by Jack Cooper
...a German ally saved most of its Jews
In August of 1943, a fateful meeting was held between Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler and Bulgaria’s King Boris. At this meeting, Hitler put forth two demands. One was that Bulgaria should surrender its Jewish population for deportation to the death camps. The other was that Bulgaria should honor its alliance with Germany by declaring war on Russia and sending its troops to the Eastern front to fight the Russians.
In an amazing act of courage, King Boris did not give in to Hitler’s screaming tirade of accusations and threats. He would neither commit his troops to the battle, nor would he surrender his country’s fifty thousand Jews to deportation.1
When the Iron Curtain fell over Bulgaria after the war, the Communist government claimed the credit for saving the Jews. However, when the Communists were ousted in 1989, and the truth began to filter out, it became clear that the credit goes to King Boris, who was not without allies in his lonely struggle. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church unanimously asked the Bulgarian parliament to prevent the deportation. Also adding their voices to the protest were prominent Bulgarian politicians representing all the branches of Bulgarian politics.
In true manifestations of Christian charity, Bulgaria’s Bishop Stefan threatened to “open the doors of all Bulgarian churches to them [the Jews] and then we shall see who can drive them out.”2 Stefan’s colleague Bishop Kyril of Plovdiv sent King Boris a telegram indicating he would refuse to cooperate with deportations and would actively oppose the government unless they were canceled.3
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1. R. J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 176.
2. Christo Boyadjieff, Saving the Bulgarian Jews in World War II (Ottawa: Free Bulgarian Center, 1989), 125.
3. Benjamin Arditi, Yehudei Bulgaria bi-shnot hamishtar hanatzi, 1940–1944 [Bulgarian Jewry under the Nazi regime] (Holon, 1962), 289.
...Roosevelt sympathized with Nazi resentment of Jewish success
In January 1943, President Roosevelt visited Casablanca for consultations with US Allies. One of his conversations was with General Auguste Nogues, a French colonial administrator who had served as governor general of Morocco. In the course of the conversation, Nogues told Roosevelt and other high-ranking American officials that “it would be a sad thing for the French to win the war merely to open the way for the Jews to control the professions and the business world of North Africa.”1
In answer to Nogues, Roosevelt suggested that “the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc.) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population.”2 Roosevelt went on to say that “his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable [italics mine] complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty per cent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews.”3
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1. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 196.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
...Jewish musicians helped demoralize German soldiers
As part of its propaganda effort during World War II, the Americans and British jointly operated a radio program entitled Soldatensender West. The program was directed primarily at the German army. It operated from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am and broadcast music and news, which contained, as might be expected, Allied propaganda. The British provided the news, and the Americans provided the entertainment. German lyrics were provided to songs by George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, and Jerome Kern, among others.
Operating under the utmost secrecy, the group did not tell the artists about what the real purpose of the music was. Only performer Marlene Dietrich knew that they were working for the government propaganda machine. This work was considered so important that the copyrights to the songs were waived, so that the broadcasts might continue.
Between July of 1944 and April of 1945, the group produced 312 recordings. Among the songs produced in German translation were “I’ll Get By,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night,” and the haunting “Lili Marlene.” As the war dragged on, more and more German soldiers became listeners, as was attested to by numerous German prisoners of war. This, of course, was the whole idea for the project.1
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1. Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS (New York: Dell, 1998), 71–75.
...England wouldn’t let Jews fight the Nazis
In 1939 the British government issued its White Paper, Command 6019. It provided for fifteen thousand Jews to be admitted to Palestine for the next five years. After that, no Jews would be permitted to enter Palestine without full Arab approval. This meant that the Jews would always be a minority in Palestine. This action by the British prompted David Ben-Gurion to issue his famous statement “We will fight the war as though there were no White Paper and the White Paper as if there were no war.”1 To back up Ben-Gurion’s words, eighty-five thousand Jewish men and fifty thousand Jewish women signed up to help the British war effort.2
In 1940, Chaim Weizmann and Ben-Gurion visited Colonial Secretary Lord Lloyd. Among other things discussed was the idea of two Jewish divisions for the British army. One division would be comprised of Palestinian Jews and the other of Jews from the Diaspora. Lord Lloyd turned down the offer and asked why the Jews didn’t join the British army without a “Jewish” designation. Ben-Gurion asked Lloyd why he didn’t ask that of the French, Poles, or Czechs, who all had separate units in the British army.3
By 1942, after the Germans had been stopped in North Africa, the British no longer felt so threatened that they would antagonize their Arab clients by fielding a Jewish fighting force. The oil revenues were more important, and they saw through the Zionists’ plan to use this military force against the Arabs in a later conflict they felt was sure to come.4 (Indeed, these trained soldiers did form the nucleus of the soon-to-be Israel Defense Forces.)
Finally, in 1944, Winston Churchill persuaded the British army to incorporate a Jewish fighting force of twenty-five thousand men. The soldiers were committed to combat, but their main contributions, ironically, came in their participation in rescue efforts of European Jews after the war.5
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1. Robert St. John, Ben-Gurion: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 78.
2. Ibid. 79.
3. Ibid., 84.
3. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 520–21.
5. 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), 12, 63, 68, 77–80, 82, and more.
...Wallenberg swam the icy Danube to rescue Jews
In the pantheon of heroes who rescued Jews from the Holocaust, no name shines more brightly than Raoul Wallenberg. The Swedish diplomat is credited with saving 100,000 Jews by issuing them Swedish passports, thereby preventing their deportation to the death camps. Wallenberg’s achievements in this area are well documented.
What is not so well known is a story that took place in the winter of 1944. The Germans, in an effort to save on the cost of bullets, devised a fiendish scheme to tie Jews together in threes, shoot the person in the middle, and throw the trio into the river. Wallenberg and two associates, witnessing all this one cold morning, jumped into the freezing water, untied the Jews, and swam them to shore. In all, they rescued eighty would-be victims of the Nazis.
One of the Wallenberg assistants who helped in the rescue was a Jewish woman named Agnes Adaci, a former competitive swimmer in high school, who was willing to risk her life to help others.1 In addition to issuing passports, Wallenberg bought buildings and draped them in Swedish
flags as diplomatically protected territory. He dressed Aryan-looking Jews in SS uniforms to protect these Jewish hideouts and even had the audacity to intimidate Nazi soldiers to open the doors of cattle cars to free the intended deportees.2
While Raoul Wallenberg was risking his life saving Jews, his cousins Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg were taking a different route. As operators of Sweden’s largest commercial bank, they were instrumental in helping the Nazis dispose of gold and jewels taken from murdered Jews in the concentration camps. They also helped shield the assets of major German corporations from confiscation by Allied governments.3
When the Russian army entered Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg was taken into custody. For some years, he was reported to have been sighted in Russian gulags, but he was never heard from again.4
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1. Kathleen F. Falsani, “Wallenberg Aide Shares Tale of Rescuing 80 Jews,” Chicago Sun Times (November 12, 2004): 40.
2. George F. Will, The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses, 1981–1986 (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 325.
3. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 62.
4. Will, The Morning After, 325.
...Heinrich Himmler saved Jews at the end of the war
As it became obvious that Germany was going to lose World War II, high-ranking Nazis began to plan their escapes from the inevitable war crimes tribunals. Among these was Heinrich Himmler, probably the number-two or number-three man in the Nazi hierarchy. Himmler concocted a scheme whereby he could acquire sufficient funds to flee Germany and start a new life elsewhere by ransoming trainloads of Jews bound for concentration camps. Negotiations were handled by high-ranking SS officers including Adolf Eichmann, the Swedish government, the Red Cross, the Swiss government, and the World Jewish Congress.1
A price was set at about seven hundred Swiss francs per head. One trainload of Jews was delivered into Switzerland in August of 1944 and another in December of 1944. Deliveries then stopped, because the Nazis claimed they had received no payments. The World Jewish Congress was reluctant to release the funds pending further guarantees from the Germans. The problems were finally solved, the first five million francs were paid over by the Swiss, and a third trainload of Jews was dispatched to Switzerland.2
Soon after all of these events, the Third Reich fell. Eichmann escaped to Argentina until the Israelis captured him years later. Himmler shaved off his distinctive mustache and donned a private’s uniform. He was, however, apprehended by the British, and in a fit of panic, bit into the poison capsule wedged between his gums and died.3
In a curious coincidence, the price of seven hundred Swiss francs per Jew is roughly equivalent to the forty talents paid for a slave during the Roman Empire and the two hundred Confederate dollars paid for a slave before the Civil War.4
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1. Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian German Conflict 1941–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 450–51.
2. Ibid., 450–51.
3. Ibid., 461.
4. Ibid., 450.
...Jewish death squads stalked Nazis
As World War II ended, the Allies realized that their main challenge in the years to come would be the Soviet Union. They also viewed West Germany as a crucial element in containing communist expansionism. As a result, the search for and will to prosecute Nazis began to wane.1 This angered the Jews, who wanted some measure of justice to be meted out to those who had participated in the Holocaust.
At the end of the war, some members of the Jewish Brigade (a group of Jewish soldiers from then Palestine who enlisted to fight for England but were not committed to battle until 1944), some Holocaust survivors, and several officers of the Haganah (a Jewish defense group in Palestine which was ultimately to become the Israel Defense Forces) formed themselves into a group called Nokmim (Avengers). They wore British army uniforms and used British military documentation, equipment, and vehicles, although they were operating independently and did not have official British sanction for their actions. Operating in Italy, Austria, and Germany, they hunted down and systematically killed several hundred Gestapo, SS, and other Nazi officials.2
After the postwar Nuremberg trials and the subsequent dying down of the punishment of Nazi war criminals, the issue was revived with the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann, chief administrator of the Holocaust.
During Eichmann’s pretrial incarceration and during the trial, he received mail from many people. Many of those anonymous letters urged Eichmann to commit suicide, and some even included razor blades. Because he knew too much, ex-Nazis were afraid he might expose them. Some of these former Nazis managed to gain entry into Israel, and a few even got in to see the trial!
While all this was going on, Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, was busy uncovering the true identities of these seemingly innocuous visitors. Soon there began to appear in the Israeli newspapers accounts of “automobile accidents” involving the deaths of foreign nationals. Nobody seemed to think that these deaths were anything but highway accidents.3
A second group also calling itself the Avengers came into being at the end of the war. It was led by Abba Kovner, a charismatic ghetto denizen, sewer rat, and resistance fighter. Having spent the war years sneaking in and out of the Warsaw ghetto and marauding across the Russian countryside, disrupting German lines of communication and supply, Kovner was just getting started.
Kovner’s plan was for his group to hunt down and kill Germans without regard to age, sex, or any other criteria. The plan was to become familiar with the sewer systems of five German cities, shut off certain valves, release poison gas into the system, and have death flow from every faucet.1
However, from the outset, Kovner began to experience difficulties. Having successfully reached Palestine (soon to be Israel) he found that the people were more interested in getting the United Nations to vote for the establishment of a Jewish state. Indiscriminate killing of Germans would hurt the Jewish cause in world public opinion. He was arrested and incarcerated in a jail in Cairo.2
Upon his release, Kovner received an audience with Chaim Weizmann, one of the preeminent architects of the Jewish state and its first president. Weizmann was so moved by Kovner’s story that he wrote out a letter of introduction to a chemist who could help further Kovner’s plan. Nevertheless, Abba Kovner realized that his plan for poisoning the sewers would never come off, and he switched to an alternative plan. His group would infiltrate the bakery at Stalag 13, an American POW camp near Nuremberg where German prisoners were being held, and poison the bread. This plan succeeded and over two thousand Germans were sickened or died.3 However, Kovner was finally convinced that his best course of action was to move to Israel and fight in the war that was sure to come. He convinced some of the other Avengers to join him in going to Israel, where they fought in the army, married, and raised families.
The time for vengeance had passed and the time for nation building had arrived.
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1. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 131.
2. Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars: A History of Israel’s Intelligence Services(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 188.
3. Howard M. Sachar, Israel and Europe: An Appraisal in History (New York: Random House, 1998), 125.
1. Rich Cohen, The Avengers (New York: Random House, 2000), 203.
2. Ibid., 203.
3. Ibid., 201, 212. Exact figures about the number of casualties are difficult to obtain, since officials kept information under wraps to avoid inciting panic after the incident. Local news accounts at the time indicate that none of the sickened prisoners died, but the Avengers claimed that as many as seven or eight hundred were paralyzed or died due to the poisoning. Jonathan B. Tucker, Toxic Terror: Assessing Terroris
t Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 36.
...non-Jewish GIs attended Yom Kippur services
A few days after the war in Europe ended, three hundred German prisoners of war were assembled in a large public area to hear a pep talk from one of their officers. This officer asked permission from General Huebner, the officer in charge, if he might give his men a “Sieg Heil” and a “Heil Hitler.” The general declined the request.
As soon as the German officer concluded his speech, General Huebner announced to the five hundred assembled American soldiers from the Big Red One, the American First Division, that Yom Kippur services would be held immediately in the cathedral across the field. As the Jewish GIs began to file toward the cathedral, the gentile sergeant of one of the Jewish soldiers turned around and began to walk to the cathedral. He was followed by virtually all the American soldiers present.
The German POWs certainly couldn’t believe that they were seeing an all-Jewish outfit. What they were seeing was “a bold message to Nazi anti-Semites and an extraordinary demonstration of American solidarity with Jews.”1
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1. Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 242–44.
...kosher is not always kosher
Following the end of World War II, Jewish organizations were engaged in massive efforts at ameliorating the physical conditions of refugees, finding them places for resettlement, and transporting them to safe destinations. Feeding the refugees, of course, was a monumental task, and Jewish relief agencies were heavily involved in the work. To make sure that the food for the refugees was prepared according to the laws of keeping kosher, the Mizrachi, a religious Zionist group, was engaged to oversee the preparation of food in a camp outside of Prague in Czechoslovakia.