The Ruling Elite
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Weizmann acknowledged, as had numerous British Statesmen, that the American Jews had, in the last war, “effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain.” He said that they would gladly do it again. All that they were waiting for was some indication from His Majesty’s Government, such as the formation of a Jewish fighting force, a sure signal. Weizmann indicated that it was not the lack of military equipment or the idea that there were insufficient troops because the British could call up “fresh recruits… by the hundreds of thousands.” If something could only arouse “the spirit of American Jewry” then “America’s rather sluggish production” would increase and offset Britain’s production deficiencies. He hoped that the British would not “spurn” Jewish “friendship” at a time when “Hitler is endeavoring to obliterate our very existence.” 1355
On November 10, 1941, Time Magazine reported that George Axelsson of The New York Times, referring to the 200,000 Jews in Germany said, “In public places or in contacts as a fellow-worker in factories the German working man seems to treat the Jew as an equal.” Dreier, of NBC’s Berlin desk, said, “During my entire stay in Germany I never saw a German civilian participate in an attack on a Jew.” Dreier changed his story after Germany expelled him on November 15, along with Howard K. Smith of CBS. Dreier then claimed that Germans were mass murdering Jews, gassing 2,000 a day while transporting them from Germany to Poland. The Polish media substantiated his claims. Lemkin incorporated these bogus stories in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Given his numbers, there would have been no Jews in Germany by the end of January 1942. 1356
Zorach Warhaftig, a Warsaw lawyer like Lemkin and Begin, embraced the objectives of the international Zionist movement. Warhaftig was the Vice Chairman of the Central Palestine Office in Warsaw. In 1939, he, like Begin, fled from Poland to Lithuania. Authorities arrested Begin and sent him to Siberia. Neither Begin nor Warhaftig were ever in German custody. Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, in their book, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War Two, relate the mass migration of Polish Jews into Lithuania and Russian-occupied Eastern Poland from September 1939. They claim that anti-Semitic White Russians introduced the Japanese to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Japanese, evaluating the wealth of Jewish people, decided that they would initiate Jewish settlement and investment in Manchuria. Based on that premise, Jews, mainly from the refugee camps in Bialystok and Vilna, began migrating, via the Soviet Union, through Siberia, to Manchuria, North China and to Japan. Tokayer and Swartz state, between August 18 and September 1, 1940, the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania issued 6,000 transit visas to Jews. Many Jews did not want to reside in the Soviet Union or in Poland. Warhaftig helped facilitate the trip, via the Trans-Siberian railway, from Lithuania, ultimately to Manchuria, North China, and to Japan, mostly to Tokyo and Kobe. 1357
In April 2012, Lithuanian officials passed legislation to compensate Jewish families $50 million for the alleged confiscation of property by the Germans in 1941. Jewish sources also claim that the Nazis murdered “nearly all of Lithuania’s 200,000 Jews, “often with the complicity of local Lithuanians.” The Lithuanian ambassador to America, Zygimantas Pavilionis reported that “the Lithuanian government is training teachers to educate schoolchildren about the Holocaust.” Alexander Domanskis, former president of the Lithuanian World Center in Chicago, said Lithuanians should learn about the Holocaust. 1358
As he had in Central Europe, Zorach Warhaftig, a member of the executive board of the World Jewish Congress (1951-1965), used his connections to the Jewish JDC, and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, to get yeshiva scholars to Palestine, to the west, or east to the Pacific. He initially resettled in Kobe, and then went to Yokohama. He acquired visas for hundreds of Polish Jews to Japan from the Soviet Union, promising to ultimately get them to Palestine. Plans fell through, because, according to Tokayer and Swartz, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) refused to further back Warhaftig who then, with the support of the JDC, moved Polish Jews in Japan to Shanghai. By June 1941, there were 17,000 Jews in Shanghai. His Committee for Assistance of Jewish Refugees moved several thousand more Jews from Japan to China. He left Japan and resettled in America in mid-1941 where he became the Deputy Director (1943-1947) of the WJC’s Institute of Jewish Affairs In New York City. Given his absence from Central Europe, he was hardly a credible witness for what happened there. He signed the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel in 1948. 1359 Ironically, in 1946, he wrote Uprooted: Jewish Refugees and Displaced Persons after Liberation.
Boris Shub, a graduate of Columbia University Law School, became an editor for the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) of the AJC in New York. Shub’s father David was the key editorial writer for the Social Democrat Menshevik Jewish Daily Forward (1924-1972). 1360 In 1903, David Shub, a member of the Jewish Labor Bund, moved from Kiev to America, but two years later returned to Russia, via Switzerland, where he met Lenin. He declined Lenin’s invitation to join the Bolsheviks but instead joined the Mensheviks. Officials later arrested Shub and sent him to Siberia. In 1907, he escaped from Irkutsk and made his way back to America. 1361 Following World War II, he wrote Lenin: A Biography (1948).
Using Warhaftig’s “research” and under his direction, Boris Shub, devised two small books, Hitler’s Ten-Year War on the Jews (1943) and Starvation over Europe, Made in Germany (1943), both published by the IJA. 1362 Shub claims that Hitler started a war on January 30, 1933, when he became Chancellor. He based this on statements from diplomatic reports and foreign correspondents in Axis Europe, and from the press, especially in Switzerland and Sweden. He also included the “published and unpublished materials of the governments-in-exile, including the reports submitted to them by their representatives within the occupied countries, and by groups having such inside representatives.” He also cites “the underground press, including the documents and letters smuggled out of occupied Europe, as well as eye-witness reports when corroborated by other evidence.” 1363
Raphael Lemkin used Shub’s two largely fabricated Germano-phobe booklets in his self-serving book. Warhaftig, because of his absence from Europe, could not possibly know about the situation in Germany with regard to the availability of food in Central Europe. After all, he was in Kobe, Japan or in New York City 1940-1943. Warhaftig, who lived in Poland, was more qualified to write a history about the Polish-Jewish relationship from 1920, when officials created the Polish state to 1940. 1364
On November 22, 1941, Rabbi Joshua Liebman, of Temple Israel, told the Junior Hadassah, “The Jewish people will say, ‘We were the first victims. We seek indemnity for the millions of our people sent across the face of the earth in refrigerated cars to die, for all the children who perished on barbed wires trying to cross inhospitable frontiers, and for all concentration camp martyrs… . We shall say to democracy that we are ready to share its poverty but never to bear persecution again. We have the right to ask in the name of the ideals for which democracy is suffering air raids and bombings, a little piece of earth. Call it Palestine. Let our people find an end to homelessness.’” 1365
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise claimed that during a conference with State Department officials on November 24, 1941, they told him that the State Department had a copy of Hitler’s mandate for “the immediate extirpation of all Jews in German-occupied Europe.” It also claimed to have documents from Jewish sources in unoccupied countries reporting that the Nazis were constantly committing vile atrocities against vast numbers of people. According to the Times, Wise claimed that the State Department had affidavits from “reliable persons who knew” that the Nazis committed atrocities such as extracting fat from “Jewish bodies” to make soap and lubricants, that Nazi doctors injected air bubbles into the veins of Jewish prisoners and that they used prussic acid to gas the Jews until it became too expensive. Wise verified that the most notable Jewish organizations, the AJCm, the AJC and the American Jewish Labor Committee, the WJC, B’nai B
’rith, the Synagogue Council of America and other agencies believed the data. On November 27, Dr. Henryk Strasburger, the Polish Finance Minister of the government in exile claimed that the Germans also slaughtered 400,000 non-Jewish Poles in “human slaughter houses” designed by the Germans in Poland. 1366
In early December 1942, before the formal charges by the UN, Wise would repeat these purported statistics and accuse the Germans of killing 1,000,000 Polish Jews by electrocution, gassing and the injection of air bubbles in the bloodstream. In conjunction, Strasburger called for Germany’s complete destruction. The Communist New Masses editorial, Poland’s Jews, of December 8, would report the reactions of Americans to this data as well as the idea that Germany was systematically starving another million Polish Jews. Wise, using affidavits from Washington officials, claimed that Nazis offered fifty Reichmarks for corpses which they converted into soap, fat, fertilizer and lubricants. 1367 The New York Times claimed that the State Department had “affidavits from reliable Washington sources” about the production of dead Jews into soap and fertilizer. After such “evidence” had proven its usefulness, it was unavailable. In late November 1941, Vyacheslav Molotov, in a broadcast, accused the Germans of starving Soviet prisoners of war, cutting off their hands, gouging out their eyes, slicing open their guts, undressing citizens and leaving them to freeze, and raping women across Poland. Time Magazine published his address on December 1, a week before Pearl Harbor. 1368
In early December 1941, the IJA published a 151-page status report covering the period of September 1939-September 1941. The report claimed that the number of Jews in Germany had decreased from 760,000 in 1933 to 250,000 and claimed that Jews in Poland decreased from 3,000,000 to 300,000, not indicating whether they perished in the German or Russian zone. The report said that, between 1933 and 1940, 1,000,000 Jews left Europe, 330,000 to Russia, and another 300,000 had fled from Nazi-occupied Poland. The report said that about 150,000 German Jews went to Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands while 135,000 went to America, 116,000 to South America and 110,000 went to Palestine. 1369
In September 1943, the Soviets would say that they had taken at least 1,800,000 Jews from Poland into the interior, purportedly corroborated by an IJA report. Propagandists maintained that there were 8,300,000 European Jews in 1933 and only 3,000,000 remained ten years later. They claim that Hitler had slaughtered 3,000,000 and about 2,000,000 immigrated, with 180,000 of those going to the Soviet Union. However, that 1943 report contradicts the IJA report of December 1941 when they say that about 350,000 Jews fled to America, South America and Palestine prior to America entering the war. 1370
Firebombing Germany
The Allies rationalized the devastating saturation firebombing of Germany. Then, in order to avert public attention from “the Soviet rape squads, Abram Games (Abraham Gamse), Herbert Morrison and others, known as the Jewish underground or what people now refer to as Sayanim, worked with Churchill’s War Department. Beginning in 1942, Games was the Official War Artist. He created at least 100 propaganda posters. 1371 In 1942, James N. Rosenberg, the honorary chair of the JDC, also talked about the returning Red Army discovering Polish Jews in the Stalingrad area. Yet, the Soviet propagandists continued, long after the war, to disseminate the myth that the Nazis had slaughtered thousands of Jews. The returning Red Army would not have found these Jews if that were the case. In 1942, Rosenberg said, of the 1,750,000 Jews who fled from the Axis… the Soviets evacuated and transported about 1,600,000 from Eastern Poland to the Russian interior far beyond the Urals. About 150,000 other Jews were able to relocate to Palestine, America, and other countries. 1372
On August 14, 1942, the European offices of a Jewish agency claimed that the Germans had emptied the Polish ghettos through murder, deportation and hunger. They reported that the Germans murdered 100,000 Jews in Warsaw and 50,000 Jews in Lemberg. Of the 200,000 Jews living in Germany in 1939, only 40,000 remained because of the mass deportations, suicides and starvation. In Austria, of the 75,000 Jews, in 1939, only between 12,000 and 15,000 remained. They provided similar numbers for Poland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and the Netherlands. 1373 On November 29, the Committee of Jewish Writers and Artists met at Carnegie Hall during which speakers praised the “victorious advance of the Russian armies,” and admonished Jews living in Russia and America “to cooperate in the solution of the Jewish post-war problems.” During the meeting, someone read a message from Weizmann, president of the WZO. He said the advance of Russia’s armies “brings us step by step nearer to the hour of liberation for those whom Hitler has sworn to exterminate; every hamlet retaken from the Nazi invaders, every village reconquered, reduces the unprecedented plight of the people under the heel of those evil forces.” 1374 If Hitler and his “evil forces” had, in fact, sworn to “exterminate” the Jews, then who did the Russian armies rescue? If they rescued the non-Jews, then why speak of the “hour of liberation.”
Other speakers included Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, and Reuben Saltzman, secretary of the Jewish section of the International Workers Order, B. Z. (Ben Zion) Goldberg, editor of the New York-based The Day, presided. Victor Fediushin, Soviet Consul General said that the “invincible alliance of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and America would win not only the war but also a just peace for all the peoples of the world.” Rabbi Israel Goldstein of Temple B’nai Jeshurun said: “There is one other Jewry which deserves to be linked with Soviet Jewry and American Jewry. It is Palestinian Jewry. Though its numbers are only 600,000, it is of first-rank significance culturally and spiritually. It is recreating upon its historic Bible soil the Old Testament vitality of the Jewish people. It is, moreover, demonstrating the capacity of the modern Jew for social idealism upon a national scale.” 1375
On December 2, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise wrote to President Roosevelt claiming that the “most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres?” Wise said that it is “indisputable that as many as two million civilian Jews have been slain.”1376 On that same day, the chief Rabbinate of Palestine proclaimed a day of prayer, fasting and mourning for world Jewry, for all the Jews that Germany had murdered. The New York Times, on that date, claimed that the State Department had evidence that only 40,000 of Germany’s 200,000 Jews remained. The Times referred to State Department’s possession of “an order of Adolf Hitler demanding the extermination of all Jews in all territories controlled by Germany.” Researchers have failed to find such an order or anyone that has ever seen it. London, Washington and New York coordinated this propaganda operation, between November 24 and 27, 1942, which involved the Polish government in exile, the State Department and eight Zionist organizations. On November 26, reports claimed that Germany had exterminated almost one-third of Poland’s pre-war 3,000,000. Stalinists made a similar claim about the Japanese and their “organized spreading of diseases.”1377
On Tuesday, December 8, 1942, delegates from the AJCm, the AJC, the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Synagogue Council of America, and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States submitted a document to FDR during a 29-minute meeting, claiming that Germany and its satellites had exterminated almost two million European Jews “through mass murder, planned starvation, deportation, slave labor and epidemics in disease-ridden ghettos, penal labor colonies and slave reservations created for their destruction.” The delegates provided confirmation of these events via (a) State Department depositions; (b) official German admissions and confidential papers; and (c) eyewitness reports from Jewish agencies, (d) reports by the Polish press and (e) evidence received by the governments in exile. According to the delegates, “the slow death began for the Jews of Germany when Hitler came to power.” 1378
Other people who made allegations included Dr. Nahum Goldman, who the Germans had stripped of his German citizenship in 1935. In 1942, he was the vice-president of th
e Jewish Agency for Israel. Other claimants included officials in the exiled Polish Government, Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom (1913-1946), Sumner Welles, a shirttail relative of the Roosevelts, Maxim Litvinov, the BBC, Henry W. Steed, an anti-German propagandist during World War I, and the U.S. War Refugee Board, established by FDR’s Executive Order 9417 of January 22, 1944. None of those who made the allegations presented any evidence or produced eyewitnesses, due to national security constraints, a much-used cop-out. They promised they would supply their proof after the war. Then the Allies liberated the camps, such as Buchenwald. The worldwide media exposed the piles of corpses, probably bodies of dead Germans from the Rhine Meadows encampment, which alleviated those who made the allegations from giving any evidence; it then seemed unnecessary. 1379
Raphael Lemkin accused Germany of genocide of both Jews and non-Jews in Poland and Russia. One of his sources was the AJC’s publication, They Chose Life (1973) in which the writers stated that the majority of the Jews remaining in pre-war Poland engaged in the underground resistance. Lemkin accused the Germans of genocide of Jews and non-Jews in Poland and Russia. On December 17, 1942, members of the wartime UN, in London and New York, issued the Joint Declaration primarily based on testimony from the Polish government in exile and a dozen Axis enemies. Their report accused the Germans of moving all European Jews to Eastern Europe, where they worked them to death and/or killed them in mass executions, with no mention of gas chambers. His other source was Hitler’s Ten-Year War on the Jews (1943), published by the IJA which claimed that the Germans killed 1,702,500 persons by the end of 1942. 1380