Who Knew?

by Jack Cooper

  Delegates were further cautioned that the administration “had no power to relax or rescind [the immigration] laws.” What was left unsaid was that the administration did have the power to bring in refugees to fill the almost untouched legal immigration quotas.6

  When the conference finally got around to the problem of finding space for refugees on empty ships, fourteen refugees actually were permitted to come to America. It was then that the US State Department closed the loophole by creating a convenient catch-22. The new regulation stipulated that shipping would not be granted to anybody without a quota number. It further stipulated that no quota numbers could be issued unless shipping was guaranteed. As expected, nobody qualified to go.7

  The list of failures goes on and on, but the fact was that the conference was organized for failure, and it succeeded splendidly. If corroboration of the obvious is necessary, it was provided by Richard Law, a member of the British delegation. Many years later he said that “the process was no more than ‘a façade for inaction.’”8

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  1. David S., Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust (New York: New Press, 1984), 108.

  2. Ibid., 108–109.

  3. Ibid., 113.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., 114.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid., 128.

  8. Ibid., 122.

  ...famous architecture is worth more than human lives

  During the Holocaust, many people and organizations in the United States pleaded with the Allies to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. Their reasoning was that it would prevent the rapid killing and disposing of vast numbers of people. Without their death factories, to continue the extermination of the Jews would have required a lot of personnel at a time when the Germans were hard-pressed for manpower in many areas. The government’s answer to these pleas was that the best way to save the remaining Jews was to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. The official line was that diverting bombers to destroy the death mechanisms at Auschwitz would slow down the war effort,1 even though bombers were regularly attacking the industrial complexes in Auschwitz, often within five miles of the killing facilities.2

  In an answer to a plea from the World Jewish Congress pleading for the bombing of Auschwitz,3 John J. McCloy, a high-ranking member of the United States War Department, wrote back saying in part that “such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere...” and that “such an action, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.”4

  At a later date, Secretary of War Stimson said to this same John J. Mc-Cloy, “Would you consider me a sentimental old man if I removed Kyoto from the target cities of our bombers?” McCloy agreed to this, even over the objections of the Air Force command! McCloy himself prevented the bombing of Rothenburg, a German town known for its medieval architecture.5 While the Allies could not spare the resources to destroy the death mechanisms, they were willing to refrain from attacking viable German cities.

  During this time, a pathetically ironic drama was being played out in the Auschwitz death camp itself. Jewish women slave laborers working at making munitions in the camp managed to pass tiny amounts of gunpowder, little by little, to the Sonderkommando (Jewish men forced to man the death works). Their heroic efforts culminated in the starving, imprisoned Jews achieving what the mighty Allies claimed they could not do: in a prisoner uprising on October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando blew up Crematorium IV. In recognition of this accomplishment they were summarily executed.6

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  1. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: New Press, 1994), 353.

  2. Ibid., 302.

  3. Ibid., 295.

  4. One might wonder how much more vindictive the Germans could have gotten than thousands of murders per day!

  5. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, 305.

  6. Ibid., 307; Emily Taitz, Holocaust Survivors: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), xxx.

  ...Holocaust mentality took German lives

  When the Germans penetrated deep into Russia during World War II, they assumed major tasks in rail transportation in order to keep their army supplied. Sometimes, when traffic was heavy, trains carrying Jews headed for the death camps were shunted off onto sidings until clear tracks could be allocated.

  In one incident, a trainload of German soldiers wounded in the battle was parked on a siding. The train was sealed and its markings had been removed in order that the train would not become an inviting target for the roving bands of partisans who were constantly harassing German shipping. Unfortunately for the train’s occupants, the transit orders had been destroyed in a bombing raid. The stationmaster did hear sounds coming from within the train pleading for fresh air and water. However, he assumed that the train was carrying Jews bound for extermination, and the cries he heard were coming from German-speaking Jews. When the train was finally unsealed, they found that more than 200 German soldiers had perished.1

  So indoctrinated was the German population that the people they were dealing with were a subhuman species, that they caused their own soldiers to suffer the fate decreed for others.

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  1. Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian–German Conflict, 1941–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 193–94.

  ...Jews were forced to counterfeit Allied currency

  During World War II, the Nazi government employed Jews in an effort to destabilize the British economy. For at least 150 years, it had been the policy of warring nations to attempt to wreak havoc on the economy of their enemies by counterfeiting their currency. Such was the plan of Germany against England.

  Their plan was to counterfeit massive quantities of British currency and to drop the fake money from bombers flying overhead. Once the five-pound notes were found by the citizens of the British Isles, they would immediately begin to spend the money. This would cause a dramatic increase in currency in circulation, and the resulting rise in prices would damage the English economy and seriously hamper their war effort against Germany.

  In order to carry out their scheme, the Nazis searched the Auschwitz concentration camp for Jews who were skilled artists, engravers, or printers, or had any other talents that would be useful in counterfeiting currency. The Jews were put into an isolated area of the camp where they could not communicate with any other inmates. If a prisoner became ill, he was brought to the medical center for treatment under guard until he was cured.

  When the first bills were produced, they were almost identical to authentic British five-pound notes. Unfortunately for the Germans, the Luftwaffe was so depleted by losses suffered during the Blitzkrieg of England that they had to postpone plans to send bombers over England to drop the money. However, the Nazis successfully used the currency throughout the war for a variety of other purposes, but on a much smaller scale than originally intended. This story is featured in a 2001 documentary film.1

  This was not the only Jewish counterfeiting group working for the Nazis. In early 2007, a movie about Jews counterfeiting Allied currency was made by an Austrian filmmaker, Stefan Ruzowitzky. The movie, Die Falscher (The counterfeiters) begins with the apprehension of Jewish printer Adolf Burger while he was counterfeiting baptismal certificates for Jews attempting to avoid the death camps. Burger was initially incarcerated in Birkenau but was soon transferred to Sachsenhausen, where he was put into a group of 140 Jewish printers, fine artists, and bankers. Conditions in Sachsenhausen were much better for the prisoners, and they were put to work counterfeiting British pounds. The group produced 134 million British pounds and caused a 75 percent loss in the value of the British currency. Swiss banks eventually refused to accept the notes, but they floated freely on the black market. Some of it even financed illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine
!

  After a time, the counterfeiters turned their attention to American dollars. They were able to produce acceptable currency, but the end of the war prevented any widespread circulation of the dollars.

  At the age of 89, Burger embarked on a speaking tour of Germany. While not blaming Germany’s young people for what happened so many years ago, he wanted young Germans to beware of becoming neo-Nazis.1

  It is ironic that a group of “subhuman” people would be singled out for a highly technical operation so critical to the Reich.

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  1. “Making a Buck,” Time Machine, History Channel, 2001.

  1. Katharina Goetze, “Hitler’s Jewish Counterfeiter,” The Forward (February 16, 2007), http://www.forward.com/articles/10099/.

  ...Russian Jews were unfit to live but too valuable to be killed

  When the German army invaded Russia in 1941, they conquered vast territories including a large population of Russian Jews. Following closely behind the army were two competing organizations, the Generalbevollmächtige für den Arbeitseinsatz (GBA, meaning “general plenipotentiary for manpower”) and the SS (the Schutzstaffel, or “elite guard”). The GBA was charged with conscripting slave labor for the Reich. The SS was charged with rounding up candidates for internment in concentration camps, most of whom would soon be killed. Each group was responsible for supplying its own quota of prisoners.

  When the new director of the GBA assumed office, he issued the following directive: “I must ask you to exhaust all possibilities for speedily shipping the maximum number of men to the Reich; recruitment quotas are to be trebled immediately.”1 The requirements of the GBA immediately conflicted with those of the SS. Each group felt that the other was hindering the meeting of its quota. In one instance an SS general, when asked why not enough Jews in his jurisdiction had been killed, replied, “the Jews form an extraordinarily high percentage of specialists who cannot be spared because of the absence of other reserves.”2

  The Germans faced a dilemma; the Jews should be killed immediately, but their labor was indispensable to the Reich. While it may seem obvious that the needs of the GBA would override those of the SS, such was not always the case. One regional commissar pleaded that executions be postponed, citing the fact that the Jews were working as skilled laborers and specialists. He pointed out that there were no White Russian mechanics, and that the only ones available were Jews. His plea was ignored and the executions proceeded.

  Vehicles loaded with ammunition for the troops fighting desperately at the front were left standing in the streets, because the Jewish drivers had been sent off to be killed. Workshops that once produced wooden carts, soap, candles, leather, and soap were left idle, because the Jews had been hauled off to the killing fields. German soldiers were freezing for lack of adequate shoes and German civilians were walking around with cardboard soles in their shoes, because the Jewish workers had been shipped off to the death camps.3

  Such stories were repeated ad infinitum. It might be said that the victims of the mass murders, by their absence from the workplaces operating for the German Army, contributed as much to the Allied war effort as many of the soldiers who died on the battlefield.

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  1. Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 317–18.

  2. Ibid., 318.

  3. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken, 1973), 252–53, 257.

  ...murdered Jews’ assets are a bigger prize than Jews themselves

  When the Nazi-allied government of Hungary had its Jews deported to the death camps during the Holocaust, the confiscated assets of the victims attracted local, national, and international attention.

  The first predators to be attracted to the loot were high-ranking Hungarian government officials. They skimmed the most portable and valuable property for themselves.1 What they could not carry with them, they cached in hiding places in the Austrian countryside before the Russian army could complete its occupation of the country.2

  Next in line were various governments. The United States was eager to get its hands on the stolen loot. The Americans wanted to turn the money over to the Jewish agencies involved in resettling the remnants of the European Jewish population who had survived the Holocaust. The American government was eager to get out from under the burden of paying most of the cost of caring for the refugees.3

  The French government, which found itself in possession of most of the Jewish assets, was interested in using the loot to coerce the Hungarian government to return some three thousand French railroad cars that Hungary had acquired during the war. The British, while ostensibly siding with the Americans in favor of using the treasure to help resettle Jews, were quietly encouraging the French not to follow the Americans’ wishes. Their purpose was to try to limit the number of Jews who might attempt to make their way to Palestine and complicate matters for the Arab-leaning English government.4

  The Hungarian government was pushing for the return of the looted assets to their own country. While expressing their desire to assist the few surviving Jews in Hungary,5 they really wanted the money to restart their banking system and curb the ruinous inflation that was crushing the economy.6

  Last in line were the few surviving Hungarian Jews. In a pathetically misguided plea, they asked that the gold, jewelry, and other items of value be returned to Hungary, so that they might be compensated for their losses.7

  In the end, the French got back their rolling stock; the Hungarians got enough treasure to restart their banking system; the British were able to measure their success by how many Jews did not get to Palestine; and only fifteen to twenty Hungarian Jews out of a wartime Jewish population of 800,000 received some compensation.

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  1. Ronald W. Zweig, The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 85.

  2. Ibid., 115.

  3. Ibid., 173.

  4. Ibid., 175–76.

  5. Ibid. 149.

  6. Ibid., 152.

  7. Ibid., 188.

  ...the American atomic bomb was a largely Jewish project

  When Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 was published, the scientific world was not long in grasping the potential residing in the atom. Scientists from many nations began to delve into the problem of releasing this enormous potential. Among these scientists was a Hungarian Jew named Leo Szilard. Szilard was employed by the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany, but he was forced to flee when the Nazis took over.

  While working in England, it occurred to Szilard that, if he could “find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.”1

  Szilard wrote up his thesis, took out a patent on it in 1934, and promptly assigned the patent to the British Admiralty, because the only way to keep a patent secret was to assign it to the government. Curiously, neither the British War Office nor the Admiralty exhibited much interest in Szilard’s findings.2 Eventually, Szilard immigrated to the United States, where he was granted the use of laboratory facilities by Columbia University.3

  In the meantime, other scientists were also at work on the atom. Lise Meitner, an Austrian-born Jewess and twenty-year head of the physics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, was working on the problem of atomic energy with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman. The Nazi Anschluss in Austria caused Meitner to flee Germany, first to Denmark and then to Sweden. While in Sweden in 1938, Meitner received a letter from Hahn telling her that he and Strassmann had split a uranium atom with an accompanying release of tremendous energy. Meitner discussed the finding with her nephew Otto Frisch, a scientist in his own right. At that time Frisch was working at Neils Bohr’s Copenhagen Institute. Realizing the significance of the German finding, Meitner a
nd Frisch decided to inform Neils Bohr, then preparing for a trip to America.

  Neils Bohr, a Danish-Jewish physicist and Nobel laureate, was scheduled to speak at the fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics, where he described the German breakthrough. The news that Bohr was carrying would launch the scientific community into a frenzied period of experimentation to understand and harness the properties of nuclear fission.1

  By now, Leo Szilard was settled in at Columbia University and immediately set out to duplicate the Germans’ findings. Alarmed that the Germans could be so close to producing an atom bomb, Szilard and Hungarian-Jewish refugee scientist Eugene Wigner met with a Jewish refugee scientist named Albert Einstein and drafted a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to begin an American effort to become the first to have a nuclear bomb. The letter was to be presented over the signature of Einstein. At a second meeting with Einstein, Szilard was accompanied by another Jewish-Hungarian scientist, Edward Teller, who would later be credited with being the father of the hydrogen bomb.

  In order to avoid bureaucratic delays, Szilard and Wigner enlisted the aid of Alexander Sachs, a Jewish economist and a confidant of Roosevelt. After several drafts, Einstein signed the letter, and Sachs made sure it went directly to Roosevelt. Thus was born the history-making Manhattan Project, culminating in the war-ending explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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  1. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon Books, 1984), 603.

  2. Ibid., 604.

  3. Maurice Goldsmith, “Leo Szilard,” Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM Edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997).

  1. James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 94; Daniel S. Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 72; Herbert L. Anderson, “Early Days of the Chain Reaction,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 29, no. 4 (April 1973): 8–12.