by Jack Cooper
While Winston Churchill is generally regarded as having been a friend of the Jews, this blatant abetting of mass murder happened on his watch. The British let people die rather than upset the Arabs.
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1. Tad Szulc, The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 27–31.
...Hitler couldn’t pass the Aryan test
Nazi bureaucracy included many laws and decrees defining whether a given person was an Aryan. People who wanted to establish an official Aryan identity – including those who wanted to apply for or keep government jobs, get married, and certainly to receive official citizenship in the Reich – were required to produce documentation proving that all four of their grandparents were Aryan.1 It is at this point that Hitler would have failed the test, because he could not definitively identify an Aryan as his maternal grandfather.2
The story goes that Hitler’s grandmother, at age forty-two, was a domestic for a Jewish family, the Frankenbergers (or Frankenreiters) when she became pregnant. There is not much doubt that the Frankenbergers paid child support for the child, but Hitler maintained that it was merely a way to extort money from the Jewish family. The real father was an Aryan, he claimed, named George Heidler. Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that Hitler searched diligently for his family records. His own nephew Patrick claimed that Hitler said that the public “must not know where I came from and who my family is.”3
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1. Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military. (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 21; Gerald E. Markle, Meditations of a Holocaust Traveler (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 79–82; Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 642.
2. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 174.
3. Ibid., 173.
...saving Jews cost a US diplomat his job
In 1940, Hiram Bingham IV was already a veteran diplomat, having been posted to Japan, China, Poland, and England. His latest assignment was as vice-consul to Vichy France in charge of issuing visas. The Vichy regime was the puppet government set up by the Germans in July of 1940. With the Nazis bringing their anti-Semitic crackdown to France, Bingham’s office in Marseilles was literally besieged by visa seekers, mostly Jews, desperate to escape from the Nazis. In this humanitarian endeavor, Bingham was only too happy to oblige.
Since the United States was not yet at war with Germany and since the granting of escape visas was contrary to Vichy law, Bingham was clearly operating outside of his area of jurisdiction. Nevertheless, knowing the fate of those who would not be able to get visas, Bingham willingly broke the law.1
Before long Bingham’s activities got the attention of both the United States State Department and the government of Vichy France. In the summer of 1941, Bingham was transferred to Lisbon, Portugal, and later to Argentina. With his career stagnating due to his disfavor within the foreign service because of his actions, he resigned in 1945.2
Bingham’s story was a tightly guarded secret until he shared some of it with his granddaughter, who was writing a paper for school. More of Bingham’s story surfaced when his son found a bundle of letters among his things.3
For his heroic efforts in the rescue of perhaps two thousand people, Hiram Bingham has been honored by the State of Israel, the United Nations, the United States, and the State of Connecticut.
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1. Connecticut State Register and Manual (Hartford, CT: Secretary of the State, 2001), viii; also available at “Hiram Bingham IV,” http://www.ct.gov/sots/cwp/view. asp?a=3188&q=392620.
2. Robert Kim Bingham, Courageous Dissent: How Harry Bingham Defied His Government to Save Lives (Greenwich, CT: Triune Books, 2007), 135.
3. Connecticut State Register and Manual, viii; see also the book written by Bingham’s son, Robert Kim Bingham, Courageous Dissent.
...German scientists had to “Aryanize” Einstein’s physics
With the rise to power of the Nazis, the work of Jewish scientists in general and Albert Einstein in particular were denigrated as “Jewish physics” and often committed to the flames of the book-burning orgies.
In November of 1940, German physicists gathered at a Reich-organized meeting that would later come to be called the Munich synod, to answer challenges by members of the Aryan Physics movement, which sought to sanitize the discipline from Jewish contributions.1 The physicists were successful in rebutting the challengers’ claims, and the following conclusions were issued as a summation of the meeting:
Theoretical physics is an indispensable part of physics.
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity belongs to the experimentally verified facts of physics.
The theory of relativity has nothing to do with a general relativistic philosophy. No new concepts of time and space have been introduced.
Modern quantum theory is the only method known to describe quantitatively the properties of the atom. As yet, no one has been able to go beyond the mathematical formalism to obtain a deeper understanding of the atomic structure.2
In 1942 a second meeting was held. This time it was to soften the idea that relativity had to be accepted. The meeting concluded that “before Einstein, ‘Aryan’ scientists like Lorentz, Hassenohrl, Poincaire, etc., had created the foundations of the theory of relativity, and Einstein merely followed up the already existing ideas consistently and added the cornerstone.”3
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By this clever sleight-of-hand, the Germans were able to utilize “Jewish physics” by switching the credit for the discoveries to their own scientists.
1. Klaus Hentschel, Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), 290.
2. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon Books, 1984), 701–2.
3. Ibid., 702.
...hunted Jews took refuge on the Riviera
When France capitulated to the German invasion in 1940, the Nazis set about their goal of annihilating the Jews of the defeated nation. From the start, the French were reluctant to surrender their native French Jews to deportation to the death camps. As the war dragged on and German victory seemed more doubtful, the French began to put more and more obstacles in the path of German attempts to send their Jews to the death camps. Moreover, the Italian government began to waver in their alliance with Germans.
As part of the German defense against the expected Allied invasion of France, Italian troops were stationed in the south of France. It is to this area that the hunted Jews began to gravitate. All the luxury hotels were empty and the owners were happy to get any tenants who showed up.1
At the start of the war, Jews who could afford it went to Nice in Vichy France, where the German army was not an occupying force. As the war continued, the luxury hotels began to empty out and more and more refugee Jews began to occupy the space. Relief agencies provided money for many of the refugees.2
A truly odd scene began to unfold in the Hotel Roosevelt. The large hall was rented out to serve as a synagogue and a study room. Rabbis walked the streets in their traditional garb, and one could hear Talmudic discussions while fanatical Jew-haters were beside themselves with rage.3
As the Nazis began to step up the pressure on the Italians, the government officials and the army continued to stall. By then Mussolini had been deposed, and the new Italian government virtually ceased to cooperate with the Nazis. While the rescuers could no longer maintain the Jews on the Riviera, the underground successfully dispersed some fifty thousand Jews to the countryside, to Switzerland, and to Spain.4
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1. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken, 1973), 450.
2. Ibid., 450–51.
3. Ibid., 451.
...World War II Jewish GIs had more than one Jewish reason to fight
Immediately after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, American young men flocked to recruiting offices to fight against the Japanese. While this outpouring of rage against the Japanese affected Jewish youth, the Jewish recruits also had a separate list of incentives to serve in the armed forces. The wrath against the Japanese was quite new, but Jewish GIs had had two or more years to build up hatred for the Nazis as they continued to learn daily about the atrocities committed against their coreligionists in Europe. Most Jewish GIs preferred to fight the Germans.1
Another reason for Jews to get into the fight was to refute the widespread belief that Jews were physically unfit for combat. They were alleged to have “flat feet, bowed legs, asthmatic lungs, and stunted stature.”2 Also included in the list of Jewish infirmities was “verbal skill.”3
GI Jews were also out to expunge the US Army’s belief that Jews were likely to seek exemptions, or once in the military, to try for softer jobs.4 As late as 1918 an army manual states, “The foreign born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native born.”5
Many army officers subscribed to the notion regarding Jews that “assimilation could be a monumental mistake, since it would dilute and bastardize the pure American stock they wanted to preserve.”6
Zionist Jews had an additional reason to fight. By acquiring technical skills and combat experience, these GIs planned to form the nucleus of a new Jewish army in Palestine. They would train other Jews to defend themselves against invading Arabs once the new Jewish state became a reality.7
All of these incentives helped improve the performance of Jewish GIs in World War II and to eradicate the racial misconceptions regarding Jews’ willingness and ability to fight.
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1. Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 27–28.
2. Ibid., 28.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 32.
5. Joseph W. Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the US Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 38–39.
6. Ibid., 39.
7. Moore, GI Jews, 44.
...Japan couldn’t build a bomb because Germany’s Jews were gone
On December 17, 1941, a meeting of Japanese scientists and naval technicians met at the Naval Officers’ Club in Tokyo. The topic was the building of a Japanese atomic bomb. Those in attendance soon realized that German scientists would be needed to assist the Japanese in their quest for the bomb.
When the matter of soliciting German scientists to assist in the project was raised, Tsunesaburo Asada, the chief physicist at Osaka University, remarked that not much help could be expected from the Germans. “Most of Germany’s atomic scientists happened to be Jewish, and they’ve been expelled from the country. Some of them have gone to the United States. In my opinion, only the United States has the potential to build an atomic weapon.”1
This prescient statement is significant for two reasons. The first is that it came only ten days after Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese were riding a wave of military success. The second is that it was a recognition of the potential contributions that Jews could make to the research into atomic energy.
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1. Dan Kurzman, The Day of the Bomb: Countdown to Hiroshima (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 142.
...mothers can either help or kill
A mother’s lie cost her soldier son his life
Klaus Menge was the son of a German mother and a Jewish father. Because of his classification as a half-Jew, Klaus was discharged from the German army in October of 1940. In order to be reinstated in the army, Klaus had his mother swear out a statement that Klaus’s father was an Aryan with whom she had an adulterous affair. The army accepted her story, and Klaus was returned to active service in April of 1941. In September of 1941, Klaus died in battle.1
A mother’s lie made her son the number-two man in the German air force
Erhard Milch was a member of the German air force in 1935 when he was denounced to Luftwaffe head Herman Göring as being a Jew. Milch’s mother went to her son-in-law, the police president in Hagen, with an affidavit stating that the father of her six children was her late uncle Carl Bauer. Göring approved the letter and Hitler issued instructions to have Milch’s records revised to declare him of pure Aryan descent. Milch went on to receive Germany’s highest rank, that of field marshal, and virtually commanded the Luftwaffe in major areas such as planning, production, and strategy.2
A mother’s truth kept her son out of harm’s way
In 1943, half-Jew Wolfgang Ebert received his draft notice ordering him to report for military service in the German army. His mother, Sonja Ebert nee Himmelstein, a Russian Jew, unwilling to lose her son in battle, immediately went to the recruiting office in Potsdam and convinced the recruiters that she was Jewish. She argued that according to Nazi race laws, her half-Jewish son should not be drafted. The recruiter was convinced and wrote “not to be used” on Ebert’s papers and assigned him to the reserves. As a parting shot, Frau Ebert said to the recruiters, “and besides the war is over so you should just write my son sick.”3
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1. Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 30.
2. Ibid., 29–30.
3. Ibid., 145.
...coded letters leaked word of the Holocaust
In the early days of the Holocaust, the news of what was actually going on was too horrible to contemplate. Surely, those bringing such reports must be exaggerating! However, as more evidence from a variety of sources began to come in, the enormity of the crime began to penetrate the benumbed minds of the world at large.
One such bit of evidence was brought in semi-coded letters as shown below. The letters were written in German and bore stamps indicating they had passed the German censors. The most telling words are transliterated Hebrew (in italics). The words in parentheses are translations added later to make the code intelligible.
I spoke to Mr. Jager (hunter, thus the Germans). He told me he will invite all relatives of the family Achenu (our brethren, thus the Jews), with the exception of Miss Eisenzweig (apparently ironworkers, thus heavy industry workers), from Warsaw, to his countryside dwelling Kewer (tomb). I am alone here: I feel lonely... Uncle Gerusch (deportation) works also in Warsaw; he is a very capable worker. His friend Miso (death) works together with him. Please pray for me.1
This letter was followed by another repeating the news of the wholesale extermination. It begins: “I too was in sorrow, for I am now so lonely. Uncle Achenu has died.”2
The writer has expressed, in a few words, a volume of tragic text.
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1. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: New Press, 1984), 50.
2. Ibid.
...beets, dumplings, and fine linen can be lethal
During World War II, many Jews turned to non-Jews for sustenance and shelter from the Nazi dragnets that were set out for their capture.
In one instance, a Jewish woman was admonished by her Polish hostess that by slicing the beets so evenly, she might give herself away if anyone noticed that the beets were being prepared “Jewish style.” In another instance, a member of a hostile Polish guerilla group, the AK, responsible for the murder of countless Jews, was eating soup with dumplings in the home of a family sheltering Jews. The hungry killer was heard to exclaim, “These dumplings could only have been cooked by a Jewess.” That night, the dumpling maker was again on the run.
In yet another instance, a Polish woman sheltering Jews spread her freshly spun linen on the grass for drying. A passing Polish farmer remarked, “That’s Jew linen, very fine.” The Polish woman bluffed her way
out of the situation by telling the farmer that the sun was blinding him, and that the linen was indeed her own.1
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1. Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok(Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 617.
...a conference to save Jews was held to do nothing
As news of the Holocaust began to become more common knowledge, pressure on the Allies to do something to rescue those still alive began to mount. In order to still the outcry, the Americans and the British decided to convene a conference, ostensibly to devise a plan to aid the millions marked for death at the hands of the Nazis. The venue chosen for the conference was the island of Bermuda, which served to keep the conference out of the public eye; travel to the area was restricted due to military activity.1
When a State Department representative was asked the purpose of the meeting, he replied that it “was to be simply a preliminary meeting to put in motion the Executive Committee of the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees.” He said this in 1943, but the committee had been in existence since 1938!2
Although the reason for calling the conference was the outcry over the systematic slaughter of Jews, the conference rules “prohibited any emphasis on Jews. And no steps were to be taken exclusively for Jews.”3 The State Department further stated that “no commitment regarding transatlantic shipping space can be made.”4 It should be noted that many supply ships were returning to the United States empty.5