegal postering in the early years of the regime. [111] How much of this was due to the influence of the Communist infiltrators, and how much was spontaneous is impossible to estimate. However, the Zionist bureaucracy vigorously attacked the KPD. [112] As in Italy, so in Germany: the Zionist leadership sought the support of the regime for Zionism and resisted Communism; in neither country could it be thought of as part of the anti-Fascist resistance.

The interrelationship between the ZVfD and the WZO will be described below. Suffice to say for now, that the WZO leaders approved of the general line of their German affiliate. However, within the ranks of the world movement there were many who refused to remain silent while their German branch not only accepted second-class citizenship as no more than the Jews had a right to expect but, even worse, denounced foreign Jews for boycotting Germany. Boris Smolar, the chief European correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Zionist wire service, spoke for all these when he wrote angrily, in 1935:

One can understand that a Jewish newspaper which appears in Germany may not be in a position fully to support the demands of World Jewry with regard to the full restoration of Jewish rights. This, however, doesn't justify any official organ to come out and practically agree to the anti-Jewish limitations which exist in Germany. This last is exactly what the Judische Rundschau has done. [113]


Prior to the Nazis, German Zionism was no more than an isolated bourgeois political cult. While the leftists were trying to fight the brownshirts in the streets, the Zionists were busy collecting money for trees in Palestine. Suddenly in 1933 this small group conceived of itself as properly anointed by history to negotiate secretly with the Nazis, to oppose the vast mass of world Jewry who wanted to resist Hitler, all in the hope of obtaining the support of the enemy of their people for the building of their state in Palestine. Smolar and their other Zionist critics saw the ZVfD as merely cowardly, but they were quite wrong. Any surrender theory explains nothing of the pre-Hitler evolution of Zionist racism, nor does it go far in explaining the WZO's endorsement of their stance. The truth is sadder than cowardice. The plain fact is that Germany's Zionists did not see themselves as surrendering but, rather, as would-be partners in a most statesmanlike pact. They were wholly deluded. No Jews triumphed over other Jews in Nazi Germany. No modus vivendi was ever even remotely possible between Hitler and the Jews. Once Hitler had triumphed inside Germany, the position of the Jews was hopeless; all that was left for them was to go into exile and continue the fight from there. Many did, but the Zionists continued to dream of winning the patronage of Adolf Hitler for themselves. They did not fight Hitler before he came to power, when there was still a chance to beat him, not out of any degree of cowardice, but out of their deepest conviction, which they had inherited from Herzl, that anti-Semitism could not be fought. Given their failure to resist during Weimar, and given their race theories, it was inevitable that they would end up as the ideological jackals of Nazism.

_______________

Notes:

86. Jacob Boas, 'A Nazi Travels to Palestine', History Today (London, January 1980), p. 33.

87. Martin Rosenbluth, Go Forth and Serve, p. 253.

88. Ibid., p. 254.

89. Ibid., p. 255.

90. Ibid., p. 258.

91. Yisrael Gutman (in debate), Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust, p. 116.

92. Stephen Wise, Challenging Years, p. 248.

93. Joachim Prinz, 'Zionism under the Nazi Government', Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p. 18.

94. Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-5

95. Ruth Bondy, The Emissary: A Life of Enzo Sereni, pp. 118-19.

96. Jacob Boas, 'The Jews of Germany: Self-Perception in the Nazi Era as Reflected in the German Jewish Press 1933-1938', PhD thesis, University of California, Riverside (1977), p. 135.

97. Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, p. 148.

98. Ibid., p.149.

99. Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p. 122.

100. 'Rasse als Kulturfaktor', Judische Rundschau (4 August 1933), p. 392.

101. Koppel Pinson, 'The Jewish Spirit in Nazi Germany', Menorah Journal (Autumn 1936), p. 235.

102. Uri Davis, Israel: Utopia Incorporated, p. 18.

103. Benyamin Matuvo, 'The Zionist Wish and the Nazi Deed', Issues (Winter 1966/7), p. 12.

104. Author's interview with Joachim Prinz (8 February 1981).

105. Arnold Zweig, Insulted and Exiled (London, 1937), p. 232.

106. Abraham Margaliot, 'The Reaction of the Jewish Public in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p. 89.

107. Ibid., p. 85.

108. Ibid., p. 86.

109. 'German Zionists Seek Recognition', Palestine Post (15 January 1936), p. 1.

110. Yechiel Greenberg, 'Hashomer Hatzair in Europe', Hashomer Hatzair (November 1937), p. 13.

111. Author's interview with Arnold Paucker, 28 October 1980.

112. Giora Josephthal, The Responsible Attitude, p. 88.

113. Boris Smolar, 'Zionist Overtures to Nazism', Jewish Daily Bulletin (8 March 1935), p. 2.
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Tue Apr 24, 2018 11:28 pm

How to Tell the Difference Between a Right and a Privilege
by AJ Oatsvall
Voices of Liberty
April 22, 2015 5:17 PM

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April 22, 2015—What is a Right? What is a privilege? What is the difference? These are obscure if not important questions. Something only an idle thinker would ever spend the time to ponder about, let alone write an essay or commentary on. Yet, no matter how trivial others might think it, such questions should be asked. And receive logical answers. To initiate this discussion on two similar yet altogether different concepts quotations and examples shall be given to distinguish and then explain them. A privilege is a special entitlement granted to a restricted group or person, either by birth or on a conditional basis, and can be revoked. By contrast, a right is irrevocable and inherently held by all human beings. It is self-evident and universal under the laws of nature. Though there is such a thing as legal rights, the focus of this discussion will be upon natural rights, that is, those rights which are inalienable.

What qualifies as a privilege? In a broad sense it refers to special powers or immunities held as a consequence of political power, social status, or wealth. While an individual has the right to own and live in a home, a state governor is entitled or given the privilege, to live in a specified residency during their term in office (i.e. a Governor’s Mansion). Such an example elevates that person, giving them status and power that others no better and no less do not get to experience unless they too are elected into that particular office. A privilege is something a particular individual or group are allowed to do which others do not have permission. Privileges are prominent everywhere within society. Participation in certain events or functions is meant exclusively for members or those who qualify, such as at golf clubs, places of employment, and business establishments. You have a right to use the bathroom, but you do not have permission to use this bathroom: paying customers only!

So what qualifies as a Right? To cite the American Declaration of Independence, all men (i.e. mankind) are Created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights such as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Originally, in place of “the Pursuit of Happiness”, it was suppose to be “property”. However, there was a conflict of interest during the drafting of the Declaration, and eventually with the Constitution, as some held that slaves were property and therefore men had a right to own other men, while others contested that no man – regardless of the color of their skin – should endure what the American Revolution would free the colonies from with regard to Parliament and the British Crown. For tyranny and slavery go hand in hand.

John Locke was the first to summarize the three most basic of natural rights. He stated that everyone is entitled to live once they are created; that everyone is entitled to do as they please so long as it does not conflict with the first right; and that everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it does not conflict with the first two rights. For in order to pursue happiness, one must be able to live how they choose and how best to sustain themselves and their families. Property, usually referring to land, housing and/or livestock, is the primary and most basic way of sustaining one’s self as well as a family. Happiness and property cannot be experienced or owned without life, or rather if one is not living. And life cannot be experienced to its fullest measure if others intrude upon or interfere with it; which is why life, property and happiness are so greatly dependent upon Liberty.

Liberty itself is dependent upon each individual to defend and maintain it. Which is why every person has a Right to Bear Arms, for which to defend their homes, their families and themselves from any enemy either foreign or domestic, or even a tyrannical government.
It cannot go without saying that the Founding Fathers of these united States of America purposefully included the Second Amendment immediately after the First to ensure that if no person could speak, or assemble peaceably, in protest against the government, then the only course of action would be to fight against it. For no other way can any person do anything if they cannot defend themselves when reprimanded by those who persecute them for their thoughts, their words, or their beliefs.

Ultimately, a right is the ability to decide for one’s self; to make a choice. Exercising a right is always a choice. Choosing to not exercise it is still a choice; a decision based upon thought. And that is the core of all inalienable rights. This is what fundamentally distinguishes a Right from a Privilege. Whereas a right is something that can be done because it originates commonly within all individuals, a privilege is something that cannot be done without permission. The Freedom of Speech, of Religion, of the Press, and to Peaceably Assemble are not privileges. No man, woman, or child need ask for permission to exercise these rights. Nor does any government, instituted by any collective body of men, has the right or authority to deny or circumvent such rights. Governments do not grant rights, since governments are a creation or coalition of men, but rather are meant to protect those rights for all people.
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 4:11 am

'Did Six Million Really Die?' Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988 [EXCERPT]
Edited by Barbara Kulaszka

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Christie next turned to the topic of Jewish responsibility for causing the Second World War. [Holocaust historian Raul] Hilberg testified that Did Six Million Really Die? seemed "to indicate that the Jews had a large, or perhaps even predominant role in causing the war to have been fought." Christie agreed and indicated he would be putting certain historical events to Hilberg and asking him if those did not support the very point made in the booklet.

Wasn't it true, asked Christie, that in 1933 Samuel Untermeyer made a statement that indicated that war must be waged on Germany?

"I may have seen it," said Hilberg, "but there were a number of speeches, and that's one of them. I don't recall it."

Hilberg refused to characterize Untermeyer as a fairly important person although he could not remember what his position was. "I don't even remember, but I do remember he was not an important personage."

Hilberg had not read the front page story on Untermeyer in the New York Times from August 7, 1933. "I have not read this particular article. I probably have seen a headline, but I have never read the entire text of this particular speech. I have testified before that there were numerous speeches. It is humanly impossible and fruitless to read all of the speeches of personages of importance or less important as they react to persecution in 1933. There were lots of speeches." (5-992 to 994)

You are not familiar with that speech at all?, asked Christie.

"No. I have never read it."

Does it come as a surprise to you, asked Christie, that speeches reported on the front page of the New York Times were saying that there was a campaign to exterminate Jews in 1933?

"...The New York Times, I must say, especially in those days -- and this I can testify to -- printed a lot of things," said Hilberg. "... It is common knowledge and it is obvious that there was no campaign to annihilate the Jews -- I have said this before -- in 1933. I have testified to and written about the evolution of this process. People were killed as Jews because they were Jews in 1933, but there was not in 1933 an immediate threat of total, physical annihilation of the Jewish population of Germany." (5-994)

So, asked Christie, if anybody said in 1933 that the Hitler regime originated to fiendishly exterminate the Jews by placarding Jewish shops, warning Germans against dealing with them, by imprisoning Jewish shopkeepers, that would be false news? "It is a form of rhetoric, since it was common knowledge to anybody what was happening. It was widely reported. People knew what was and what was not occurring, because it was at that moment a time of peace and there were correspondents in Germany reporting daily on the events there."

Much additional research needs to be done on many aspects of the U.S. response to the plight of German Jewry in the 1930s. I am pleased to note the significant work undertaken recently by professors Stephen Norwood and Laurel Leff. Norwood's studies of the academic community's response to Nazism break new, albeit painful, ground, as he has uncovered evidence that the leaders of America's elite universities sought to develop good relations with the Hitler regime. His lengthy essay on the relations between Harvard president James Conant and the Nazis, published in American Jewish History, is jarring.

Leff's most recent research found that very few U.S. newspaper publishers, and only one of the dozens of American journalism schools, were willing to hire German Jewish refugee journalists -- their own professional colleagues -- who were seeking positions in the United States in order to escape Hitler. (The school that was the exception hired just one refugee, as a researcher.) In response to Leff's findings, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies mobilized more than eighty journalism school deans and faculty to pressure the Newspaper Association of America to express regret for its predecessor's actions in the 1930s.

Although such expressions of remorse obviously cannot undo the damage done seven decades ago, they constitute an important step in the necessary process of our society coming to grips with the Allies' woeful response to the Holocaust and learning lessons from that dark experience.

Professor Leff has also recently authored the award-winning book, Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a masterful study of how the New York Times covered the Holocaust, and how that coverage affected public knowledge and the Roosevelt administration's response. It is the best book yet written on media coverage of the Holocaust and is likely to remain the gold standard for the topic for a long time to come.

Other U.S. publications of prominence, such as Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, and The Nation, merit scholarly scrutiny as well. Columnists and commentators should also be considered, ranging from Max Lerner, who actively promoted rescue, to Walter Lippmann, who refused to mention the plight of Europe's Jews in his columns.

-- The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, by David S. Wyman
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 4:26 am

The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 [EXCERPT]
by David S. Wyman © 1984 by David S. Wyman

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Part 1 of 2

PART TWO: "A PLAN TO EXTERMINATE ALL JEWS"

2. THE NEWS FILTERS OUT

The First Reports and Their Impact


We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster.

-- The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, by Mark Twain


The perpetrators of annihilation sought to conceal their operations. Even in secret communications, they used code words such as final solution (for systematic extermination) and special treatment (for gassing). They told Jews destined for the death factories in Poland that they were going to labor camps in the East. From time to time, the Germans forced Jews arriving at killing centers to write postdated cards assuring friends and relatives that they were working and living under reasonably good conditions. The efforts at secrecy, along with the location of the killing centers deep inside Nazi-held territory, kept clear information about the annihilation process from reaching the outside world for many months. [1]

But so extensive and sensational a campaign could obviously not be hidden indefinitely. Initially, reports on the massacres were few, like the first spits of snow that hint at what the winter air holds in store. With time, they increased in number and clarity. Even so, throughout the war the regular American newspapers published comparatively few of these disclosures and nearly always relegated them to the inner pages. [2]

Almost from the start, intimations of the bloody swaths cut by the Einsatzgruppen reached the American Jewish press via the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a news bureau with extensive foreign contacts. For instance, in July 1941 the New York Yiddish dailies revealed that hundreds of Jewish civilians had been massacred by Nazi soldiers in Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Lvov, and other places, all within the first thrust of the German attack on Russia. The same papers relayed an August broadcast from Moscow that made essentially the same charges. Several weeks later, to cite only one other example, they carried a summary from the Polish government-in-exile in London telling of the machine-gunning of thousands of Jews in eastern Poland and the Ukraine. In late October 1941, a similar report appeared in a small article inside the New York Times. The story, based on unspecified "reliable sources," drew on eyewitness accounts from Hungarian army officers who had returned to Hungary from Galicia. It included estimates of ten to fifteen thousand Jews killed in Galicia. [3]

During the first half of 1942, disclosures of slaughter on the Russian front continued to reach the United States, along with more and more reports of deportations of Jews to Poland from Slovakia, Germany, and elsewhere. These accounts, many of them taken from Swedish and other neutral newspapers, received wide coverage in the Yiddish and English-language Jewish press and occasionally appeared in major American newspapers. [4]

An extremely trustworthy source of information, used by the New York Times as well as by several Jewish publications, was a New York press conference held by S. Bertrand Jacobson in mid-March 1942. Jacobson was back from Budapest after two years as chief representative in eastern Europe for the relief activities of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He based much of his report on eyewitness statements. Estimating that the Nazis had already massacred 240,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone, Jacobson stated that the killing in eastern Europe was continuing in full fury. Among the most horrifying revelations to appear in the United States until that time (but omitted from the Times's account) was a description by a Hungarian soldier who had seen a vast burial site near Kiev. Seven thousand Jews, some shot dead but others wounded and still alive, had been thrown into the shallow grave and covered thinly with dirt. Burned into the soldier's memory was the sight of that field, "heaving like a living sea." [5]

In discussing the despair that enveloped East European Jews, Jacobson noted that the Jews of Slovakia had already been crowded into concentration centers, most likely a harbinger of wholesale deportation to Poland. In fact, two weeks after he spoke, the deportations began. By June 1942, this forced evacuation would carry away 52,000 of Slovakia's 90,000 Jews. Most went to Auschwitz. A terse message in March from the Slovakian capital to an American relief agency summarized the situation from another perspective: "Bratislava will require no matzoth for Passover this year." [6]

On May 18, the New York Times published a report by Glen Stadler, a UP correspondent caught in Germany when the United States entered the war. In Lisbon with a group of American citizens who had been exchanged for Axis nationals, Stadler revealed reports that German gunners had killed more than 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, nearly that many in Poland, and over twice as many in western Russia. [7]

Sometime that same May, the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland compiled a summary of verified massacres and succeeded in transmitting it, along with an anguished plea for action, to the Polish government in London. The persistence of the two Jewish members of the Polish National Council in London -- Szmul Zygielbojm, of the Bund, and Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, of the Zionist group -- forced British and American government officials and news media to take notice. The Bund report became the decisive factor in the first breakthrough of extermination news. [8]

In their message, the Jews in Poland traced the path of murder through their country, city by city, region by region, month by month. They described the Chelmno killing center, including the gas vans: "For gassing a special vehicle (gas chamber) was used in which 90 people were loaded at a time.... On the average, 1,000 people were gassed every day." They estimated the number of Polish Jewish victims to be 700,000 already. Their conclusions: Germany had set out to "annihilate all the Jews in Europe" and millions of Polish Jews faced imminent death. To save the remaining Polish Jews, they called on the London Polish government to press the Allies for a policy of immediate retaliation against German citizens living in their countries. [9]

One of the very earliest rescue proposals, the retaliation entreaty seemed plausible to the desperate and despairing Jews in Poland. But it was not feasible. The Germans would have responded with counter-threats against Allied nationals under their control. Furthermore, even had the plan offered some hope of effectiveness, it is inconceivable that the American and British legal systems could have sanctioned the execution of individuals who were not themselves involved in Nazi crimes. [10]


On June 2, shortly after the Bund report reached England, the BBC broadcast its essence, including the estimate of 700,000 Jews killed. But the broadcast did not emphasize the conclusion that an extermination program was under way. A week afterward, the Polish National Council officially informed the Allied governments of the report's contents. On June 25, Zygielbojm released the full document to the press and on the following day broadcast a summary over the BBC. As the month ended, the British section of the World Jewish Congress held a press conference in London to which Schwarzbart brought further information on Jewish deaths. He also emphasized the impending extermination of all the European Jews. These efforts brought no reaction from the Allied governments, so the Polish National Council, on July 8, repeated its earlier notice to the Allies and added that it had new evidence of planned destruction of masses of Poles, both Jews and non-Jews. [11]

As the Allied governments marked time, newspapers slowly began to publish the information. Indicative of the early confusion was a UP report from London on June 1. In striking contrast to the figure of 700,000 slain Polish Jews that the BBC would broadcast the next day, it declared that the Nazis had killed 200,000 Jews in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic states. The Seattle Times chose this report for its top story on June 1; the paper's main headline read, "JEWS SLAIN TOTAL 200,000!" (It was one of the very few times during World War II when a Holocaust event received a front-page headline in an American metropolitan daily.) [12]

Probably the first American newspaper to carry information on the Bund report was the Boston Globe, in its morning edition of June 26. Relegated to the bottom of page 12, the Globe story was nonetheless noticeable because of its three-column headline: "Mass Murders of Jews in Poland Pass 700,000 Mark." Wired from London by the Overseas News Agency, the dispatch minced no words: "A systematic campaign for the extermination of the Jews in Poland has resulted in the murder of more than 700,000 in the past year." That evening, the Seattle Times published much the same information, on page 30, under a tiny headline, "700,000 Jews Reported Slain." Originating in London with the Chicago Daily News service, this article characterized the Bund report as "new evidence" of "the systematic extermination of the Jewish population." Polish sources, it stated, spoke of portable gas chambers at Chelmno.

The New York Times devoted two inches to the Bund report on June 27. It had picked up the information from CBS in New York, which had recorded Zygielbojm's BBC broadcast the preceding day. The Times's brief account noted that 700,000 Polish Jews had been slain, and it quoted the broadcast's disclosure that "to accomplish this, probably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed -- machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation." Not until July 2 did the Times publish (on page 6) a thorough summary of the Bund report, including details on the mobile gas chambers at Chelmno. [13]

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) press conference, held in London on June 29, generated additional information. Combining the Bund report with other evidence received from the Continent, the WJC compiled a country-by-country summary of the Nazi assault on the Jews. The WJC estimated that the Nazis had already killed over a million Jews, mostly in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, and Rumania. (The estimates were low as measured against today's knowledge.) In the words of WJC spokesmen, the Germans had turned eastern Europe into a "vast slaughterhouse for Jews." From Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands, Jews had been deported en masse to Poland to be shot in large groups. All of it, the WJC claimed, was part of a Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews. [14]

Full reports on the WJC press conference were carried on both the AP and the UP wires from London. But few American daily papers printed more than brief notices to the effect that the World Jewish Congress had charged the Germans with killing over one million Jews. [15]

Soon afterward, two authoritative voices in Great Britain reinforced the Bund disclosure of mass murder. In a press conference, the British minister of information, Brendan Bracken, announced that "700,000 Jews alone have been murdered in Poland." He declared in the strongest terms that when the war ended the United Nations would bring to speedy and severe punishment the persons responsible for the war crimes committed in Poland against Jews and against other Poles as well. [i] [16]

And in a special broadcast Arthur Cardinal Hinsley, the seventy-six-year-old archbishop of Westminster and Britain's leading Roman Catholic prelate, stated that "in Poland alone the Nazis have massacred 700,000 Jews." To those who might doubt the charges of Nazi mass atrocities against both Jews and Christians in Poland, Cardinal Hinsley pointed out that some people "reject offhand anything and everything that does not directly touch their own noses" and that others "dismiss even the clearest evidence with the sneer, 'Oh! British propaganda!'" "But," the Cardinal maintained, "mighty is the truth; murder will out." The outspoken Hinsley persisted in decrying the Western world's failure to respond to the slaughter of the Jews until death took him, in March 1943. [17]

Only in early July 1942 did the State Department begin to inquire into the massacres of Jews in eastern Europe. In response, the American minister to Sweden sent information to Washington indicating that at least 284,000 Jews had been executed by the Nazis in areas wrested from the Russians since mid-1941. One Estonian officer who had been with the German occupation forces in the Baltic states reported seeing an SS firing squad force 400 Jews to dig their own graves and then shoot them. Another source cited similar executions elsewhere in the Baltic area and in Kiev. From the American representative to the London Polish government, the State Department received a statement by Schwarzbart based on the Bund report as well as other sources smuggled from Poland. [18]

The flow of news about the European Jewish situation, which had surfaced here and there in the regular newspapers, flooded the American Jewish press. It set off calls for mass protests and for American and United Nations action. The American Jewish Congress, the B'nai B'rith, and the Jewish Labor Committee (later joined by the American Jewish Committee) organized a mass demonstration in New York City, where Americans could express their grief and indignation over the massacres. [19]

On the evening of July 21 -- one day before the eve of Tishab'Ab, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, 20,000 people crowded Madison Square Garden, while thousands more stood outside, to protest the Nazi atrocities. Among the main speakers were Rabbi Stephen Wise, Governor Herbert Lehman, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the Methodist bishop Francis McConnell, and William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor. [20]

President Roosevelt sent a message in which he expressed the sorrow of all Americans and declared that the American people "will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come." Repeatedly during the evening, the mention of Roosevelt's name set off ovations. A companion message from Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted that "the Jews were Hitler's first victims." Churchill reminded listeners that he and Roosevelt had spoken out on Nazi atrocities nine months earlier and had then resolved "to place retribution for these crimes among major purposes of this war." [21]

The assembly adopted a declaration that hailed the heroic spirit of the trapped Jews and called on the United Nations to take public notice of the Jewish tragedy and to express their determination to bring the Nazis to justice. It pledged that American Jewry would "make every sacrifice to support the United Nations in their struggle for freedom and human decency." [22]

American Jewish organizations expressed satisfaction with the results of the mass meeting, particularly with the strong public assurances from the highest levels that those responsible for the monstrous crimes would be brought to justice. But neither Roosevelt nor Churchill, nor the declaration adopted by the assembly, nor any of the speakers had proposed measures to rescue the Jews still alive in Hitler's Europe. Rabbi Wise even asserted that "the salvation of our people and all peoples who would be free can only come under God through a victory speedy and complete of the United Nations." [23]


Did Stephen Wise and the others who said nothing of rescue operations that night really mean that the only way to save Jews from the Nazis was to win the war? Could the trapped Jews look for no efforts to help them throughout the months and years that lay between the summer of 1942 and the Allied victory? Who among them would be alive to see that victory? After many more months and several more shocks, American Jewish leaders would respond to these questions by pressing a program of rescue on the American government. But then other questions would develop: How high a priority would these Jewish leaders place on rescue? What part of their energies and resources would they commit to it?

In July 1942, Jewish leaders may well have been in a state of shock at learning of the huge and still rising Jewish death toll in Europe. They also were sorely worried about the threat to the Jewish settlement in Palestine resulting from the German drive across Africa and toward Suez that summer. Initially, when the war was running heavily in the Germans' favor, the obstacles to mounting potentially effective programs of aid must have seemed insurmountable. Clarification and reassessment could be expected.

Other observances followed the Madison Square Garden demonstration. The Synagogue Council of America called upon all Jewish congregations to make July 23, Tishab'Ab, a day of memorial to the victims of the Nazis, and the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives opened that day's session with a prayer for the murdered Jews. The Federal Council of Churches and the Church Peace Union sent messages of sympathy to the Synagogue Council. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada proclaimed August 12 a day of prayer and fasting. [24]

Other mass meetings were organized to protest the murderous Nazi assault on the Jews. Ten thousand people attended the one held in the Chicago Coliseum, and smaller demonstrations took place in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Hartford, and other cities. At these meetings, mayors, governors, congressmen, labor leaders, and spokesmen for Christian churches joined Jews in expressing sorrow and indignation. In Cincinnati, more than one hundred Protestant ministers endorsed a public statement to the Jews of their community declaring, "We of the Christian ministry cannot and will not remain silent before the spectacle of mass murder suffered by Jews of Nazi-controlled Europe." Expressing insights that should have been obvious, but which seem to have gone widely unrecognized in American Christian circles during World War II, the Cincinnati ministers pointed out:

This is the tragedy of your European Jewish brethren but it is also our Christian tragedy. This is an evil suffered by those of Jewish faith but it is also an evil perpetuated by men of Christian names and Christian pretension. [25]


The mass meetings undoubtedly had some effect on the American public's hitherto nearly complete ignorance about the Jewish catastrophe in Europe. Yet, although well covered in the daily press, the demonstrations fell far short of realizing their full potential for publicizing the disastrous situation. The New York Times, for instance, placed a sizable part of its report on the Madison Square Garden meeting in the middle of page 1. But nothing on that page indicated that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered. In fact, Jews were barely mentioned, and the event came across as no more than a "mass demonstration against Hitler atrocities." The Chicago Tribune provided substantial publicity prior to the Chicago mass meeting, but its report on the demonstration itself, while comprehensive, offered little understanding of what had caused the meeting. The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, publicized the demonstration in Los Angeles for more than a week and made it clear throughout that the issue was "the terrible mass murders of Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe." [26]

How deeply did the disclosures about annihilation of the Jews penetrate? Obviously, the answer would differ from individual to individual and from group to group. The extent to which the information spread in the United States, and the related matter of how much credence people actually gave it, crucially influenced the American response to the Holocaust. Those who were concerned that the United States do what was possible to rescue the Jews encountered difficulties on both counts, not only in 1942, when hard evidence first appeared, but throughout the war, and this despite the increasing confirmation that came out of Europe as time passed.

By May 1943, for instance, extensive news had appeared regarding the destruction of European Jewry. Yet Dorothy Day, the leader of the Catholic Worker movement, recalled speaking at a meeting that month at which "a member of the audience arose to protest defense of the Jews and to state emphatically that she did not believe the stories of atrocities.... She was applauded by the several hundred present." "Against such astounding unbelief," Day reflected, "the mind is stunned." [27]

The tendency to discount the extermination reports arose mainly from two causes. First, many people simply could not believe them. They refused to accept the fact that civilized people would commit such barbaric acts. Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm, the men who vouched most strongly for the accuracy of the Jewish Labor Bund's report from Poland, recognized the problem. At a press conference in July 1942, Zygielbojm stated that he realized that the facts "are so horrifying that one may ask if human beings can be degraded to such a brutality." Schwarzbart granted that "it is difficult to grasp that a human being could fall so low as has the contemporary German, educated by Hitlerism. It is difficult to believe these facts -- and yet they are true." [28]

Skepticism about the annihilation reports also stemmed from the abuse of the public's trust by British propagandists during World War I. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor has noted that some of the atrocity charges leveled at Germany in World War I were true but most were inflated; "the violated nuns and babies with their hands cut off were never found." Yet "nearly everyone believed the stories." [29]

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, historians had laid bare the falsity of Britain's World War I atrocity propaganda. By the late 1930s, these exposures had worked their way into the popular mind, and atrocity stories in the first stages of World War II consequently met with much skepticism. As the war ground on, however, and as an increasing volume of information on Nazi crimes against occupied populations issued from numerous trusted sources, and as hatreds built, most Americans came to believe much of the news. Nevertheless, a tendency to see the atrocity reports as at least partly exaggerated persisted throughout the war and weakened the impact of the disclosures. [30]


Besides the problem of the credibility of the reports, two additional factors regarding the flow of information impaired the growth of American concern for rescue. For one thing, only a limited amount of news about the murder of the European Jews reached the American public. The mass media reported it only sporadically and almost always without emphasis. Newspapers printed comparatively little of the available knowledge and commonly buried it in inner pages. Radio seems to have offered even less information. Government-sponsored and independently produced films alike gave almost no hint of the attempt to exterminate the Jews. Mass circulation magazines hardly noticed it. [31]

Of course, Jewish magazines and weekly newspapers and the Yiddish daily press provided thorough coverage of the catastrophe. A few limited-circulation periodicals, such as the Nation and the New Republic, also made readers aware of the issue. But most Christian publications, both Protestant and Catholic, had little or nothing to say. Only a few Christian church leaders tried to inform their constituencies of the Jewish situation in Europe. Except for a small number of voices, those who spoke with the authority of government either kept silent or very infrequently referred to the Jewish disaster. The main American channels for publicizing events did not entirely black out the extermination news, but they did little to bring it to the attention of the public. [32]

The impact of Holocaust information was further diluted by the background against which it appeared. Throughout World War II, reports of Nazi terror against civilian populations in occupied countries repeatedly made the news. Accounts of German reprisals, mass killings of hostages, executions of suspected anti-Nazis, and other atrocities were regular features in newspapers and news magazines. These war crimes most often were related to the Nazi tactic of terror to control populations and to counter sabotage and assassinations.

Several times, disclosures of Nazi mass killing of Jews appeared within stories of the more general German crimes against civilian populations. News services frequently provided summaries of Nazi repression, country by country. Incorporated into these dispatches were accounts of mass executions of Jews. Even when massacres of the Jews were reported separately, they blended into the background of Nazi terror against civilians all across Europe. Thus, quite by chance, widespread Nazi repression of all subject peoples obscured the fact that a distinct program of systematic extermination of Jews was in progress. [33]

In mid-1942, an especially virulent wave of Nazi terrorism swept over Europe. Mass killings of Poles, both Jews and non-Jews, had increased since SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had visited Poland in the spring. Other reports of severe repression came steadily from all across the Continent. In June, the world was stunned to learn that the Germans had obliterated the small Czech mining village of Lidice in reprisal for supposed complicity in the assassination of Heydrich. (The 190 men of Lidice were shot, the women deported, mostly to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and the children dispersed among German families.) [34]

In response to the campaign of intensified terror, and at the initiative of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, the leaders of nine occupied European countries urged President Roosevelt to retaliate for the atrocities. Following State Department advice, Roosevelt rejected the appeal, as well as Sikorski's specific proposal to bomb German cities in reprisal for the mass executions, especially those of Polish Jews. According to the Polish ambassador in Washington, Roosevelt explained that the Allies had not yet attained full air strength and that, furthermore, Germany might respond with an even higher level of terror. [35]

Actually, the Allies were already bombing German cities as a war measure and surely would not have ceased if massacres of the Jews had stopped. In addition, German Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels had preempted the issue some weeks before. In mid-June, he had publicly declared that American and British Jews were responsible for the bombing of German cities and that the German people were suffering intensely from the attacks. Germany, said Goebbels, would repay "blow by blow," by "mass extermination of Jews in reprisal for the Allied air bombings of German cities." The Sikorski proposal had reached a standoff.
Extermination of the Jews had been going on for a year. Little hope for stopping it could be placed in a tactic already in use against Germany and in response to which a top Nazi promised to exterminate the Jews. [36]

Although Roosevelt did not agree to the call for retaliation against Germany, he again warned the Axis, on August 21, 1942, that perpetrators of war crimes would be tried after Germany's defeat and face "fearful retribution." During the rest of the year, American and British officials worked on plans to set up a United Nations commission to investigate war crimes. In October, in the midst of these negotiations, Roosevelt once more spoke out about war crimes, declaring that those responsible would receive "just and sure punishment." But he also announced that mass Allied reprisals would not take place. Neither in this statement nor in the one the President had issued in August did he refer to Jewish victims. During the same months, efforts by the United States and other governments to persuade the Vatican to voice public condemnation of Nazi atrocities against civilians came to nothing. [37]

By the time of the July 21 Madison Square Garden mass meeting, American Jewish leaders and much of the Jewish public recognized that the European Jews were suffering terrible losses. They probably did not realize, however, that Nazi barbarism had actually gone as far as the most horrifying reports indicated. And despite increasing use of the term systematic extermination, none quite understood then that a planned, step-by-step program to annihilate all of European Jewry was in progress. The outlines of that hideous scheme were only vaguely coming into sight.
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 4:27 am

Part 2 of 2

Destination Unknown

Within a few days of the July demonstrations, another important dimension of the "final solution" began to become apparent. From the Nazi perspective, this development was an obvious part of the extermination plan, but it could not yet be recognized as such from the outside. It was a massive deportation of Jews from western Europe to "an unknown destination" in the East. Labor service was the announced purpose. But in reality these evacuations were part of the Europe-wide transportation of Jews to the still-secret killing centers already in operation in Poland. [38]

The deportations from France in 1942, especially those from the Vichy, or Unoccupied, Zone, were more fully exposed to the scrutiny of the outside world than any other Holocaust development. At work were the usual European news outposts in Switzerland, England, and Sweden. Beyond that, the peculiar status of Vichy France, which was partially autonomous and maintained diplomatic relations with the United States, meant that American newsmen could operate in the Unoccupied Zone, yet bypass Vichy censorship by dispatching their reports from Switzerland. Even closer to the deportation events were Americans and others who had been assisting some of the many thousand Jewish refugees who had earlier fled to France to escape Nazi persecution. These relief workers were in touch with their agencies in other countries and could thus transmit to the outside world detailed information on events in the Unoccupied Zone.

The relief organizations had been active in southern France for some time, helping refugees in applying for visas to countries abroad and in arranging the necessary transportation. After mid-1940, emigration became more and more difficult as overseas nations, the United States included, all but closed their doors to immigration. Accordingly, the relief agencies had increasingly concentrated on supplying food, clothing, and other assistance to the refugees caught in France. By the time the deportations struck, two years of hard work had raised conditions to a barely livable level in the squalid detention camps in which the Vichy government had incarcerated thousands of the fugitives. [39]

Whatever stability Jewish refugees had attained in France was smashed by a series of ruthless roundups that began in mid-July 1942 in the Occupied Zone. Lacking sufficient forces to carry out mass seizures, the Nazis had to secure the collaboration of the Vichy government and the French police. The price of that cooperation was the exemption of French-born Jews from deportation, at least temporarily. Left vulnerable were 75,000 Jewish men, women, and children, most of whom had already endured a variety of hells in their attempts to escape the Nazis. [40]

At four o'clock on the morning of July 16, the trap was sprung in Paris. French police dragnets swept up 13,000 refugee Jews amid scenes of anguish and terror. Buses backed up to apartment buildings and were filled with screaming, crying people. Hospital beds were emptied. A cancer patient operated on the previous day was carried away. One woman gave birth while police waited to haul off mother and baby. Younger children were permitted to be left behind, and many parents desperately accepted that choice in the hope that neighbors or orphanages would take them in. Family groups, comprising some 9,000 people (half of them children), were funneled into the winter sports arena (Velodrome d'Hiver) and penned up like animals. Water and food were scarce; some infants died for lack of milk. Since only ten latrines were available, people stood in line for hours to use the toilet. After five days of this nightmare, adults and children were separated and transferred to different deportation centers to await shipment to Poland. [41]

Relief organizations in the Unoccupied Zone learned later what had become of the children left behind in Paris. Many were hidden. But French police gathered up thousands of others who were found in apartments, wandering the streets, or crying at locked doors of houses. Nearly 4,000 of them, aged two to fourteen, were sent to "unknown destinations," packed into windowless boxcars without adult escort, without food, water, or hygienic provisions, without so much as straw to lie on. They were even without identification. The Nazis had destroyed their papers. [42]

Close to 50,000 refugee Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the Occupied Zone, mostly from Paris, before France was liberated in 1944. More than half of them were seized in the roundups of July, August, and September 1942. [43]


Early in August, the Vichy chief of government, Pierre Laval, began the evacuations from the Unoccupied Zone. The Vichy police started with refugees who had already undergone misery and degradation in the internment camps of southern France. In the words of an American relief worker, they were now exposed "like fowl in a chicken pen with a hawk circling overhead, only here very few, if any, escape." [44]

In rapid order, 3,600 Jews were collected from the camps and dispatched to the Occupied Zone for transshipment to Poland. The first train pulled out of the camp at Gurs on August 6, carrying a thousand refugees into the night. Within four days, two more trains swallowed the rest from Les Milles, Rivesaltes, Vernet, and other camps which, though their names had come to mean wretchedness, had not killed all hope of survival. [45]

A French citizen who witnessed a deportation recorded what he saw:

We were at the Camp des Milles the day the last train left. The spectacle was indescribably painful to behold. All the internees had been lined up with their pitifully battered valises tied together with bits of string. Most of them were in rags, pale, thin, worn out with the strain. ... Many of them were quietly weeping. ... Their faces showed only hopeless despair.


The YMCA's Donald Lowrie, an American relief worker, described the evacuation:

The actual deportation was as bad as could be imagined: men and women pushed like cattle into box-cars, thirty to a car, whose only furniture was a bit of straw on the floor, one iron pail for all toilet purposes, and a police guard. The journey, we were told, would take a fortnight or eighteen days. . . . All of us were curtly refused permission to accompany the trains or even to organize a service of hot drinks and refreshments at the frontier where they passed into German occupied territory. [46]


In the first stage of the deportations from Unoccupied France, refugee parents were allowed to leave children under eighteen behind. Fearing the worst from their return into German hands, most chose separation. After watching the leave-taking, relief workers felt they could "never forget the moment when these truck loads of children left the camps, with parents trying in one last gaze to fix an image to last an eternity." Later in August, however, the powers in Vichy betrayed both children and parents with an order requiring deportation of all refugee youngsters. "We are solving the problem humanely," lied the Vichy spokesman. "We want children to go with their parents." Many whose parents had already been carried away were now deported. The others remained in constant danger of evacuation. [47]

After clearing the camps, the Vichy government moved to hunt down the thousands of foreign Jews who had managed to avoid detention or had gained release from the camps before the deportations had commenced. Houses and hotels were searched before dawn. Mass arrests took place. Frantic parents, hearing of the raids, besieged the relief groups, begging them to hide their children. But French police had also started tracking down children who were in orphanages and care homes throughout Vichy France. These roundups of children, frequent in the summer and fall of 1942, continued sporadically throughout the war. This firsthand account is typical:

There was the first raid on the nursery at 4 o'clock in the morning with two trucks. There were similar raids in all of L___ that same night. The big trucks were to be seen everywhere. ... Within a quarter of an hour the children [some as young as three years] had to be awakened, dressed and their belongings packed. [48]


The great tide of Vichy roundups outside the camps lasted from late August until mid-September 1942. It swept another 7,000 Jews onto trains to Occupied France and then to Auschwitz. These large-scale deportations from the Unoccupied Zone in August and September carried away about 10,600 Jews. Before the Germans were driven from France, nearly 4,000 more were transported to Auschwitz, making a total of over 14,000 delivered to the Nazis from the southern sector of the country. [49]

Shock waves from the calamity that struck in the Unoccupied Zone quickly registered in the offices of relief organizations in the United States. As early as August 10, Donald Lowrie traveled to Geneva to send the first in a series of thorough reports to the YMCA in New York. The New York headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began receiving detailed information by cablegram from its Lisbon office by August 13. Many starkly brief messages of despair were dispatched from Marseilles to the American Friends Service Committee office in Philadelphia. These telegrams reported on people for whom the Quakers had been trying to arrange immigration to the United States. Filed away a generation and a half ago, they may stand as the only epitaphs that scores of Jews ever received. These three are representative:

A_______ L _______ DEPARTED CAMP RIVESALTES UNKNOWN DESTINATION

MOTHER DEPARTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION

[to an uncle on Long Island] PARENTS DEPARTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION
SITUATION DIFFICULT [50]


The deportations were devastating on the personal level, even before people realized that evacuation meant murder by gas. A family that had done everything possible to escape from the Nazi grasp offers an example. The fragments of information that remain show that the S__ family had fled German territory some time before and had made its way to southern France. It succeeded in moving one young son into safekeeping in Switzerland. And a second boy, C__ , had been lucky enough to reach the United States earlier in 1942. But the parents had to remain in France, even though the relevant American immigration quotas were 90 percent unfilled at the time. The manner in which U.S. immigration laws were administered during World War II kept most refugees out. [51]

After reaching the United States, C__ wrote to his parents several times. He became increasingly concerned when he received no response. The explanation came in November in a letter from C__ 's sponsoring agency in New York to his case worker in the city where he lived with his new foster parents. Enclosed was one of C__ 's letters to his father. The agency worker wrote:

What we feared would happen has actually taken place. C__'s father was deported, because the enclosed letter, as you will note, came back with the famous stamp "partisans addresse." [52]


Several other children who reached the United States from southern France in July 1942 sent postcards to their parents. Most of the cards came back marked "DEPARTED -- DESTINATION UNKNOWN." [53]

In France, the deportations brought a barrage of denunciation. Several Roman Catholic prelates, including the archbishops of Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse, protested vigorously. The cardinals and archbishops of the Occupied Zone united in condemnation. [ii] [54][/quote]

A statement by Bishop Pierre Theas, of Montauban, read in all the churches of his diocese, was representative of the attitude of the Catholic leadership:

Hereby I make known to the world the indignant protest of Christian conscience, and I proclaim that all men, whether Aryan or non-Aryan, are brothers because they were created by the same GOD; and that all men, whatever their race or religion, have a right to respect from individuals as well as from States. [56]
 

Pastor Marc Boegner, leader of the Protestant Federation of France, assailed the Vichy government for its collaboration in the roundups and the deportations. With the explicit support of the archbishop of Lyon, Pastor Boegner insisted on an audience with Laval in September in a last, unsuccessful attempt to halt the evacuations. [57]

The outrage of church leaders was shared by many others in the French population. It broke out even within the ranks of the police, many of whom resigned or accepted dismissal rather than round up Jews. The military governor of Lyon was removed because he refused to send his troops to hunt out Jews. [58]

Although the protests failed to stop the evacuations, they may have contributed to the fact that the Nazis never undertook large-scale removal of France's native-born Jews. Moreover, the denunciations voiced by church leaders and spread by local clergy shattered the secrecy that the Vichy regime tried to impose by banning the news from the French press and radio. Several religious leaders sent out pastoral letters calling on church members to help Jews. Many French families took in Jews and hid them. Children, especially, could be concealed, and, despite some betrayals and disasters, about 8,000 were saved by the combined efforts of Jewish organizations, private families, schools, youth groups, and Catholic convents and monasteries. [59]

Interfaith cooperation flourished. The head of the Jewish Boy Scouts in France came to the leader of a Protestant youth federation and simply stated, "Mademoiselle, I have 600 foreign Boy Scouts to be hidden from the police." They were hidden. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a Protestant village, successfully concealed scores of Jews, despite persistent police searches as well as government threats to reduce the town's food rations. Again, a force of Protestant and Catholic social workers broke into a prison in Lyon and "kidnapped" ninety children who were being held there with their parents for deportation. The parents signed releases placing their children under the care of a Christian organization, with the assurance that it was simply acting as a protecting cover. The parents were deported the next day; the children were hidden in convents. When Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, refused an order to surrender the children, Laval struck back by arresting Father Pierre Chaillet, a member of the cardinal's staff. Cardinal Gerlier responded by again instructing the priests in his diocese to conceal Jews. His personal commitment and prestige enabled him to face down Laval; the children remained hidden and Father Chaillet was released. [60]

Americans also spoke out vigorously against the deportations. As soon as they learned of the crisis, American relief workers in France alerted the news agencies and moved to press the issue with the Vichy government. Early in August, Donald Lowrie, a spokesman for several of the relief agencies, and Father Arnou, a special representative of Cardinal Gerlier, saw the chief of state, Marshal Henri Petain. The aged leader, who seemed barely aware of the developments, agreed that the matter was regrettable but indicated that he was helpless to change it. "You know our situation with regard to the Germans," he said. That same day, Roswell McClelland and Lindsley Noble, of the American Friends Service Committee, had a conference with Laval in which he offered no hope of moderation. Instead, he broke into a long tirade against the Jews generally and the damage Jewish refugees allegedly had caused to France. During their visit to Vichy, the American relief workers gave the U.S. embassy its first detailed information about the roundups and evacuations. [61]

Following an exchange of communications with the State Department, Pinkney Tuck, charge d'affaires at the embassy, saw Laval and registered an extremely sharp protest against the "revolting" and "inhuman" treatment of the Jews. In fact, Tuck's deeply felt vehemence disturbed middle-level policymakers in the State Department who complained to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles that Tuck had exceeded his instructions. Tuck, in fact, was even in advance of the leadership of the main American Jewish organizations, which on August 27 submitted a joint letter to the State Department calling on the United States to protest to the Vichy government. Welles replied that the American embassy in Vichy, "in compliance with instructions sent by the Department," had already made "the most vigorous representations possible." [62]

Some two weeks later, Secretary of State Cordell Hull followed up by personally delivering a blunt condemnation of the "revolting and fiendish" deportations to the Vichy ambassador to the United States, Gaston Henry-Haye. (The next day, Henry-Haye privately expressed his own disgust, with respect both to his rough handling by American officials and to the situation in France. He reportedly told a visitor that his ambition when he went back to France was to become a farmer "so that his dealings will be with animals instead of people. He feels that his dealings with people have spoiled his enjoyment of their society.") [63]

While in Vichy to see Petain and Laval, Lowrie and the two American Friends workers had asked the Vichy leaders and the American embassy about the possibility of permitting some of the Jewish refugee children to leave for safety in the United States. Laval offered almost no hope but did not refuse outright. At the suggestion of American relief workers in France, their organizations' home offices appealed to the State Department for 1,000 immigration visas for Jewish children stranded in France. Actively aided by Eleanor Roosevelt and the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, the plea was successful. On September 18, the State Department cabled its consuls in France authorizing the 1,000 visas and instructing the consuls to waive virtually all the usual red tape involved in visa issuance in order to hasten the process. Because of increasingly dire reports from France, the American relief agencies soon asked Washington to raise the number to 5,000. By the end of September, the State Department had compiled. [64]

But the great difficulty was extracting exit visas from the Vichy regime. While the children were being collected and readied, a sleight-of-hand game was played out in Vichy. On September 30, Tuck sought Laval's cooperation. Laval replied that he agreed "in principle" to the exodus of the children, adding, as Tuck reported it, "that he would be only too glad to be rid of them." But when it came to arranging the details with Laval's underlings, it turned out that a combination of German pressure and Vichy recalcitrance had shifted the ground. [65]

Throughout October, the Vichy government stalled on releasing the children, falling back on sham arguments to drag out discussions. Some religious groups, asserted the secretary-general of police, had illegally hidden children. For the government now to allow those children to emigrate would be to justify illegal acts and encourage such conduct in the future. Vichy officials hypocritically spoke of their government's great concern about separating families and its belief that eventual reunion was more likely if the children remained on the same continent as the parents. [66]

Tuck's constant pressure finally wrenched out of Laval a promise of 500 visas. It was then the end of October, and before a convoy of children could be assembled, moved through the documentation process, and placed on a train for Lisbon, the entire project ended precipitously. On November 8, Allied forces landed in French North Africa. The Vichy government severed diplomatic ties with the United States the next day. By then a group of a hundred children with the precious exit visas had reached Marseilles and needed only their U.S. visas. But the American consulate was closed. On November 11, the Germans occupied the southern sector of France and demolished the chances of salvaging anything from the project. Until spring 1944, diplomatic efforts were made, chiefly by the Swiss government, to persuade the Vichy regime to allow at least the promised 500 to leave. These attempts were fruitless. [67]


American newspaper readers in the summer of 1942 could follow the main configurations of the Jewish tragedy in France. Most metropolitan dailies provided fairly thorough coverage of the mass arrests of mid-July in Paris. The fearful and chaotic conditions connected with those roundups appeared in many of the major newspapers, and some of them carried partial descriptions of the Velodrome d'Hiver episode. Almost none reported the barbaric shoving of 4,000 children into boxcars for shipment across the Continent without the necessities of life and without adult escort. But the UP did reveal that outrage, and the Los Angeles Times, for one, ran the dispatch. [68]

The deportations from the camps in southern France and the roundups in the Unoccupied Zone received widespread notice. Nothing specific appeared, however, concerning conditions on the deportation trains. But the protests raised by the French archbishops and other members of the clergy drew repeated coverage. Accounts of the church's role in hiding children and the Vichy government's challenge to the church by arresting a priest also ran in most major newspapers.

Much of the French deportation story thus appeared in the American press. But it was almost never featured. For instance, the New York Times published some twenty-five items but placed only two on the front page. Those reports reached page 1 apparently because they involved leaders of the Catholic church. Even so, each story received only a few inches of type at the foot of the page. One told very little, the other nothing, about what was actually happening to the Jews. Other major newspapers generally conformed to the same pattern. They printed considerable information, but almost always on inner pages, and even there it was often barely noticeable. [69]

In sum, the American daily press carried fuller information on the calamity of the refugee Jews in France than it did on any other development in the Nazi extermination program. As with all news about the Holocaust, though, American newspapers gave this information very limited emphasis.

The disaster that struck France in the summer of 1942 was the most noticeable part of a large wave of deportations from western Europe to the gas chambers in the second half of that year. Though the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway were nearly walled off from the Allied world, bits of information filtered out about the mass arrests and evacuations there. In July a roundup of 60,000 Jews began in Amsterdam. Convoys rolled to the East, despite the protests of Dutch Protestant and Catholic church leaders. Popular demonstrations against the deportations, urged on by broadcasts from the Dutch government-in-exile in England, obliged the Germans to reschedule train deportations for the middle of the night. But the transports continued to move. (The first of the trains to reach Auschwitz from Holland arrived while SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was there on an inspection tour. Himmler observed the whole murder process, from opening the railway cars to removal of the bodies from the gas chamber.) [70]

The few accounts to break out of Belgium mentioned nighttime roundups and mass deportations. Isolated reports from Norway told of the arrest and later removal by Ocean freighter of many members of that country's tiny Jewish population. [71]

The massive deportations from western Europe in 1942 were one step in the still-secret program of genocide. The Nazi explanation -- labor service at an unnamed destination in the East -- seemed plausible at the time. It especially appeared to make sense in view of the poor response to the Vichy government's effort to recruit 150,000 French workers to go to Germany to help fill the labor shortage there. News reports concerning the deported Jews regularly referred to "forced labor" and "slave labor" as their fate, a view that was generally accepted. But some observers, especially those close enough to witness the events, had doubts. [72]

Commenting in August on the announcement that the Jews were being sent to a labor area in Poland, Donald Lowrie pointed out certain inconsistencies:


Since children, the aged and ill (we know some cases of epileptics, palsied, insane and even bedridden put into the corral for deportation) are taken, and since their destination is uniformly reported (by Laval, Petain, the Police) as the Jewish reservation in Poland, the need for labor does not totally explain this action. In view of the present transport difficulties in Germany it is hard to understand a German desire to have these unfortunates.


Two months later Lowrie was still suspicious, although he did not speculate on what was actually happening:

By no stretch of the imagination, however, can the majority of the unfortunate Jews thus delivered to the Germans be considered as capable of labour service. Of one convoy totalling 700, not more than 60 were in physical condition to do any useful work. [73]


A Jewish refugee physician working at the Unitarian Service Committee's medical facility in Marseilles had just about figured it out. Months of hoping for a favorable decision on his application for a visa to the United States had run out. Shortly before being forced onto the deportation train, he said, "I waited for the help that was promised.

Now it is too late. We know that nobody returns from the East. Thanks for what all of you have done -- alas in vain." [74]


In the midst of the disclosures from France came news from the London Polish government concerning the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been crowded into the Warsaw ghetto since late 1940. The report revealed that the ghetto mayor, Adam Czerniakow, had committed suicide rather than obey orders to prepare deportation lists that would help the Nazis in their announced plan to evacuate 100,000 Jews to "an undisclosed place in Eastern Europe." (The real destination was death in the killing centers, principally Treblinka. Deportation of the 380,000 Warsaw Jews began on July 22; by the end of 1942, over 310,000 were gone. The remnant included those who would ignite the Warsaw ghetto revolt of April 1943.) [75]

During the summer of 1942, another shocking report was smuggled from Poland by the Jewish Labor Bund, the group that had sent word in May of the murder of 700,000 Polish Jews. A gruesome account of the mass-gassing process at Chelmno, it was the first thorough description of a German killing center to reach the West. The victims, told to undress for a bath, were led down a hallway and suddenly forced into a large truck. Shut and sealed, the truck drove to a deep ditch in a nearby wood, where it became an execution chamber. Exhaust gases killed those trapped inside. A squad of Jewish gravediggers unloaded the bodies. After German workers stripped rings, gold teeth, and other valuables from the corpses, the gravediggers buried the dead Jews in layers in the ditch. Six to nine truckloads were murdered in this way daily. The gravediggers themselves were killed after a time, but three escaped in late January 1942. They succeeded in reporting their experiences to the Polish Jewish underground, which was already aware that thousands of Jews sent to the Chelmno area had disappeared without a trace. [76]

The American affiliate of the Jewish Labor Bund printed the gravediggers' account on August 5, 1942, in a special issue of its publication The Ghetto Speaks. A month later, a closely allied journal, the Workmen's Circle Call, carried the same report, as did the Jewish Frontier.

The American mass media did not mention the gravediggers' revelations. Nor did most of the Jewish press, apparently because the story seemed so incredible. The quandary of the Jewish leadership is illustrated by the case of the Jewish Frontier, an important American labor Zionist monthly. Its editors could not believe the report. (We were then "psychologically unschooled for the new era of mass carnage," explained one of them a quarter of a century later. "Such things did not happen in the twentieth century.") But they hesitated to ignore an account that came from a most dependable underground source. So they compromised by printing the story in small type in the back of the September issue. There it appeared, placed with unintended irony among advertisements bearing New Year's greetings from commercial enterprises. This decision, taken by a conscientious and deeply concerned segment of the American Jewish leadership, was not, as one of the editors later termed it, "gross stupidity." Rather it was a reflection of the confusion that gripped American Jewish leaders when first confronted with explicit descriptions of such unprecedented barbarism."

***

The summer of 1942 revealed disaster after disaster for European Jewry. It was also a time when the war was still running against the United States and its allies. The Germans continued to advance in Russia. The Wehrmacht swept to the Don River early in July and opened the assault on Stalingrad in August. Other forces took Rostov late in July and began to move on the Caucasus oil fields. Rommel's drive across North Africa toward the Suez lifeline and the Mideast reached El Alamein as July opened. Though the Germans were stopped there, the struggle, only 200 miles from the Suez Canal, remained in doubt well into the fall. In the Pacific, the Japanese outward thrust was not halted until June, in the naval battle of Midway. It was August before a limited American offensive, the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, planted the earliest small footholds on the long road back across the Pacific.

But the turning point was approaching. The Russian winter, an ominous threat to the Germans with their overextended supply lines, was approaching. At the start of November, the British would shatter Rommel's forces at El Alamein and Allied troops would storm ashore in northwest Africa. Six months later, the two Allied drives would force the Axis out of Africa. The fight in the Pacific, where the United States applied only 15 percent of its war resources until V-E Day, would be halting and very costly, but the balance was beginning to shift there too.

As the autumn of 1942 unfolded, the situation for America and its allies was becoming more hopeful. For American Jews, though, even more terrible news about the fate of their people in Europe was soon to hit.

_______________

Notes:

[i] The term United Nations was beginning to be used by early 1942 to refer to the countries allied in the war against the Axis.

[ii] At the time, the American press reported that the Pope protested to the Vichy government three times during August. But apparently this did not happen, for no confirmation of it has been found. [55]
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 5:08 am

Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 [EXCERPT]
by Charles Higham

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Preface

It would be comforting to believe that the financial Establishment of the United States and the leaders of American industry were united in a common purpose following the Day of Infamy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Certainly, the American public was assured that Big Business along with all of of the officials of government ceased from the moment the war began to have any dealings whatsoever with the enemy. That assurance sustained the morale of millions of Americans who bore arms in World War II and their kinfolk who stayed at home and suffered the anguish of separation.

But the heartbreaking truth is that a number of financial and industrial figures of World War II and several members of the government served the cause of money before the cause of patriotism. While aiding the United States' war effort, they also aided Nazi Germany's.

I first came across this fact in 1978 when I was declassifying documents in the course of writing a biography that dealt with motion picture star Errol Flynn's Nazi associations. In the National Archives Diplomatic Records Room I found numerous cross-references to prominent figures who, I had always assumed, were entirely committed to the American cause, yet who had been marked down for suspected subversive activities.

I had heard over the years about a general agreement of certain major figures of American, British, and German commerce to continue their relations and associations after Pearl Harbor. I had also heard that certain figures of the warring governments had arranged to assist in this. But I had never seen any documentary evidence of it. Now, pieces of information began to surface. I started to locate documents and have them declassified under the Freedom of Information Act -- a painfully slow and exhausting process that lasted two and a half years. What I found out was very disturbing.

I had been born to a patriotic British family. My father had raised the first battalions of volunteers against Germany in World War I, and had built the Star and Garter Hospital at Richmond, Surrey, for ex-servicemen. He had been knighted by King George V for his services to the Crown and had been a member of Parliament and a Cabinet member. I feel a strong sense of loyalty to Britain, as well as to my adopted country, the United States of America. Moreover, I am part Jewish. Auschwitz is a word stamped on my heart forever.

It thus came as a severe shock to learn that several of the greatest American corporate leaders were in league with Nazi corporations before and after Pearl Harbor, including I.G. Farben, the colossal Nazi industrial trust that created Auschwitz. Those leaders interlocked through an association I have dubbed The Fraternity. Each of these business leaders was entangled with the others through interlocking directorates or financial sources. All were represented internationally by the National City Bank or by the Chase National Bank and by the Nazi attorneys Gerhardt Westrick and Dr. Heinrich Albert. All had connections to that crucial Nazi economist, Emil Puhl, of Hitler's Reichsbank and the Bank for International Settlements.

The tycoons were linked by an ideology: the ideology of Business as Usual. Bound by identical reactionary ideas, the members sought a common future in fascist domination, regardless of which world leader might further that ambition.

Several members not only sought a continuing alliance of interests for the duration of World War II but supported the idea of a negotiated peace with Germany that would bar any reorganization of Europe along liberal lines. It would leave as its residue a police state that would place The Fraternity in postwar possession of financial, industrial, and political autonomy. When it was clear that Germany was losing the war the businessmen became notably more "loyal." Then, when war was over, the survivors pushed into Germany, protected their assets, restored Nazi friends to high office, helped provoke the Cold War, and insured the permanent future of The Fraternity.

From the outset I realized that in researching the subject I would have to carve through an ice cream mountain of public relations. I searched in vain through books about the corporations and their histories to find any reference to questionable activities in World War II. It was clear that the authors of those volumes, granted the cooperation of the businesses concerned, predictably backed off from disclosing anything that would be revealing. To this day the bulk of Americans do not suspect The Fraternity. The government smothered everything, during and even (inexcusably) after the war. What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the Focke Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goring's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?

For the government did sanction such dubious transactions -- both before and after Pearl Harbor. A presidential edict, issued six days after December 7, 1941, actually set up the legislation whereby licensing arrangements for trading with the enemy could officially be granted. Often during the years after Pearl Harbor the government permitted such trading. For example, ITT was allowed to continue its relations with the Axis and Japan until 1945, even though that conglomerate was regarded as an official instrument of United States Intelligence. No attempt was made to prevent Ford from retaining its interests for the Germans in Occupied France, nor were the Chase Bank or the Morgan Bank expressly forbidden to keep open their branches in Occupied Paris. It is indicated that the Reichsbank and Nazi Ministry of Economics made promises to certain U.S. corporate leaders that their properties would not be injured after the Fuhrer was victorious. Thus, the bosses of the multinationals as we know them today had a six-spot on every side of the dice cube. Whichever side won the war, the powers that really ran nations would not be adversely affected.

And it is important to consider the size of American investments in Nazi Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor. These amounted to an estimated total of $475 million. Standard Oil of New Jersey had $120 million invested there; General Motors had $35 million; ITT had $30 million; and Ford had $17.5 million. Though it would have been more patriotic to have allowed Nazi Germany to confiscate these companies for the duration -- to nationalize them or to absorb them into Hermann Goring's industrial empire -- it was clearly more practical to insure them protection from seizure by allowing them to remain in special holding companies, the money accumulating until war's end. It is interesting that whereas there is no evidence of any serious attempt by Roosevelt to impeach the guilty in the United States, there is evidence that Hitler strove to punish certain German Fraternity associates on the grounds of treason to the Nazi state. Indeed, in the case of ITT, perhaps the most flagrant of the corporations in its outright dealings with the enemy, Hitler and his postmaster general, the venerable Wilhelm Ohnesorge, strove to impound the German end of the business. But even they were powerless in such a situation: the Gestapo leader of counterintelligence, Walter Schellenberg, was a prominent director and shareholder of ITT by arrangement with New York -- and even Hitler dared not cross the Gestapo.

As for Roosevelt, the Sphinx still keeps his secrets. That supreme politician held all of the forces of collusion and betrayal in balance, publicly praising those executives whom he knew to be questionable. Before Pearl Harbor, he allowed such egregious executives as James D. Mooney of General Motors and William Rhodes Davis of the Davis Oil Company to enjoy pleasant tete-a-tetes with Hitler and Goring, while maintaining a careful record of what they were doing. During the war, J. Edgar Hoover, Adolf A. Berle, Henry Morgenthau, and Harold Ickes kept the President fully advised of all internal and external transgressions. With great skill, he never let the executives concerned know that he was on to them. By using the corporate leaders for his own war purposes as dollar-a-year men, keeping an eye on them and allowing them to indulge, under license or not, in their international tradings, he at once made winning the war a certainty and kept the public from knowing what it should not know.

Because of the secrecy with which the matter has been blanketed, researching it presented me with a nightmare that preceded the greater nightmare of discovery. I embarked upon a voyage that resembled nothing so much as a descent into poisoned waters in a diving bell.

Why did even the loyal figures of the American government allow these transactions to continue after Pearl Harbor? A logical deduction would be that not to have done so would have involved public disclosure: the procedure of legally disconnecting these alliances under the antitrust laws would have resulted in a public scandal that would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread strikes, and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services. Moreover, as some corporate executives were never tired of reminding the government, their trial and imprisonment would have made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war effort. Therefore, the government was powerless to intervene. After 1945, the Cold War, which the executives had done so much to provoke, made it even more necessary that the truth of The Fraternity agreements should not be revealed.

I began with the conveniently multinational Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland. The activities of this anomalous institution in wartime are contained in Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's official diaries at the Roosevelt Memorial Library at Hyde Park, New York. Other details are contained in reports by the estimable Lauchlin Currie, of Roosevelt's White House Economics Staff, whom I interviewed at length by telephone at his home in Bogota, Colombia, to which city he had been banished, his citizenship stripped from him in 1956 for exposing American-Nazi connections. Another source lay in reports by the late Orvis Schmidt of Treasury Foreign Funds Control. German records were a useful source: Emil Puhl, vice- president and real power of the Reichsbank, a most crucial figure in The Fraternity's dealings, had sent reports to his nominal superior, Dr. Walther Funk, from Switzerland to Berlin late in the war.

I turned to the matter of the Rockefeller-controlled Chase National Bank, which had conducted its business for the Nazi High Command in Paris until the war's end. Evidently realizing that future historians might want to examine the highly secret Chase Bank files, Morgenthau had left subtle cross-references at Hyde Park that could lead future investigators to Treasury itself. I asked Ralph V. Korp of Treasury for access to the sealed Chase boxes, which had been under lock and key since 1945. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Mr. Korp obtained permission from his superiors to unseal the boxes and to declassify the large number of documents contained therein. From the Chase Bank it was a natural progression to Standard Oil of New Jersey, the chief jewel in the crown of the Rockefeller empire. Records of Standard's dealings with the Axis were contained in the Records Rooms of the Diplomatic Branch of the National Archives and were specially declassified. There, too, I found records of Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film, and William Rhodes Davis, whose FBI files were also most revealing. Documents on ITT and RCA were classified. After waiting out the better part of the year, I was able to obtain them from the National Archives. Classified SKF Industries files are held in the Suitland, Maryland, annex of the Archives. General Motors matters are covered in the James D. Mooney public access collection of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. The unpublished post-Pearl Harbor diaries of Harold Ickes were invaluable; they are to be found in the manuscript room of the Library of Congress.

The most elusive files were those on Ford in Occupied France. I could find no reference to them in the Treasury documentary listings. I knew that a Treasury team had investigated the company. I wondered if any member of the team could be alive.

Something jolted my memory. I remembered that a book entitled The Devil's Chemists had appeared after World War II, written by Josiah DuBois, an attorney who had been part of the Treasury team at Nuremberg. The book was a harrowing account of the trial of the executives of I.G. Farben, the Nazi industrial trust, that showed Farben's links to Wall Street.

I reread the book's pages, looking for a clue. In it DuBois mentioned that he came from Camden, New Jersey. I decided to call information in the Camden area because I had a theory that, embittered by his experience in Germany and Washington, DuBois might have returned to live there after the war. It was only a hunch, but it paid off. In fact, it turned out that DuBois had gone back to his family law firm in Camden. I wrote to him, asking if he had records of the Ford matter. I figured that these might have been so important that he would have been given personal custody of them; that Secretary Morgenthau might not even have risked leaving them at Treasury.

DuBois replied that he believed he still had the documents, including the letters of Edsel Ford to his managers in Nazi-occupied France after Pearl Harbor, authorizing improvements in automobile and truck supplies to the Germans. After several weeks, DuBois wrote to say that he had searched his attic to no avail. The documents were missing. However, he would keep looking.

He was admitted to a hospital where he underwent major surgery. Although enfeebled, he returned to the attic and began searching again. Compelled by a desire to disclose the truth, he pursued his task whenever he could find the strength. At last, when he was about to give up hope, he uncovered the documents.

However, he explained that the main file was so incendiary that he would not send it by mail or even by messenger -- I was at liberty to examine it in his office. I was faced with a new dilemma. Since I was expecting delivery of an important set of documents, I couldn't risk an absence from my house for a prolonged journey to the East. I said I would call him back.

I knew that Rutgers University was close to DuBois's offices. I called the Law department and asked for a student researcher. Within an hour I received a call from a young man who needed work. I contacted DuBois's secretary and arranged for the student to copy the documents on the premises. He did so; I sent an air courier to his home to pick them up. As I read the documents, the last details of the puzzle fell into place.

I have tried to write this book as dispassionately as possible, without attempting a moral commentary, and without, of course, intending implication of present corporations and their executive boards. It will be claimed that the people in this book, since they are dead, cannot answer and therefore should not be criticized. To that I would reply: Millions died in World War II. They, too, cannot answer.

***

GENERAL LICENSE UNDER SECTION 3(a) OF THE TRADING WITH THE ENEMY ACT

By virtue of and pursuant to the authority vested in me by sections 3 and 5 of The Trading with the Enemy Act as amended, and by virtue of all other authority vested in me, I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, do prescribe the following:

A general license is hereby granted, licensing any transaction or act proscribed by section 3(a) of The Trading with the Enemy Act, as amended, provided, however, that such transaction or act is authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury by means of regulations, rulings, instructions, licenses or otherwise, pursuant to the Executive Order No. 8389, as amended.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 13, 1941
H. MORGENTHAU, JR.
Secretary of the Treasury
FRANCIS BIDDLE
Attorney General of the United States
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 5:32 am

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler [EXCERPT]
by Antony C. Sutton

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INTRODUCTION: Unexplored Facets of Naziism

Since the early 1920s unsubstantiated reports have circulated to the effect that not only German industrialists, but also Wall Street financiers, had some role — possibly a substantial role — in the rise of Hitler and Naziism. This book presents previously unpublished evidence, a great deal from files of the Nuremburg Military Tribunals, to support this hypothesis. However, the full impact and suggestiveness of the evidence cannot be found from reading this volume alone. Two previous books in this series, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution1 and Wall Street and FDR,2 described the roles of the same firms, and often the same individuals and their fellow directors, hard at work manipulating and assisting the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, backing Franklin D. Roosevelt for President in the United States in 1933, as well as aiding the rise of Hitler in pre-war Germany. In brief, this book is part of a more extensive study of the rise of modern socialism and the corporate socialists.

This politically active Wall Street group is more or less the same elitist circle known generally among Conservatives as the "Liberal Establishment," by liberals (for instance G. William Domhoff) as "the ruling class,"3 and by conspiratorial theorists Gary Allen4 and Dan Smoot5 as the "Insiders." But whatever we call this self-perpetuating elitist group, it is apparently fundamentally significant in the determination of world affairs, at a level far behind and above that of the elected politicians.

The influence and work of this same group in the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany is the topic of this book. This is an area of historical research almost totally unexplored by the academic world. It is an historical minefield for the unwary and the careless not aware of the intricacies of research procedures. The Soviets have long accused Wall Street bankers of backing international fascism, but their own record of historical accuracy hardly lends their accusations much credence in the West, and they do not of course criticize support of their own brand of fascism.

This author falls into a different camp. Previously accused of being overly critical of Sovietism and domestic socialism, while ignoring Wall Street and the rise of Hitler, this book hopefully will redress an assumed and quite inaccurate philosophical imbalance and emphasize the real point at issue: Whatever you call the collectivist system — Soviet socialism, New Deal socialism, corporate socialism, or National socialism — it is the average citizen, the guy in the street, that ultimately loses out to the boys running the operation at the top. Each system in its own way is a system of plunder, an organizational device to get everyone living (or attempting to live) at the expense of everyone else, while the elitist leaders, the rulers and the politicians, scalp the cream off the top.

The role of this American power elite in the rise of Hitler should also be viewed in conjunction with a little-known aspect of Hitlerism only now being explored: the mystical origins of Naziism, and its relations with the Thule Society and with other conspiratorial groups. This author is no expert on occultism or conspiracy, but it is obvious that the mystical origins, the neo-pagan historical roots of Naziism, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Thule Society, are relatively unknown areas yet to be explored by technically competent researchers. Some research is already recorded in French; probably the best introduction in English is a translation of Hitler et la Tradition Cathare by Jean Michel Angebert.6

Angebert reveals the 1933 crusade of Schutzstaffel member Otto Rahn in search of the Holy Grail, which was supposedly located in the Cathar stronghold in Southern France. The early Nazi hierarchy (Hitler and Himmler, as well as Rudolph Hess and Rosenberg) was steeped in a neo-pagan theology, in part associated with the Thule Society, whose ideals were close to those of the Bavarian Illuminati. This was a submerged driving force behind Naziism, with a powerful mystical hold over the hard-core S.S. faithful. Our contemporary establishment historians barely mention, let alone explore, these occult origins; consequently, they miss an element equally as important as the financial origins of National Socialism.

In 1950 James Stewart Martin published a very readable book, All Honorable Men7 describing his experiences as Chief of the Economic Warfare Section of the Department of Justice investigating the structure of Nazi industry. Martin asserts that American and British businessmen got themselves appointed to key positions in this post-war investigation to divert, stifle and muffle investigation of Nazi industrialists and so keep hidden their own involvement. One British officer was sentenced by court martial to two years in jail for protecting a Nazi, and several American officials were removed from their positions. Why would American and British businessmen want to protect Nazi businessmen? In public they argued that these were merely German businessmen who had nothing to do with the Nazi regime and were innocent of complicity in Nazi conspiracies. Martin does not explore this explanation in depth, but he is obviously unhappy and skeptical about it. The evidence suggests there was a concerted effort not only to protect Nazi businessmen, but also to protect the collaborating elements from American and British business.

The German businessmen could have disclosed a lot of uncomfortable facts: In return for protection, they told very little. It is undoubtedly not coincidental that the Hitler industrialists on trial at Nuremburg received less than a slap on the wrist. We raise the question of whether the Nuremburg trials should not have been held in Washington — with a few prominent U.S. businessmen as well as Nazi businessmen in the dock!

Two extracts from contemporary sources will introduce and suggest the theme to be expanded. The first extract is from Roosevelt's own files. The U.S. Ambassador in Germany, William Dodd, wrote FDR from Berlin on October 19, 1936 (three years after Hitler came to power), concerning American industrialists and their aid to the Nazis:

Much as I believe in peace as our best policy, I cannot avoid the fears which Wilson emphasized more than once in conversations with me, August 15, 1915 and later: the breakdown of democracy in all Europe will be a disaster to the people. But what can you do? At the present moment more than a hundred American corporations have subsidiaries here or cooperative understandings. The DuPonts have three allies in Germany that are aiding in the armament business. Their chief ally is the I. G. Farben Company, a part of the Government which gives 200,000 marks a year to one propaganda organization operating on American opinion. Standard Oil Company (New York sub-company) sent $2,000,000 here in December 1933 and has made $500,000 a year helping Germans make Ersatz gas for war purposes; but Standard Oil cannot take any of its earnings out of the country except in goods. They do little of this, report their earnings at home, but do not explain the facts. The International Harvester Company president told me their business here rose 33% a year (arms manufacture, I believe), but they could take nothing out. Even our airplanes people have secret arrangement with Krupps. General Motor Company and Ford do enormous businesses/sic] here through their subsidiaries and take no profits out. I mention these facts because they complicate things and add to war dangers.8


Second, a quote from the diary of the same U.S. Ambassador in Germany. The reader should bear in mind that a representative of the cited Vacuum Oil Company — as well as representatives of other Nazi, supporting American firms — was appointed to the post-war Control Commission to de-Nazify the Nazis:

January 25. Thursday. Our Commercial Attache brought Dr. Engelbrecht, chairman of the Vacuum Oil Company in Hamburg, to see me. Engelbrecht repeated what he had said a year ago: "The Standard Oil Company of New York, the parent company of the Vacuum, has spent 10,000,000 marks in Germany trying to find oil resources and building a great refinery near the Hamburg harbor." Engelbrecht is still boring wells and finding a good deal of crude oil in the Hanover region, but he had no hope of great deposits. He hopes Dr. Schacht will subsidize his company as he does some German companies that have found no crude oil. The Vacuum spends all its earnings here, employs 1,000 men and never sends any of its money home. I could give him no encouragement.9


And further:

These men were hardly out of the building before the lawyer came in again to report his difficulties. I could not do anything. I asked him, however: Why did the Standard Oil Company of New York send $1,000,000 over here in December, 1933, to aid the Germans in making gasoline from soft coal for war emergencies? Why do the International Harvester people continue to manufacture in Germany when their company gets nothing out of the country and when it has failed to collect its war losses? He saw my point and agreed that it looked foolish and that it only means greater losses if another war breaks loose.10


The alliance between Nazi political power and American "Big Business" may well have looked foolish to Ambassador Dodd and the American attorney he questioned. In practice, of course, "Big Business" is anything but foolish when it comes to promoting its own self-interest. Investment in Nazi Germany (along with similar investments in the Soviet Union) was a reflection of higher policies, with much more than immediate profit at stake, even though profits could not be repatriated. To trace these "higher policies" one has to penetrate the financial control of multinational corporations, because those who control the flow of finance ultimately control the day-to-day policies.

Carroll Quigley11 has shown that the apex of this international financial control system before World War II was the Bank for International Settlements, with representatives from the international banking firms of Europe and the United States, in an arrangement that continued throughout World War II. During the Nazi period, Germany's representative at the Bank for International Settlements was Hitler's financial genius and president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.

Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht

Wall Street involvement with Hitler's Germany highlights two Germans with Wall Street connections — Hjalmar Schacht and "Putzi" Hanfstaengl. The latter was a friend of Hitler and Roosevelt who played a suspiciously prominent role in the incident that brought Hitler to the peak of dictatorial power — the Reichstag fire of 1933.12

The early history of Hjalmar Schacht, and in particular his role in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was described in my earlier book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. The elder Schacht had worked at the Berlin office of the Equitable Trust Company of New York in the early twentieth century. Hjalmar was born in Germany rather than New York only by the accident of his mother's illness, which required the family to return to Germany. Brother William Schacht was an American-born citizen. To record his American origins, Hjalmar's middle names were designated "Horace Greeley" after the well-know Democrat politician. Consequently, Hjalmar spoke fluent English and the post-war interrogation of Schacht in Project Dustbin was conducted in both German and English. The point to be made is that the Schacht family had its origins in New York, worked for the prominent Wall Street financial house of Equitable Trust (which was controlled by the Morgan firm), and throughout his life Hjalmar retained these Wall Street connections.13 Newspapers and contemporary sources record repeated visits with Owen Young of General Electric; Farish, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey; and their banking counterparts. In brief, Schacht was a member of the international financial elite that wields its power behind the scenes through the political apparatus of a nation. He is a key link between the Wall Street elite and Hitler's inner circle.

This book is divided into two major parts. Part One records the buildup of German cartels through the Dawes and Young Plans in the 1920s. These cartels were the major supporters of Hitler and Naziism and were directly responsible for bringing the Nazis to power in 1933. The roles of American I. G. Farben, General Electric, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Ford, and other U.S. firms is outlined. Part Two presents the known documentary evidence on the financing of Hitler, complete with photographic reproduction of the bank transfer slips used to transfer funds from Farben, General Electric, and other firms to Hitler, through Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.

_______________

Notes:

1. (New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1974)

2. (New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1975)

3. The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America, (New York: Vintage, 1970)

4. None Dare Call It Conspiracy, (Rossmoor: Concord Press, 1971). For another view based on "inside" documents, see Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966)

5. The Invisible Government, (Boston: Western Islands, 1962)

6. Published in English as The Occult and the Third Reich, (The mystical origins of Naziism and the search for the Holy Grail), (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1974). See also Reginald H. Phelps, " 'Before Hitler Came:' Thule Society and Germanen Orden" in the Journal of Modern History, September 1968, No. 3.

7. (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1950)

8. Edgar B. Nixon, ed., Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, Volume III: September 1935-January 1937, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1969), p. 456.

9. Edited by William E. Dodd Jr. and Martha Dodd, Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933-1938, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1941), p. 303.

10. Ibid, p. 358.

11. Quigley, op. cit.

12. For more information about "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, see Chapter Nine.

13. See Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, op. cit., for Sehacht's relations with Soviets and Wall Street, and his directorship of a Soviet bank.
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Re: The Jewish "Declaration of War" on Nazi Germany

Postby admin » Wed Apr 25, 2018 7:48 am

Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal [EXCERPT]
by Lenni Brenner

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14. THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANISATION AND ITALIAN FASCISM, 1933-1937

In 1933 Mussolini was well regarded by conservatives. He was thought to be the only one to have the ear of his wild disciple in Berlin, and the Zionists hoped that he would advise Hitler that to antagonise the Jews unduly could only cause needless problems. They also believed that Mussolini might be prevailed upon to join London and Paris in guaranteeing Vienna against a Nazi take-over.

Nahum Sokolow, then President of the WZO, saw Mussolini on 16 February 1933. Sokolow was not a strong figure; he had only been elected in 1931 on Weizmann’s resignation after losing a vote of confidence on his policy of accommodation to the British, and he made no requests of Mussolini. However, Mussolini spoke of his 'cordial sympathy’ for the Jews. When the Nazis announced their anti-Jewish boycott for 1 April, Mussolini sent his ambassador to see Hitler on 31 March, urging him to call it off. At this meeting the Fuhrer heaped praise upon the Duce, but Adolf Hitler was the world’s greatest expert on the Jews and needed no lecture on how to deal with them. Was it his fault that the leading Marxists were Jews? And what excesses had he perpetrated on the Jews that his name should be so maligned abroad, he retorted. No, his admirers might thank him if he called off the boycott, but his many enemies would all take it as a sign of weakness. Hitler asked that the next time the ambassador saw Signor Mussolini:

Add this: That I do not know whether in two or three hundred years my name will be venerated in Germany for what I so ardently hope to be able to do for my people, but of one thing I am absolutely certain: that five or six hundred years from now, the name of Hitler will be glorified everywhere as the name of the man who once and for all rid the world of the plague of Judaism. [332]


The Italians, who were concerned about Germany’s designs on Austria, were on relatively good terms with the British as a result and gave London a report on the Hitler interview, but there is no reason to believe that Mussolini ever passed on these ominous words to the Zionists, nor is there evidence that the WZO ever presumed to request that the Italians pass them such information on Hitler's intentions. The WZO's interest lay in getting Mussolini to support them on Palestine, ally with the British on Austria, and lobby on behalf of German Jewry within the Nazis' parameters. There was an old tradition in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe of the shtadlan (the interceder), the rich Jew who would go to the resident Haman and bribe him to call off the mob. But Hitler was not the ordinary Jew-hating king, or even a Petliura, and no Jew was allowed in his presence. Although Zionism had to fight the traditional shtadlinim for power within the Jewish communities and made much of the timidity of these people, the WZO looked to Mussolini to be their proxy intercessor with Hitler. Getting Mussolini to whisper into Hitler's ear was but the latest form of shtadlinut.

'My Third and Last Interview with Mussolini'

Though his prophesy to Mussolini's ambassador was awesome, Hitler was acutely aware of his weakness in early 1933. The opposition to stepping up the persecution of the Jews, as witness both Mussolini's intervention and the pleas of the German bourgeoisie, who were concerned for their export markets in the United States, compelled him to restrict the boycott to a one-day warning to the Jews. But Mussolini took this caution to mean that some form of modus vivendi was possible. He had tried to help the Jews; now he had to do likewise for Hitler. He asked Angelo Sacerdoti, the chief rabbi of Rome, to put him in contact with the heads of Jewry, suggesting that Hitler could scarcely be expected to stop his activities, if he did not have prior guarantees from world Jewry that they would call off their own demonstrations against him. Weizmann was already scheduled to visit Rome on 26 April 1933, and the rabbi suggested him as the logical contact; thus the third Weizmann-Mussolini meeting was quickly arranged.

Their discussion is shrouded in obscurity. Nahum Goldmann, Weizmann's long-standing associate, has remarked that anything unpleasant 'simply put his memory out of action'. [333] The record in Weizmann's autobiography, Trial and Error, is inconsistent. He wrote of 'My third and last interview with Mussolini', and then discussed their fourth conference. [334] Was it ever possible to forget a meeting in Mussolini's famous office? The reception at the Palazzo Venezia was meant to be memorable: a bell opened a window and an officer loudly announced that dottore Weizmann was there to see il Duce; a row of soldiers ushered him to the next floor, where he was again heralded; this was repeated four times. After a wait in a splendid Renaissance drawing-room, Weizmann was announced by a final footman and he stepped into the fabled chamber. It was huge, at least 40-50 paces long; at the far end of the almost empty hall was Mussolini, sitting alone, the only light coming from a lamp on his small desk.

Other Italian and Zionist documents reveal some of the content of their conversation. Mussolini made his proposition that the heads of Jewry should declare that they were willing to call off their demonstrations and negotiate with Hitler. He had his own anti-Semitic notion of Jewry as a collective body, and Weizmann had to explain that he had no control over the non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, nor even over his own movement which had compelled his own retirement from active office. He was now organising the immigration of German Jews into Palestine and would not take on further assignments; later, he said that he told Mussolini he did not negotiate with 'wild beasts'. [335] The curtain over the meeting prevents us from hearing more of their dialogue, but 26 April was still prior to Sam Cohen's deal with the Nazis in May; even if Weizmann had had knowledge of Cohen's discussions in Berlin, he could hardly have raised this still vague project. But by 17 June, when he wrote to Mussolini asking for another meeting in July, Arlosoroff had returned home from his own parleys with the Nazis over the terms of the extended Ha'avara and it is reasonable to think that Weizmann wanted to discuss the proposed Fascist participation in the Political Secretary's liquidation bank. Weizmann could now prove to the Italians that the WZO was willing to come to terms with Hitler, even if that organisation could not order all Jewry to stop demonstrating. Although there is no evidence that the April conversation resulted in Weizmann’s trying to get the pledge out of the world's Jewish leaders, rabbi Sacerdoti did attempt to carry out Mussolini's urgings. On 10 July he reported to the Duce that he had met five Jewish leaders, the chief rabbi of France, the President of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Neville Laski, head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and Norman Bentwich and Victor Jacobson of the WZO. They had all agreed to call off demonstrations, if Hitler would restore the Jews’ rights. [336]

'I shall be Able to Place at your Disposal a whole Team of Chemists'

Although Weizmann wanted a quicker meeting, his fourth conversation with Mussolini could not be arranged until 17 February 1934. Through the reports he gave at the time to the British and the report of Victor Jacobson of the Zionist Executive, in addition to Italian documents, the record of the fourth meeting is fairly complete. Mussolini asked if he had tried to deal with Hitler; Weizmann, who, through his friend Sam Cohen, had just asked to be invited to Berlin to discuss the liquidation bank proposal, told him, again, that he did not negotiate with wild beasts. [337] They changed the subject and went directly to the topic of Palestine; Mussolini supported Weizmann's idea of partition and an independent Zionist ministate with the proviso that it should be independent of Britain. Mussolini also told him that he would help the Zionists establish their new merchant marine, although it is doubtful if Weizmann knew anything about the Revisionists' planned school at Civitavecchia.

Weizmann was a politician and he knew he had to give as well as take. His own rather unreliable autobiography tells that Mussolini 'talked freely of a Rome-Paris-London combination, which, he said, was the logical one for Italy. He spoke also of the chemical industry, and of the Italian need of pharmaceuticals, which we could produce in Palestine'. [338]

He wrote those words in 1947; after the war the President of the WZO could scarcely admit that he had offered to build a pharmaceutical industry in Fascist Italy, but the record is clear. Victor Jacobson, the WZO’s representative at the League of Nations, had accompanied Weizmann to Italy and sent a detailed report of the interview to the Zionist Executive. Weizmann told Mussolini:

I shall be able to place at your disposal a whole team of chemists of the highest scientific standing; expert, trustworthy and loyal men with only one desire -– to help Italy and harm Germany. If necessary, we will also be able to find the necessary capital. [339]


The Italians appointed Nicola Paravano to meet Weizmann the next day. Marquis Theodoli, the Chairman of the League of Nations Mandate Commission, was present and his memoirs record that Weizmann and the Fascists reached complete agreement on the plan. In the end nothing came of the arrangement, and in his autobiography Weizmann blamed the British:

I repeated the substance of this conversation to my British friends in London but it had no consequences… I do not know whether detaching Rome from Berlin would have prevented the outbreak of the war, but it certainly might have made a great difference to the war in the Mediterranean, might have saved many lives and shortened the agony by many months. [340]


Certainly the British were not interested in his scheme; furthermore, it is highly unlikely that he could have raised the capital to support his offer of direct economic collaboration with Fascism. He was always a diplomatic speculator; later he would make an equally fantastic offer of a $50 million Jewish loan to the Turks, if they, too, would ally with London. He worked on a principle that, if he could generate interest at one end of an alliance, something might happen at the other. It is doubtful if any of his pre-war diplomatic ploys, which were always tailored to suit the interest of the other side, but carefully designed to make Palestinian Zionism a central pivot of Britain's Mediterranean defence, were accepted by his negotiating partners.
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