Photograph courtesy of Arnon Goldfinger (c) 2014
This article was published by Alliance (Marxist-Leninist) as part of the publication Alliance, issue #30, “Marx, Lenin and Stalin on Zionism.”
The desire to be free of oppressions from pogroms is naturally understandable. But could that desire lead to an alliance with forces of fascism that would promote the worst pogrom known to us to date? It is most “politically incorrect” to say that it did.
However Lenni Brenner clearly illustrated this indeed occurred. He has described this well in the book: “Zionism in the Age of Dictators.”
The natural consequence of a Zionist ‘separatist’ mentality was described by Mussolini as only being correctly understood by one of the founders of Israel – a fellow “fascist” – Vladimir Yabotinsky:
“The highest.. accolade was from Mussolini who, in 1935, told David Prato, later to become chief rabbi of Rome, that: For Zionism to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky.”
Bar-Zohar, “Ben-Gurion-The Armed Prophet”, p. 46. Cited by Brenner, Lenni in Chapter 10:”Zionist- revisionism and Italian Fascism; in: “Zionism in the Age of Dictators”; 1983, Kent; ISBN (GB) 0-7099- 0628-5; p.117;
Web site of International Secretariat of the War & Holocaust Tales Ancient Amateurs’ Association; (WHOTAAAN) in 1996;
http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
As shown by Brenner, the Zionists across Europe were in fact, at best ambivalent to fascist regimes, and informed many of the key Zionist colonists of Palestine including the notorious Stern Gang. Brenner’s contentions inflame Zionists. But the objective reality was that Zionist Jews turned their views and thoughts towards, what was for them a “Zion”, but which was in reality the Arabic Palestine. Zionists had agreed that their current place of residence was only a temporary historical stopping over.
We will now follow Brenner, and cite Brenner at great length, to illustrate the objective logic of “Zionist separatism” versus “Assimilation” during the Second World War, up to 1945.
In the First Phase the Zionist forces obstructed the anti-Nazi United Front;
Secondly and later on, they denied that the extermination of the Jews was occurring.
Thirdly, in yet another phase, the highest echelons of the Zionists indicated that they were prepared to “sacrifice” a substantial part of European Jewry, as the Allies post-war would now accept the need for a seperate “Jewish Homeland”.
Fourthly: Zionist sympathies were not primarily given to the only potential forces – communism and socialism – that could stop fascism. This especially applied to German Jews:
“German Jewry was deeply loyal to the Weimar Republic which had put an end to the discriminations of the Wilhelmine era. Germany’s Jews, (0.9 per cent of the population) were generally prosperous: 60 per cent were businessmen or professionals; the rest artisans clerks, students, with only insubstantial numbers of industrial workers. Most were for liberal capitalism with 64 per cent voting for the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP). About 28 per cent voted for the moderate Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). Only 4 per cent voted for the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), and the rest were scattered Rightists.”
Lenni Brenner:” Zionism in the Age of Dictators”; Chapter 3; “German Zionism & The collapse of the Weimar Republic”; p. 27; or http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad3.htmlOn web; Ibid 1996;
When Hitler appeared to be gaining ground in Germany, Jewish organisations led by their youth, did belatedly try to counter the worst fascist atrocities:
“Religious Jewry turned to its traditional defence organisation, the Centralverein, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith; now, for the first time, the department store owners, who had become a prime target for the attentions of the Nazi brown-shirts, began to contribute to the CV’s efforts…younger members of the CV pushed aside the old leadership and were able to get the CV .. to subsidise the SDP’s anti-Nazi propaganda. After the DDP’s betrayal, the SDP picked up approximately 60 per cent of the Jewish vote. Only 8 per cent went Communist.”
Brenner Chapter 3; op Cit; p.27
Web Citation. http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad3.html
Elsewhere it has been pointed out by the Marxist-Leninists of the Communist League, that the effective resistance to the Nazis was sabotaged by the criminal sectarianism foisted upon the KPD by the revisionists of the KPD and the revisionist leaders of the Communist International led by Dimitrov. (Compass Issue 1996.)
Brenner correctly points out that if both the SDP & the KPD did not organise effectively against fascism – neither did the German Zionists:
“If the SDP and the KPD must bear their full measure of guilt for Hitler’s triumph, so too must the Zionistische Vereinigung fur Deutschland (the Zionist Federation of Germany-ZVfD). Although conventional wisdom has always assumed that the Zionists, with their dire view of anti-Semitism, warned the Jews of the Nazi menace, this is in fact not true….. a diligent search of the pages of the Jeudische Rundschau, the weekly organ of the ZVfD, will not reveal.. prophecies (foretelling Hitler’s accession to power-Ed). When a Jew was killed several hundred Jewish stores looted in a November 1923 hunger riot in Berlin, Kurt Blumenfeld, the Secretary (later President) of the ZVfD, consciously played down the incident:
‘There would be a very cheap and effective kind of reaction, and we … decisively reject it. One could incite deep anxiety among German Jewry. One could use the excitement to enlist the vacillating. One could represent Palestine and Zionism as a refuge for the homeless. We do not wish to do that. We do not wish to carry off by demagoguery those who have stood apart from Jewish life out of indifference. But we wish to make clear to them through [our] sincere conviction where the basic error of Jewish galuth [exile] existence lies. We wish to awaken their national self(awareness. We wish … through patient and earnest educational; work [to] prepare them to participate in the upbuilding of Palestine.”
From Brenner Ibid; Chapter 3; p. 29; also citing Stephen Poppel, Zionism in Germany’ 1897-1933, p.119.
Brenner cites Stephen Poppel, author of “Zionism in Germany 1897-1933”, to the effect that until 1931 “Far from warning and defending the Jews, prominent Zionists opposed anti-Nazi activity.” The logic of the Zionists in Germany was to agree with the Nazis that Jew and Gentile could not in fact co-exist:
“It had been the German Zionists who had most fully elaborated the ideology of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) before 1914 and in the 1920s they developed the argument to its logical conclusion: Judaism in the Diaspora was hopeless. There was no possible defence against anti-Semitism and there was no purpose in trying to develop Jewish cultural and community institutions in Germany. The ZVfD turned away from the society in which they lived. There were only two Zionist tasks: instilling nationalist consciousness in as many Jews as would listen and training youths for occupations useful in the economic development of Palestine. Anything else was useless and palliative.”
Brenner Chapter 3; op Cit; p. 30; Or at Web Citation. http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad3.html
The rigorous extent to which this type of logic was taken is instructive when assessing the claims of present day Zionists proclaiming the Anecessity” of the state of Israel in its current form. Thus In 1925 the “total abstentionist” Jacob Klatzkin, a co-editor of the “Encyclopedia Judaica” stated:
“If we do not admit the rightfulness of antisemitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism. If our people is deserving and willing to live its own national life, then it is an alien body thrust into the nations among whom it lives, an alien body that insists on its own distinctive identity, reducing the domain of their life. It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity. Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites, who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends who desire to defend our rights.”
Jacob Agus, The Meaning of Jewish History, vol. II, p. 425; cited Brenner; p. 30.
After the June 1930 elections in Saxony, where Nazis obtained 14.4 per cent of the vote:
“The Berlin Jewish community put pressure on the ZVfD to join a Reichstag Election Committee in conjunction with the CV and other assimilationists. But the ZVfD’s adherence was strictly nominal; the assimilationists complained that the Zionists put barely any time or money into it, and it dissolved immediately after the election… Siegfried Moses, later Blumenfeld’s successor as head of the federation, demonstrated the Zionists, indifference to the construction of a strenuous defence:
“We have always believed the defence against anti-Semitism to be a task which concerns all Jews and have clearly stated the methods of which we approve and those which we consider irrelevant or ineffective. But it is true that the defence against anti-Semitism is not our main task, it does not concern us to the same extent and is not of the same importance for us as is the work for Palestine and, in a somewhat different sense, the work of the Jewish communities.”
“Reactions Jewish Press to Nazi Challenge”, Leo Baeck Inst. Yr Bk, V (1960), p. 312; In Brenner; ibid; p. 31.
It is not the case that all Jews were so blind to the dangers. Obviously the position of the Zionists was directly contrary to that section of the Jewish population that had accepted and welcomed assimilation:
“The ZVfD leaders could never effectively unite with the assimilationists on defence work. They were total abstentionists politically, and they were volkists they did not believe in the CV’s fundamental premise that the Jews were Germans. Their concern was that the Jews should emphasise their Jewishness. They reasoned that if Jews started to consider themselves a separate national minority, and stopped interfering in ‘Aryan’ affairs, it would be possible to get the anti-Semites to tolerate them on a basis of a dignified’ coexistence. The assimilationists would have none of this; to them the Zionist position was just an echo of the Nazi line. There is no doubt that the assimilationists were correct.”
Brenner Chapter 3; op Cit Web Citation.
But in the face of the KPD sectarianism the best of the Jewish assimilationists had no effective United Front to go to. Moreover, to their own youth, the Zionist leadership preached fervent anti-communism, describing it in 1932 as “red assimilation” (See Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, p. 30).
Sections of the Jewish bourgeoisie, such as Georg Kareski, a banker, disagreed with the Zionists. In 1919 he founded the “Juedische Volkspartei”. But in 1930, he unsuccessfully stood for the Reichstag on a Catholic Centre platform. He then set up the “Organisation of Jewish Centre Party Voters”. Even the left wing of the Jewish population was dominated by the idea of a Zion:
“On the Zionist left the German branch of the Poale Zion backed the incompetent leadership of the SDP. Before 1914 the SDP refused to associate with Zionism, which it saw as separating the Jews from other workers, and only those elements on the far right of the SDP that supported German imperialism in Africa patronised the Labour Zionists, whom they saw as fellow socialist colonisers. The Socialist International only established friendly relations with Poale Zion during and after the First World War, when the left-wing anti-colonialist forces joined the Communist International. The Labour Zionists joined the SDP with one central purpose: to gain support for Zionism.”
Brenner Chapter 3; p. 33; op Cit; Or at:
Web Citation. http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad3.html
Even after Hitler’s accession to power, the Jewish leaders did not organise effectively. The Zionists position has been explained. However the assimilationists also were tragically short sighted. They wished to not create waves to draw attention to them. This is perhaps understandable. However the attitude of actively identifying with the Nazi concept of “Volk” was also adopted by sections of Zionism:
“Gustav Krojanker, editor at the Judischer Verlag, the oldest Zionist publishing house in Europe, also saw the two movements’ common roots in volkist irrationalism, and drew the conclusion that Zionists should look positively at the nationalist aspects of Nazism. A benign approach toward their fellow volkists, he naively reasoned, would perhaps bring forth an equivalent benevolence toward Zionism on the part of the Nazis.”
Brenner Ibid; p. 35-36; citing Herbert Strauss, Jewish Reactions to the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany, p. 13.
As far as Krojanker and many other Zionists were concerned, democracy’s day was over. Harry Sacher, a Briton, one of the leaders of the WZO in the period, explained Krojanker’s theories in a review of Krojanker’s book, “Zum Problem Ausutschen Nationalismus”:
“For Zionists, Liberalism is the enemy; it is also the enemy for Nazism; ergo, Zionism should have much sympathy and understanding for Nazism, of which anti-Semitism is probably a fleeting accident.”
Harry Sacher, review of Gustav Krojanker, Zum Problem des Neuen Deutschen Nationalismus, Jewish Review (London, September 1932), p. 104; Cited By Brenner Ibid; p. 36.
Thus international Jewry was not only confused about the nature of fascism, but often its leaders took mis-guided steps to dissuade even any moderately active anti-Nazi organisation, such as goods boycotts:
“Certainly those Jewish groups like the JWV, the Anti-Nazi League and the AJC were ineffectual, but there were those in the Jewish community in America and Britain who specifically opposed the very notion of a boycott. The American Jewish Committee, the B’rnai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant) fraternal order and the Board of Deputies of British Jews refused to back the boycott. They feared that if the Jewish workers, and others as well, took it into their heads to fight Hitler, perhaps they would stay in motion and come after their own rich closer to home. These worthies confined themselves to charity efforts for German Jewry and its refugees and prayed that Hitlerism would not spread. The Agudas Yisrael (Union of Israel), the political arm of the most extreme wing of traditional Orthodoxy, opposed the boycott on religious grounds as well as their social conservativism. They claimed that ever since the ancient Jewish kingdom was destroyed by the Romans, the Talmud had forbidden Jews to revolt against Gentile authority in the Diaspora; they interpreted the boycott as rebellion and therefore forbidden. However, of all of the active Jewish opponents of the boycott idea, the most important was the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). It not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers. The WZO saw Hitler’s victory in much the same way as its German affiliate, the ZVfD: not primarily as a defeat for all Jewry, but as positive proof of the bankruptcy of assimilationism and liberalism. Their own hour was at hand. Zionists began to sound like tent-revivalists: Hitler was history’s flail to drive the stiff-necked Jews back to their own kind and their own land.”
Lenni Brenner: “Zionism in the Age of Dictators”; Chapter 6″The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Zionist-Nazi Trade agreement”; Op Cit p. 58;
or at: Web site for index, as before: http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
It is true that some were far more aware, such as the American rabbi, Abraham Jacobson, who:
“Protested against this insane idea, which was still quite widespread even as late as 1936: “How many times have we heard the impious wish uttered in despair over the apathy of American Jews to Zionism, that a Hitler descend upon them? Then they would realize the need for Palestine!”
Lenni Brenner: “Zionism in the Age of Dictators”; Chapter 6″The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott and the Zionist-Nazi Trade agreement”; p. 60; Op Cit; or at: Web site. http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
However most of the leaders were drawn to the prospect of using Nazism as a vehicle for the creation of a Zionist homeland – kicking out the resident Palestinians.
This desire, was the vehicle by which the WZO itself destroyed even the weak boycott of Nazi German goods. They supported and then took over the 1933 independent proposal of a Sam Cohen:
“The owner of Ha Note’a Ltd, a Tel Aviv citrus export firm. Even under Chancellor Bruning the German government had put a flight tax on capital leaving the country and Cohen had proposed that Zionist emigres be allowed to avoid the tax by purchasing goods in Germany which would later be turned back into cash after sale in Palestine. Bruning had no interest in the idea, but in 1933 Cohen, on his own, presented the plan again. The Nazis were already worried about the effect even the spontaneous and lamentably organised boycott was having on their balance of trade, and Heinrich Wolff, the German Consul in Jerusalem, quickly grasped just how useful Cohen’s proposition could be. He wrote to his ministry:
“In this way it might be possible to wage a successful campaign against the Jewish boycott of Germany. It might be possible to make a breach in the wall.’
The Jews, he argued, would be put in a quandary. Further boycott would be seen as imposing problems on emigrants seeking to find new homes for themselves in Palestine or elsewhere. Because of his location, Wolff was one of the first Germans to perceive the growing importance of Palestine in the Jewish equation, and in June he wrote again to Berlin:
‘Whereas in April and May the Yishuv was waiting boycott instructions from the United States, it now seems that the situation has been transformed. It is Palestine which now gives the instructions… It is important to break the boycott first and foremost in Palestine, and the effect will inevitably be felt on the main front, in the United States.’
Brenner Chapter 6; p. 61; Op Cit;
or at Web Site. http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
Accordingly contracts were soon signed that were then taken over by the WZO. Moreover the WZO now used this lever to transfer monies out of Germany ear-marked for buying land in then Palestine:
“In early May 1933 the Nazis signed an agreement with Cohen for one million Reichmarks ($400,000) of Jewish wealth to be shipped to Palestine in the form of farm machinery. At this point the WZO intervened. The Depression had badly affected donations and in March 1933 they had desperately cabled to their followers in America pleading that if funds were not forthcoming immediately’ they were heading for imminent financial collapse. Now Menachem Ussischkin, head of the Jewish National Fund, got Cohen to arrange for the release of frozen JNF monies in Germany via Ha Note’a. The bait for the Nazis was that the cash was needed to buy land for the Jews whom Hitler would be pushing out. Cohen also assured Heinrich Wolff that he would operate: Behind the scenes, at a forthcoming Jewish conference in London to weaken or defeat any boycott resolution’. Dr Fritz Reichert, the Gestapo’s agent in Palestine, later wrote to his headquarters reminding them of the affair:
‘The London Boycott Conference was torpedoed from Tel Aviv because the head of the Transfer in Palestine, in close contact with the consulate in Jerusalem, sent cables to London. Our main function here is to prevent, from Palestine, the unification of world Jewry on a basis hostile to Germany… It is advisable to damage the political and economic strength of Jewry by sowing dissension in its ranks.'”
Brenner Chapter 6; p.62; Op Cit;
or at Web Site. http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
But the WZO had even grander aims than Sam Cohen. They saw an opportunity to draw enough money and immigrants into Palestine to drown by weight of numbers the indigenous and inconvenient Palestinian Arabs. The calculations involved the tacit approval of the British. This was a plan woven by a self-proclaimed “Socialist-Zionist,” named Chaim Arlosoroff. Brenner describes the secret calculation as “cold”:
“Sam Cohen was soon superseded.. by Labour Zionist, Chaim Arlosoroff, the Political Secretary of the Jewish Agency, the WZO’s Palestine centre. ..In 1932 he had concluded that they had failed to attract enough immigrants to overcome the Arabs’ numbers and they were not drawing enough Jewish capital. Hitler in power would mean war within ten years… Now.. he had the way for Zionism to solve its difficulties: with Britain’s agreement, they could get both the immigrants and the capital needed through extending Cohen’s project. In an article in the Rundschau .. he coldly explained that this could only be done in complete co-operation with Berlin:
‘Naturally, Germany cannot expose herself to the risk of upsetting her currency and exchange balance in order to meet the Jews, but a way out can be found to adjust these different interests… It would be worth while, leaving all sentimentalities out of the question, to reach such an agreement with Germany.
The self-styled “Socialist-Zionist” then proposed the ultimate alliance, a deal between the Zionists, the Nazis, the Fascists and the British Empire, to organise the evacuation of Jewry from Germany:‘It could also be possible to establish a company, with the participation of the German State and other European, primarily British and Italian interests, which would slowly liquidate the particular properties by issuing letters of credit… [and creating… a guarantee fund.”
Brenner Chapter 6; p. 62-63; Op Cit;
or at Web Site; http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
Harry Hopkins related the events of a meeting on 27 March 1943 between President Roosevelt, Anthony Eden and others on the question of saving Bulgarian and other Jews. Eden said:
“We should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.”
Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; p. 228; Ibid; or at http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
Brenner points out that according to Churchill, the Arabs were no better than a backward people who eat nothing but camel dung’. (Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; p. 228; or at web: http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html )
As far as the British were concerned they could control the Arabs better than they might be able to control the Zionists. They temporarily therefore favoured the Arabs. Most sections of the Zionists therefore saw merit in “currying favour” with the British. They tried to consider the benefits of the war to Jewry:
“Their first thought was how to turn the war to their advantage in Palestine. Yoav Gelber of the Yad Vashem Institute (Israel’s Holocaust Institute-ed) gives a good account of this view among the Labour Zionists in September 1939:
‘The majority of the leaders tended to Palestine and its problems as the touchstone of their attitude towards the war. They were inclined to leave the front-line fighting as such, if unconnected to Palestine, to the Jews of the Diaspora.'”
Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; p.229; ?Ibid; or at web: http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
In fact there was very little attention to the plight of the European Jews from the Jewish Agency Executive. Zionist leaders in the USA were also not only unhelpful, but argued not to assist even with food packages as this relieved pressure on the Nazis:
“Furthermore, the American Zionist leadership campaigned against those Jews who were trying to aid the stricken. Aryeh Tartakower, who was in charge of aid work for the World Jewish Congress in America in 1940, has told some of the story:..:
‘We received a call from the American Government, from the State Department and they brought to our attention that sending parcels to the Jews in Poland was not in the interests of the Allies… The first one to tell us to stop immediately was Dr Stephen Wise… He said: ‘We must stop for the good of England.”
Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; p. 229; Ibid;
http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
The Zionist-Nazi Pact And Trade
In 1933, a Zionist-Nazi Pact was announced.
This is a little known -yet extraordinary event. It’s lack of reporting must be compared to the constant malignment of the USSR for the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
That USSR-German pact was essential for the survival of the USSR against imperialist machinations’ and the USSR had tried repetitively before hand, to get a united front against German fascism. The Western imperialists had refused and had sabotaged even their own weak-kneed commitments to protecting the sovereignity of several countries, that German Nazism blithely ignored with no repercussions to itself. In fact the clear and obvious strategy of the Western imperialists was to drive Germany against the USSR by so-called “appeasement.” (See articles by Communist League & Alliance elsewhere).
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact “spiked the guns of the imperialists”, buying vital time to move the industry East of the Urals and continue fevered preperation for inevitable war.
But, the Zionist-Nazi Pact was quite different – it was simply another instance of how far Zionists were prepared to go to create a Zionist homeland in Palestine.
The Pact allowed the Zionists to ship 3 million Reichmarks worth of Jewish wealth, in the form of German export goods, to Palestine.
The Zionist leaders of the WZO tried to prevent any serious discussion of this manouevre of theirs:
“The Zionist-Nazi pact was announced by the Nazis in time for the 18th Zionist Congress in August in Prague. Hitler’s shadow completely dominated the Prague Congress. The WZO’s leaders knew that the Nazis were interested in a deal and they determined to avoid offending Germany by limiting discussion of the situation there to the barest minimum. The regime as such was not condemned… No plan was proposed to put pressure on the world body, nor was any specific action called for.”
L.Brenner; WWW; Ibid; Chapter 6: “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott”; p.63; ibid;
or via web: See index page at: http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
This news, of the “Zionist-Nazi Pact,” effectively discouraged adoption of an anti-Nazi Boycott. To further facilitate and absolutely ensure this rejection further, the case for the Boycott was actually presented by the fascist Zionist Vladamir Jabotinsky, whose brown shirted troops, had thoroughly alienated the Congress:
“The Zionist-Nazi pact became public the day before a boycott resolution was to be debated, and it may be speculated that the Nazis did this so as to discourage endorsement of the boycott. The leader of the right-wing .. Vladimir Jabotinsky, presented the boycott case.. Jabotinsky’s support for the boycott, and his opposition to the pact, was dismissed as the raging of a terrorist opponent of the democratically elected moderate leadership. His resolution was defeated by a vote of 240 to 48.”
L.Brenner; WWW; Ibid; Chapter 6: “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott”; ibid; p.63; or at http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
However when the Nazis publicised the pact, the floor of the Congress was furious. The leaders of the WZO lied about their role:
“When the Nazis announced that they had signed an agreement with the Zionists allowing German Jews to ship three million Reichmarks’ worth of Jewish wealth to Palestine in the form of German export goods.. pandemonium broke loose. The leadership.. tried to protect themselves by outright lying; the Labour leader, Berl Locker, brazenly proclaimed: the executive of the World Zionist Organisation had nothing to do with the negotiations which led to an agreement with the German government’. No one believed this crude fabrication.”
L.Brenner; WWW; Ibid; Chapter 6: “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott”; p. 64;
or at http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
The Zionist leaders pretended the blame lay solely with a bank. But since it was their bank, this shallow pretence was clearly seen through:
“The Political Committee”.. leaders did not dare take official responsibility for the Ha’avara’ or Transfer Agreement, and pretended that it only bound Germany and the formal signatory, the Anglo-Palestine Bank. But, since the bank was their own bank, they only succeeded in making themselves look ridiculous.. The debate over the Zionist-Nazi pact continued angrily until 1935.”
L.Brenner; WWW; Ibid; Chapter 6: p. 64; “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott”; http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
The financial trading associated with the Zionist-Nazi Pact was considerable, and laid at least some of the basis for the colonisation of the Arab owned Palestine. It did operate under Nazi rules, and it did have a top limit of cash transfer. This meant that the richest fractions of the Jews transferred monies (somehow) elsewhere. But the proportion sent purely for a Zionist Palestine was critical at that time:
“The Ha’avara rapidly grew to become a substantial banking and trading house with 137 specialists in its Jerusalem office .. in essence the agreement was always the same: German Jews could put money into a bank inside Germany, which was then used to buy exports which were sold outside Germany, usually but not exclusively in Palestine. When the emigres finally arrived in Palestine, they would receive payment for the goods that they had previously purchased after they had finally been sold. …its attraction to German Jews remained the same: it was the least painful way of shipping Jewish wealth out of Germany. However, the Nazis determined the rules, and they naturally got worse with time; by 1938 the average user was losing at least 30 per cent and even 50 per cent of his money. Nevertheless, this was still three times, and eventually five times, better than the losses endured by Jews whose money went to any other destination. The top limit through the Ha’avara scheme was 50,000 marks ($20,000 or ) per emigrant, which made the Ha’avara unattractive to the richest Jews. Therefore only $40,419,000 went to Palestine via Ha’avara, whereas $650 million went to the United States, $60 million to the United Kingdom and other substantial sums elsewhere. Yet if, in terms of German Jewry’s wealth, Ha’avara was by no means decisive, it was crucial to Zionism. Some 60 per cent of all capital invested in Palestine between August 1933 and September 1939 was channelled through the agreement with the Nazis.”
L.Brenner; WWW; Ibid; Chapter 6: ” The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott”; p. 65; or at:
http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
The rank and file of the Jewish workers in many countries abhorred and organised against the Pact:
“The great majority of Jews opposed the Ha’avara. It had no defenders outside the WZO, and trading with the Nazis was not popular with many inside its own ranks. Protests started pouring in while the Prague Congress was still in session. The pact was extremely unpopular in Poland, where the Jews feared that if there was no resistance to the anti-Semitism next door, their own Jew-haters would start demanding that the Polish government imitate the Germans. In America and Britain, each with a more or less democratic tradition, many Zionists, including some of the leading names in the movement, opposed it (like-ed) the prominent Cleveland rabbi, Abba Hille Silver.”
L.Brenner; Ibid; Chapter 6: “The Jewish Anti-Nazi Boycott”; ibid; p. 66;
or at: http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
But the unconcern of the leaders of the WZO with the anti-Nazi attitudes of many Jews continued even up to the 1935 Lucerne Congress. The leaders’ attitudes remained that Nazism assisted the formation of Israel:
“But by far the best example of the leadership’s unwillingness to resist the Nazis was Weizmann’s statement:
“The only dignified and really effective reply to all that is being inflicted upon the Jews of Germany is the edifice erected by our great and beautiful work in the Land of Israel… Something is being created that will transform the woe we all suffer into songs and legends for our grand-children.”….
(This cynicism was roundly condemned by Jews in Britain and in the USA -Editor Alliance] …
“Press criticism was immediate. London’s ‘World Jewry’, then the best Zionist magazine in the English language, excoriated their own World Congress:
‘Dr Weizmann went as far as to state that the only dignified reply the Jews could give was a renewed effort for the upbuilding of Palestine. How terrifying the proclamation of the Congress President must have sounded in the ears of Herren Hitler, Streicher and Goebbels!”
In America the opposition to the Ha’avara was particularly intense in the garment industry trade unions, with their hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers. Most of the Jewish labour leaders had always looked upon Zionism with contempt. Many of them were from Russia and knew about the fateful Herzl-Plevhe meeting and how their old enemy Zubatov had backed the Poale Zionists against the Bund. As far as they were concerned the Ha’avara was just Zionism up to its old tricks, and in December 1935 Baruch Charney Vladeck, the Chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, and himself an ex-Bundist from Poland, debated Berl Locker, the organisational head of the Palestinian Poale Zion, before an overflow crowd in New York. Locker was compelled to take a defensive position, insisting that the agreement was purely in the interest of the German Jews.”
Brenner Ibid Chapter 6; p. 71; 72; 73.
or at http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
But some wanted further manifestations of the ‘apartheid” mentality of Herzl:
“If the majority of Jews did oppose the Ha’avara as treason, there was one at least who was willing to go on record as complaining that Weizmann and his friends were not going far enough. Gustav Krojanker.. one of the leaders of the Hitachdut Olei Germania (the German Immigrants Association in Palestine) in 1936 the association published.. “The Transfer: A Vital Question of the Zionist Movement”. To him Zionism was stark calculation, nothing more, and he was more than willing to draw the logical conclusions already inherent in the Zionist-Nazi pact. He claimed to see Nazism and the opportunities it opened up for Zionism in the authentic Herzlian manner: … he perceived two political factors –an organisation of the Jewish people on the one side, and the countries concerned on the other. They were to be partners in a pact.”
Brenner Ibid Chapter 6; p. 74;
http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
The WZO extended the agreements that busted the boycott to other countries and goods:
“In March 1936, Siegfried Moses’s negotiations had finally created the International Trade and Investment Agency (INTRIA) bank in London to organise sales of German products directly in Britain itself. The Nazis had to content themselves with the satisfaction of the further demoralisation of the boycott forces, as fear of Jewish and general British hostility to boycott–scabbing made it impossible for INTRIA to go so far as to allow British currency to come directly into German hands. Instead, the goods were bought in Germany for marks and their value was credited to Jewish capitalists needing the Pounds sterling 1,000 entry fee required of over-quota immigrants into Palestine. Zionist-Nazi trade relations continued to develop in other spheres as well. In 1937 200,000 crates of the ‘Golden Oranges’ were shipped to Germany, and 1/2 million more to the Low Countries under the swastika flag.[(50)] Even after Kristallnacht –11 November 1938.. the manager of Ha’avara Ltd, Werner Felchenfeld, continued to offer reduced rates to would-be users of Nazi boats.”
Brenner Ibid Chapter 6; p. 75
http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
The consequences of this episode were to assist the Nazis. As Eduard Benes said to a later “remorseful” Nahum Goldmann at:
“At a dramatic meeting he had with the Czech Foreign Minister, Eduard Benes, in 1935… had warned:
‘Don’t you understand’, he shouted, ‘that by reacting with nothing but half-hearted gestures, by failing to arouse world public opinion and take vigorous action against the Germans, the Jews are endangering their future and their human rights all over the world?”
Brenner Ibid Chapter 6;
http://abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad.html
Molotov Warns Jews of the Killing Squads But the Zionists Do Not
Amongst the fervid anti-Stalin accusations of Arkady Vaksberg, is the charge that the USSR was silent about the fate of the Jews behind the German lines.
In reality Vaksberg has to assert this, given the shocking attempts of Western leaders and leading Western Jewish individuals to silence the real news.
Brenner asks when it was that:
“The Western Jewish establishment and the Allies discover that Hitler was systematically killing Jews? Reports of slaughter in the Ukraine started reaching the Western press in October 1941.”
It should be remembered that the USSR was then fighting for its’ very life. Yet the Molotov Announcement explicitly analysed the work of the Einsatzgruppen (the Nazi killing squads, especially instructed to kill Jews) in January 1942:
“The Soviets issued a detailed report, the Molotov Announcement’ which analysed the workings of the Einsatzgruppen. The memorandum was dismissed by the WZO in Palestine as Bolshevik propaganda.”
Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24: p. 230; “The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; citing Gelber, Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry’‘ p. 190; at: http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
It is instructive to follow in historical time, what happens next, and the various delays introduced at the highest levels of the self-appointed leaders of the international Jewish population.
It emerges that it was not until November (ie let us be clear: Our simple calculation is From January to November is 8 months exclusive of the whole months of January & February – How many died in those months?) – that an alarm was publicly given to the Jewish populations of those area by organisations such as the World Jewish Congress (WJC). These facts are verified as Brenner makes clear in his text, by independent Jewish sources:
“In February 1942 Bertrand Jacobson, the representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Hungary, held a press conference on his return to the USA and relayed information from Hungarian officers about the massacre of 250,000 Jews in the Ukraine. In May 1942 the Bund sent a radio message to London that 700,000 Jews had already been exterminated in Poland, and on 2 July the BBC broadcast the essence of the report in Europe. The Polish government in-exile used the Bund alarm in its own English-language press propaganda. Yet on 7 July 1942, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, then leading the Jewish Agency’s Vaad Hazalah (Rescue Committee), refused to believe similar accounts of massacres in Lithuania, because the numbers of the estimated dead were larger than the pre-war Jewish population in the country. On 15 August Richard Lichtheim in Switzerland sent a report to Jerusalem, which was based on German sources, about the scope and methods of extermination. He received a reply, dated 28 September:
‘Frankly I am not inclined to accept everything in it literally… Just as one has to learn by experience to accept incredible tales as indisputable facts, so one has to learn by experience to distinguish between reality –however harsh it may be– and imagination which has become distorted by justifiable fear.”
Gruenbaum and his Rescue Committee acknowledged that terrible things were going on, but he kept minimising them as ‘only’ pogroms. On 8 August Gerhart Riegner of the Geneva office of the WJC obtained detailed accounts of the gassing programme from reliable German sources, and he forwarded these to the WJC’s London and New York offices via British and American diplomats. The WJC in London received the material, but Washington withheld the message from Rabbi Wise. On 28 August the British section of the WJC sent Wise another copy, and he called the State Department and discovered that they had kept back the information. They then asked him not to release the news to the public pending verification; he agreed and said nothing until 24 November –88 days later– when the State Department finally confirmed the report. Only then did Wise make a public announcement of a Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews in their grasp. On 2 December he wrote a letter to Dear Boss’, Franklin Roosevelt, asking for an emergency meeting and informing him that:
‘I have had cables and underground advices for some months, telling of these things. I succeed, together with the heads of other Jewish organisations, in keeping them out of the press.”
Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; p.230-231. or at
http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
The same delays were engineered by the Jewish Agency in Palestine that declared publicly that the Nazis were exterminating Jews, ONLY in November. Yet as Brenner shows, as early as April leaders of the Agency had known this to be the case:
“On 17 April 1942, even before the Bund broadcast, Moshe Shertok wrote General Claude Auchinleck, the commander of the Eighth Arm in North Africa. He was concerned with what might happen to Palestine’s Jews, if the Afrika Korps broke through Egypt:
‘The destruction of the Jewish race is fundamental tenet of the Nazi doctrine. The authoritative reports recently published show that that policy is being carried out with a ruthlessness which defies description… An even swifter destruction, it must be feared would overtake the Jews of Palestine”.
Lenni Brenner: Chapter 24; p. 232 :”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
Even after this the Jewish state in former Palestine remained the objective for these Zionists, and both the numbers killed and the effects of the Nazi killings were toned down:
“Dov Joseph, the acting director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, cautioned them against: APublishing data exaggerating the number of Jewish victims, for if we announce that millions of Jews have been slaughtered by the Nazis, we will justifiably be asked where the millions of Jews are, for whom we claim that we shall need to provide a home in Eretz Israel after the war ends.”
Yoav Gelber tells us of the immediate effect of Dov Josephs’ intervention:
‘Vociferous protests were therefore toned down and instead, ways of responding more ‘constructively, were sought.”
Lenni Brenner: p.232; Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
What sort of logic would impel these types of behaviour?
These were not “wicked”people, and they knew very well, what leaving the Jews of Europe to Hitler meant. The abiding logic appears to have been that the higher goal – that of Zion in Palestine – meant hard present sacrifices.
Indeed one Zionist leader put explicit words on the lines of “buying with blood” the right to Zionists Palestine, in reply to pleas sent to him by a Jewish volunteer agent for Aguda, in Slovakia. The story is told by the youth who later became famous for demanding of the Allies that they bomb Auschwitz; and who was later to be known as Rabbi Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel.
In 1942 he twice contacted the Nazi agent for Eichmann – Dieter Wisliceny, asking him:
“How much money would be needed for all the European Jews to be saved?.. in early 1943 word came… For $2 million they could have all the Jews in Western Europe and the Balkans. Weissmandel sent a courier to Switzerland to try to get the money from the Jewish charities. Saly Mayer, a Zionist industrialist and the Joint Distribution Committee representative in Zurich, refused…. The courier who brought Mayer’s reply had another.. from Nathan Schwalb, the HeChalutz (The Pioneer Centre, in charge of training youth for the kibbutz movement in Palestine- ed) representative in Switzerland. Weissmandel described the document:
‘There was another letter in the envelope (saying).. ‘We are writing to the group that they must constantly have before them that in the end the Allies will win. After their victory they will divide the world again between the nations… now, at the war’s end, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel will become the state of Israel, and important steps have already been taken in this direction…. all the Allied nations are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the bargaining table when the nations and lands at the war’s end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order to protect our blood –for only with blood shall we get the land. But in respect to you, my friends, atem taylu (escape to refuge-ed), and for this purpose I am sending you money”.
Lenni Brenner: p.236-237; Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
All this inaction on the part of empowered and rich Western Jewry had its’ reaction on both the left and the fascist right.
On the left, sections of both the Trotskyite wing, and the Marxist-Leninists – raised their voices and tried to propagate information on the Jewish extermination.
On the Jewish fascist right – the Irgun launched rallies in the West aiming to raise the public awareness of the need for action in the European theatre and also they promoted armed struggle inside Palestine against the British.
As regards the British – in this they were objectively with the aims of the Zionists and would ultimately they would win them over. They were known to be positively orientated towards fascism.
Brenner’s verdict is impossible to correct:
“Zionism had come full turn: instead of Zionism being the hope of the Jews, their blood was to be the political salvation of Zionism.”
Lenni Brenner: p. 238; Chapter 24:”The Wartime Failure to Rescue”; http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad24.html
Establishing the Physical Presence of the Jews in Palestine
Brenner notes the increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants into Palestine were of necessity, “illegal” immigrants since the British had theoretically placed embargoes on the number of Jews entering Palestine, in order to placate the Arab Palestinian inhabitants. Nonetheless the numbers of “illegals” were high:
“It is not known exactly how many illegal immigrants were smuggled into Palestine before and during the Second World War. Yehuda Bauer estimates that approximately 15,000 illegal immigrants entered in the years 1936-9.. He breaks down this number to 5,300 brought in by Revisionist ships, 5,000 by the Labour Zionists and 5,200 by private vessels…The British listed 20,180 as having arrived prior to the end of the war. William Perl, the prime organiser of the Revisionist effort, doubles that figure to more than 40,000.. Yehuda Slutzky gives 52,000 as having reached Palestine during the war, but this number includes both legals and illegals.”
Brenner Ibid; Chapter 23; p.220; :”Illegal Immigration”; On WWW; http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad23.html
Brenner points out that the Zionists claim credit for “saving European Jewry from Hitler,” by aiding them to Palestine.
But he also points out that firstly they were bringing in specific, young “warriors” for a forthcoming war with the British and with the Arab possessors of the land:
“At the time neither the revisionists nor the WZO saw themselves as rescuing Jews per se; they were bringing in specially selected settlers to Palestine. The Revisionists returned to illegal immigration during the Arab revolt. The immigrants were mostly Betarim brought in as reinforcements for the Irgun, which was engaged in a terrorist campaign against the Arabs… All had been given weapon-training earlier at their camp at the Revisionist estate at Kottingbrunn.. for.. the final battle against the British occupiers.”
Brenner Ibid; Chapter 23; p. 220:”Illegal Immigration”; On WWW; op cit. http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad23.html
As Brenner says the claims of an “unselfish rescue of all Jews irrespective of belief,” was “simply untrue”:
“The 1947 statement of Otto Seidmann, the former leader of the Viennese Betar, who wrote that:
“We had to save the lives of Jews – be they Communists or capitalists, members of Hashomer Hatzair or General Zionists’,
was simply untrue. Betarim were always preferred over any other Zionists, right Zionists over left Zionists, and any kind of Zionist over a non-Zionist.”
Ibid; p. 222; or at:
http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad23.html
When the WZO also again began to sponsor illegal immigration, they held to the same selection criteria for young future warriors. It is true they were more circumspect than the Ultra-Zionists, but this was as they banked on future British cooperation:
“The revisionists were more daring in organising the illegal immigration, because they did not care what London thought. They had come to understand that they would have to fight Britain, if they were ever to realise their Zionist state; the WZO, however, still expected to get a Jewish state with the approval of the British at another Versailles Conference after the Second World War. They argued that Britain would only reward them if they accommodated to her plans during the war, and London most definitely did not want more refugees in Palestine.”
Brenner Ibid; p. 223; Chapter 23:”Illegal Immigration”; On WWW; http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad23.html
During this period, the British intention to divide and rule in the Middle East – between the Arab land owners and the minority Zionist settlers is graphically shown by Brenner, who cites the first military Governor of Jerusalam, Sir Ronald Storrs, from his memoirs as saying:
“The Zionist’s enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took, by forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster”in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.(Ronald Storrs, Orientations, p. 405; cited Brenner). This was the spirit of the Peel Commission’s proposal in July 1937 that Palestine be divided into three parts. All of it would stay under British overlordship; Britain would directly retain a strip from Jerusalem to Jaffa, and would hold Haifa for ten years, after which it would be seconded to a Zionist statelet of two pieces with a combined area the size of the English county of Norfolk. The tiny Zionist entity would contain an enormous Arab minority, some of whom the Commission contemplated moving to the Arab state which would get the rest of the country.”
Brenner Ibid; p. 95 Chapter 8; or at:
http://www.abbc.com/aaargh/engl/zad/zad8.html
The goals of the Zionists had been achieved by the end of the Second World War, even though they had not wanted them to be attained in such horrific circumstances. Nonetheless, some real and new objective circumstances had been created by the end of the war. As cited by Strizhov, former US Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles said:
“When the Second World War broke out, the chances for the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth in the Holy Land seemed indeed to have vanished. Yet, the forces that the war had brought into being had a determining effect in arousing world public opinion to the imperative need of finding a solution for the Palestinian problem.”
Iurii Strizhov:” The Soviet Position on the Establishment of the State of Israel”; In “Jews & Jewish Life in Russia & The Soviet Union”; Editor: Yaacov Ro’i; London; 1995; p.303.
From the first days of the war, David Ben-Gurion, one of the Zionist leaders had noted:
“The question that absorbed us was Palestine’s future after the war. I was certain that we had to exert ourselves to set up a Jewish State.”
Iurii Strizhov:” The Soviet Position on the Establishment of the State of Israel”; In AJews & Jewish Life in Russia & The Soviet Union”; Editor: Yaacov Ro’i; London; 1995; p.303.
The new objective circumstances can be summarised as:
1. A substantial Jewish immigrant population in Palestine had taken place- many of them had been trained in warfare.
2. A world spotlight had been trained on the inhumanity of anti-Semitism.
3. A new re-division of the world’s territories was taking place following the war.
It is in this context that the relevance of the proposals put forward by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee – for an international Jewish Refuge – a socialist homeland – in the Crimea become of relevance.
This was the only possible, other “solution”, (to the establishment of a Zionist state of Israel) for the displaced remnants of European Jewry.
BUT: For the imperialists and for the Zionists, this would unacceptably strengthen the state of the USSR.
It would require the joint efforts of the hidden revisionists within the Soviet Union and the combined imperialist forces within the newly formed United Nations to both:
a) destroy any plans for the Socialist Jewish Autonomous Republic in the Crimea, and;
b) to establish a pro-imperialist semi-fascist state of Israel, in hitherto Arab Palestine.
The Espresso Stalinist 