7.     CLOSING THE DOORS

Let us now see whether it was really the British who were exerting pressure on Zionists not to publicize the Holocaust, or whether it was the Zionists who were exerting pressure not to rescue Jews. 

It is a fact that when the news about Auschwitz finally got into the Swiss, not Palestinian, press, and despite efforts at suppression from the Zionist representative in Geneva, it immediately caused a world wide furore. 

The Hungarian Government was forced to suspend the deportations under direct allied threats that ‘the occupation of Hungary would not be like that of other civilized countries.’⁶² 

The deportations were not resumed until after the German occupation of Hungary, and it is unlikely that the extermination of Hungarian Jewry could have been so successful in the short time available without Zionist assistance in luring the Jews onto the Auschwitz trains in a ‘lightning operation’ that whisked them out of Hungary just ahead of the Red Army. 

7.1       Britain

The record shows that it was not the British who instigated the conspiracy of silence concerning the Holocaust, but rather Zionist leaders like Greenbaum who said that publicity for the Holocaust would have distracted attention from ‘Hebraization’ (clearing Arabs off) of the land. 

Today Zionists constantly emphasize the importance of the State of Israel to Jews because they say that during the Holocaust there was no state in the world that Jews could turn to for protection or refuge. 

What they fail to mention is that throughout this time there were Zionists working actively to keep the doors shut to Jews in every country except Palestine, and to some extent, even Palestine.⁶³ 

Here is Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the Wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain, writing a letter to the Times of 6 June, 196l: 

Your recent reports of the Eichmann trial include considerable evidence tending to show that HM government was largely indifferent to and unwilling to take, action in defense of the European Jews who were being massacred daily by the Nazis; and that this was so in spite of efforts by Zionist leaders to persuade the British Foreign Office to rouse itself into action on behalf of the victims.  In your leader (June 1) you express concern lest it be held that our wartime government was guilty of negligence in the face of  the Holocaust.   Your correspondent succinctly suggests that the attention now being given to this side of the picture is connected with some current criticism of Zionist inactivity during the war. 

My experience in 1942-1943 was wholly in favor of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help.  

In December of 1942 (long before the approaches of 1944 reported from the Jerusalem trial), we in London formed a Council for Rescue from the Nazi Terror which, in turn, initiated a Parliamentary Rescue Committee under the chairmanship of  Professor A.V. Hill M.P.  supported by leading members of both Houses.  At the time I was executive director of the Chief Rabbi’s Religious Emergency Council and applied myself to this task.  A motion was placed on the Order Paper in the following terms: 

That in view of the massacres and starvation of Jews and others in enemy and enemy-occupied countries, this house asks H.M. Government, following the United Nations Declaration read to both Houses of Parliament on December 17, 1942, and in consultation with the dominion government of India, to declare its readiness to find temporary refuge in its own territories or in territories under its control for endangered persons who are able to leave those countries; to appeal to the governments of countries bordering on enemy and enemy-occupied countries to allow temporary asylum and transit facilities for such persons; to offer those governments, so far as practicable, such help as may be needed to facilitate their cooperation; and to invite other Allied governments to consider similar action.’

As a result of widespread concern and the persistency of a few, this motion achieved within two weeks a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties.  This purely humanitarian proposal met with sympathy from government circles, and I should add that H.M.Government did, in fact, issue some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits – indeed, in favor of any threatened Jewish family that we could name.  Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum, voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: ‘Why not Palestine?’  The obvious answer that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives and that Britain could not then add to her Middle East problems, were of no avail.   

At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.P.s and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine.  Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead.  Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help? 

It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: ‘Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland – the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight.’  But it would be unjust now to permit the miswriting of history so as to cast blame upon Britain.  By all means let Eichmann be tried on his murderous merits.  Let the nations who participated in the Holocaust of this still Dark Age be judged alongside.  Even let the opportunity be taken to point an accusing  finger at the neutral bystanders, nations and individuals.  But Britain was at her best.⁶⁴ 

7.2    The USA

Zionists opposed even temporary havens in the USA, just as they opposed temporary havens in Palestine, on the grounds that there should be unrestricted permanent immigration to Palestine. 

Thus, Henry L. Feingold, whose book ‘The Politics of Rescue’, is dedicated to ‘a true lover of Zion’, writes: 

One source of opposition to temporary havens was not so easily understood.  The joyful reception of the free ports plan in the Jewish community was not fully shared by some of the Zionist organizations, who sensed that free ports, like mass resettlement outside Palestine, would take the edge off agitation for the revocation of the British White Paper and the eventual establishment of the Jewish commonwealth in Palestine.⁶⁵ 

Despite his own Zionist convictions, Feingold is troubled enough to say: 

Yet a gnawing doubt remains.  Is it possible that there was an element of truth in the contention of the Bergson group that the goal of rescue and the national commonwealth goal worked at cross purposes during the war? Might the diversion of some resources to resettlement schemes such as the Sosua experiment in the Dominican Republic have made a difference for the doomed Jews of Europe?  The Zionist movement had, after all, fashioned the only successful mass resettlement venture in the twentieth century.  It possessed the zeal, the pioneering skill, and the support of the masses of Jews that might have gone far in overcoming the serious demographic difficulties found elsewhere.

The Zionists faced an agonizing choice.  There were not enough resources to support both expensive resettlement ventures and the pioneering effort in Palestine.  The bitter truth seems to be that in order for mass rescue to have succeeded, the effort in Palestine would not only have had to be supplemented by other resettlement ventures but also by mass infiltration into established states.  Had the last two alternatives been realized before 1942 there is some reason to believe that the Wannsee decision to liquidate the Jews of Europe might not have been taken.  In any case, more Jews might have been rescued.

Unfortunately, the strife between Zionists and other groups did not remain merely academic.  It not only interfered with the mobilization of American Jewry but spilled over into the largely Zionist administered operation which maintained listening posts around the periphery of occupied Europe...⁶⁶

Nothing at all was done about this by the American Zionist organizations, although an integrated American Jew, whose father had been a prominent anti-Zionist, Henry Morgenthau Jr, head of the Treasury Department of the US Government, eventually organized a Treasury investigation into what was happening.

According to ‘While Six Million Died’ by Arthur D. Morse, the result was an official ‘Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews’.

This official internal Government report summed up the situation as follows:

'(State Department officials) have not only failed to use the Governmental machinery at their disposal to rescue Jews from Hitler, but have even gone so far as to use this Governmental machinery to prevent the rescue of these Jews.

They have not only failed to cooperate with private organizations in the efforts of these organizations to work out individual programs of their own, but have taken steps designed to prevent these programs from being put into effect.

They not only have failed to facilitate the obtaining of information concerning Hitler’s  plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe but in their official capacity have, gone so far as to surreptitiously attempt to stop the obtaining of information concerning the murder of the Jewish population of. Europe.  They have tried to cover up their guilt by: (a) concealment and misrepresentation;

(b) the giving of false and misleading explanations for their failures to act and their attempts to prevent action; and

(c) the issuance of false and misleading statements concerning the 'action' which they have, taken to date.'⁶⁷

This damning official report was condensed by Morgenthau, retitled ‘Personal Report to the President’, and given to President Roosevelt on 16 January, 1944.  Its introduction explicitly suggested that ‘plain anti-Semitism’ was motivating State Department officials and threatened a ‘nasty scandal’.⁶⁸  

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, a notorious anti-Semite, was specifically named as the main culprit. 

Roosevelt responded by immediately setting up a ‘War Refugees Board’ as requested, which for the first time began to take some effective action, although by then most of the Jews of Europe were already dead. 

What has all this to do with Zionism? 

A notorious anti-Semite like Breckinridge Long could not get away with such an openly vicious policy without some powerful support.

Long's most useful supporter within the State Department was Lawrence Steinhardt, one of very few Jews occupying an important post in the Foreign Service. 

A director of the American Federation of Zionists and then of the American Zionist Commonwealth during the 1920's, Steinhardt became notorious for his strong support for the State Department's anti-refugee position.  It is not for nothing that anti-Semites sometimes boast ‘some of my best friends are Jews’.

According to Feingold:

…In 1939 he (Steinhardt) became Ambassador to Moscow.  From that remote post he became involved in the rescue refugee crisis when he assumed a highly legalistic position on the issuance of visas, the power of the consuls, and the inviolability of the immigration laws.  Long, delighted with the strong support he was receiving from a  Jewish Ambassador, gleaned from his dispatches much evidence to support his anti-refugee petition,  Steinhardt became, a staunch supporter of Long, in his 1940 campaign to establish a rigid screening procedure.  He seemed anxious to adapt himself to the official anti-refugee petition of the State Department in the early phase and there was not a hint of his involvement in the Zionist movement in the I920s.

In 1941 it was clear that Steinhardt went further than other State Department officials in his hostility to refugee advocates.  When it was apparent that some consuls were refusing visas because of their distaste for Jews.  Steinhardt nevertheless insisted that consuls rightfully had the final word.  During the bitter dispute with the PACPR over the Department's administration of visa regulations, Long used a Steinhardt dispatch of October 1940 from Moscow, detailing with devastating effect the dangers of a more liberal visa list procedure.  He left the dispatch with Roosevelt who was so impressed with it that when James G. McDonald and Francis Biddle appeared before him shortly thereafter to press for liberalization, they had no effective retort.  Steinhardt lent strong support to Long’s ‘close relatives’ ruling in June 1941, and buttressed Long’s already strong anti-Semitic predilections by articulating his own prejudices against ‘eastern’ Jews.  Long was so impressed with Steinhardt’s slurs against ‘eastern’ Jews, that he recalled them in his diary: 

Steinhardt is an able man and has decisiveness and courage.  He took a definite stand on immigration in large numbers from Russia and Poland of the Eastern Europeans whom he characterizes as entirely unfit to become citizens of this country.  He says they are lawless, scheming, defiant – and in many ways inassimilable.  He said the general type of intending immigrant was just the same criminal Jews who crowd our police dockets in New York and with whom he is acquainted and whom he feels are never to become moderately decent American citizens.⁶⁹  

Feingold continues: 

In January 1942 Steinhardt was transferred from Moscow to Ankara, a post that had attached to it some tradition for being filled by a Jew.  The transfer seems also to have spurred a remarkable change, in Steinhardt's position on refugees and rescue…  

…In April 1943 he, was instrumental in getting Turkey to accept approximately 30,000 Balkan Jews, including many from Rumania, for transit to Palestine...⁷⁰

Although Feingold, a Zionist, takes a more charitable view, it seems clear that the change of heart occurred when the destination of the refugees was Palestine and not the United States. 

Indeed Feingold notes that Steinhardt said ‘his usefulness would be compromised should his link and sympathy to the Zionist cause become known’ and ‘In the State Department he was known as a staunch restrictionist while the Zionists considered him sympathetic to their cause.’⁷¹ 

While Feingold regards the two roles as contradictory, in fact resettlement of Jewish refugees in America would have been contrary to Steinhardt's Zionist principles, but getting them to Palestine was very much in accord with those principles.

Thus Steinhardt's Zionism was quite as genuine and consistent as his anti-Semitism.  

7.3       Sweden

The Scandinavian countries have come out of the Holocaust with a much better reputation for humanity and compassion than the other European countries, Britain or America.  But how many know that this too involved surmounting the active opposition of Zionist leaders?

According to Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld: 

'In 1939, with the intensification of persecution against German Jewry, the Swedish Parliament passed a law which permitted entry to tens of thousands of German Jews.  The upshot of this decision would be their rescue from the certain death that would result if they had otherwise been sent east.  The Swedish Parliament thus displayed an outstanding humanitarian approach.  But then something happened which dumbfounded the Gentiles, resulting in weakening the hand of those who were true friends of the Jewish people.

Dr. Ehrenpreisz, the ‘Chief Rabbi’ of Sweden (since 1914), together with the leader of the Jewish community in Stockholm, turned to the Swedish Government with the request that it not carry out the aforementioned decision of Parliament, using the excuse that the settling, even temporarily, of 10,000 additional Jews in Sweden could arouse a Jewish problem in this land that had never experienced anti-Semitism because of the small number of its Jewish citizens.  The efforts of those two wicked community leaders succeeded in their goal and the Swedish Government voided its plan to carry out its own Parliament’s law.  But when, four years later, all of Danish Jewry was smuggled, overnight, into Sweden, Ehrenpreisz did not succeed in thwarting that wonderful rescue effort, since it came to him as a surprise too.

Here it is appropriate to point out that the fear of anti-Semitism served only as an excuse for Ehrenpreisz, enabling him to convince the head of the Stockholm Jewish community to join in his criminal plan.  But the true motivation of this Jewish veteran Zionist was outstandingly and typically Zionist, fitting in with the principle that even if death threatens the Jews, one should not find for them refuge outside of Eretz Yisroel.  This principle also guided the British Zionists in 1942 in killing the proposed resolution which was virtually assured of being accepted, whereby Jewish refugees would be absorbed in temporarily in areas under British protection… Chapter 5).

Dr Ehrenpreisz was shrewd enough to realize that in the event that his intention would be revealed, he would be unable to win support either in the Stockholm Jewish community or the Swedish government.  He therefore chose to hide behind the selfish claim and seeming concern for the security of Swedish Jewry.  Who else but Yitzchak Greenbaum, who served as Chairman of the Jewish Agency’s ‘rescue committee’ in Jerusalem (the wolf in the role of the shepherd), could fathom the mind of Dr Ehrenpreisz?  He therefore strongly urged him to join the ‘rescue committee’ in Sweden, until, in 1944, Ehrenpreisz acceded to Greenbaum’s request.’⁷²

On 18 January, 1945 the Swedish Parliament discussed whether Sweden had done enough about rescue during the war and before it.  The official record shows a Government member, Moller, arguing that ‘the Swedish government was no less generous than the Jewish community in Stockholm’, while an opposition member, Kanut Peterssons replies: 

‘I do not deny this.  On the contrary, the fact is well known to me that certain factions amongst the Jews here were not the least interested in encouraging acceptance of Jewish refugees, but I ask only to answer what I have already mentioned, when we took up these problems.  It appears to me that the policy of handling refugees by the Swedish government does not have to be decided from such a point of view, but rather from protection and concern for our tradition of culture and humanitarianism and in accordance with our Meeting for justice.’

The government member then accepts this judgment and asks only that ‘the blame be divided’ and that ‘we must note all the circumstances that influenced the policy'.⁷³

This seems a fair analysis of the situation in all the countries that did not do enough to assist the victims of Nazi persecution, and that have been held up as examples by Zionists, to prove that Jews cannot rely on humanitarian concern from others, and need the protection of a State of their own.  

The truth is that these countries are guilty.  They are guilty of accepting Zionist advice instead of following their own ‘tradition of culture and humanitarianism’ and their own ‘feeling for justice’. 

It is no excuse for the American Government that it had the support of the Zionist Steinhardt, or for the British Government, that it had the support of British Zionists, Sweden is quite right to reject this excuse. 

But for Zionists to turn around and blame these countries, for policies urged on them by Zionism, is truly sickening.  And for Jews who suffered from the ‘closed doors’ of the 1930s and 1940s to imagine that they are ‘protected’ or ‘insured’ by a State that is even now working hard to drive Soviet and Iranian Jews from their homelands is truly stupid. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Mordechai Ehrenpreisz, rightly continues to be regarded as one of the heroes of Zionism and one of the builders of the State of Israel today. 

This friend and confidant of Herzl, participant in the first Zionist Congress, was indeed a Zionist hero, commemorated in special supplements to various Zionist periodicals.  He was famous for having decreed, when Chief Rabbi of Bulgaria, that anyone who refused to donate to Zionist causes would be forbidden to have his sons circumcised. 

He was a Zionist hero - and a vicious anti-Semite.  

7.4       Selectivity

Even as regards Palestine, where despite popular myth, very substantial Jewish immigration was permitted by the British authorities, the Zionist aim, was for selective. Immigration, to build a Jewish State, not rescue of Jewish refugees.  Thus, on February 1, 1940, Henry Montor, Executive Vice-President of the United Jewish Appeal, writes to Rabbi Baruch E. Rabinowitz of the congregation B'nai Abraham in Hagerstown, Maryland: 

What Palestine needs today are young people who have an understanding of what the Jewish National Home is meant to be and whose energies and resources of  talent are such as to create the possibilities for additional large immigration. 

There could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism, whether they be in the ranks of the British Government or the Arabs, or even in the ranks of the Jewish people, if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables who would make impossible the conditions of life in Palestine and destroy the prospect of creating such economic circumstances as would insure a continuity of immigration... 

Interestingly, this letter admits that: 

No reasonable person has even said that Palestine could hold all the millions of Jews who need its shelter, even if legal and unregistered immigration combined were to make feasible the entry of all these millions of Jews…⁷⁴ 

This Zionist tradition of selective immigration was firmly established long before the war, and in full knowledge of what, it meant for those not ‘selected’.  Thus Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, said at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937: 

‘...the hopes of six million  Jews are centered on emigration…I was asked,  ‘But can you bring six  million  Jews to Palestine?’ I replied, ‘No’…In the depth of the Jewish tragedy – I want to save two million of youth…The old ones will pass, they will bear their fate or they will not.  They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world…Only a remnant shall survive…we have to accept it.’ 

It follows that Zionist efforts to discourage havens outside Palestine, and even temporary havens in Palestine, were done in the knowledge that most of the Jews who needed refuge could not have gone there even if they had preferred to (which they did not), and if the British had let them.  The doors were closed elsewhere not to divert actual emigration to Palestine, but solely in a coldly calculated move to increase the future pressure for a Jewish State in Palestine.  It is difficult to imagine anything more callous. 

This callous tradition explains both Kastner's actions and also the defense of those actions by the Supreme Court of Israel.  Indeed, it was explicitly appealed to by the Attorney General of Israel, Chaim Cohen, in his defense of Kastner: 

‘He (Kastner) was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions.  In fact if that's how he saw it, rightly or wrongly, that was his duty…

If you don't like, it, if it doesn't coincide with your own philosophy, you may criticize. Kastner and -say his, policy was a mistaken one.  But what does all this have to do with collaboration?...It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine…Are we therefore to be called traitors…?⁷⁶ 

Kastner did nothing more and nothing less than was done by us in rescuing the Jews and bringing them to Palestine.…You are allowed, - in fact it is your duty - to risk losing the many in order to save the few.  

(Cohen continued explaining that this attitude had always been the system of the Zionist institutions, who gave emigration certificates to Palestine only to a few of the masses who wanted to emigrate) 

The answer to Chaim Cohen's question is ‘YES!’ - for continuing to ‘select the few out of many in arranging the Immigration to Palestine’, during the Holocaust, when the problem was how to get the many to any haven that would have them - Zionists are ‘therefore to be called traitors’. 

It was not a great jump from Weizmann's description of the masses of European Jews as ‘economic and moral dust in a cruel world’, to the Supreme Court of Israel's majority Judgment that Kastner was entitled to mislead the Hungarian Jews about Auschwitz because:

The Hungarian Jews was a branch which long ago dried up on the tree. 

And:

This was a big Jewish community in Hungary without any ideological Jewish backbone’.  (i.e. not much Zionism).⁷⁷ 

As Ben Hecht remarks, it was not a much greater jump from there to Dr. Goebbels diary entry in 1943:

In our Nazi attitude, toward the Jews, there must be no squeamish sentimentalism.

Indeed, as Ben Hecht also remarks, the sneer and belittlement of Dr. Goebbels who wrote ‘The Jews deserve the catastrophe that has now overtaken them’, seems to echo in the voice of the Attorney General of the State of Israel who says:

For those and millions of Jews like them there came true the old curse.  'And, lo, they were meant to be taken like sheep for slaughter, for killing, for destruction, for crushing and shame.'   There was no spirit in them.  The Jewish masses in Warsaw were in the same condition.⁷⁸

(Court records, CC124/53 Jerusalem District Court)

This basically Nazi philosophy, displayed here towards Jews instead of Arabs helps explain how the concept of saving the few at the expense of the many led Zionists to become the most suitable collaborators for the Nazis in administering the Jewish Councils or Judenrat in the ghettos, as will be described later.

Hersz Bernblat, deputy chief of the Bedzin Ghetto police, was unlike Kastner, actually tried under Israel's ‘Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law 5710/1950’ and sentenced to five years imprisonment for having handed over children from the Ghetto's orphan home to the Nazis for extermination.

The Supreme Court of Israel unanimously quashed the sentence, in a judgment that indirectly exonerated the Jewish Councils in general, precisely on the grounds that they were trying to save some by sacrificing others (as indeed all collaboraters always are - trying to save themselves). 

Rabbi  Shonfeld quotes Hertzberg,  a witness in the Bernblat trial, and goes on to draw some interesting conclusions: 

‘The ‘Judenrat' served as an instrument for keeping things calm.  It lulled both the youth and the adults into a false sense of security, so that they shouldn’t think about rescue activities.  Unfortunately, most of the members of the Judenrat were Zionists.  They thought that by collaborating with the Germans, they were doing a good thing.  By preparing the lists of Jews who were sent to their death they thought that they were   saving other Jews.  The heads of the Judenrat suffered from a superiority complex, thinking that they were doing an historic thing in order to redeem the nation – and the entire Jewish population feared them.’ (‘Ha’aretz’, 24 September, 1963) 

Rabbi   Shonfeld   continues: 

On the same subject, it is fitting to quote the words of the lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, in his concluding speech in the Kastner trial in order to prove that human nature is the same the world over.  Whether in Poland, Hungary, the United States or Eretz Israel, the Zionists take one line of action: their ancient dream materialized: seizing the ‘Kehillos’ (communities), even within the framework of the Judenrat, served as the precedent to the government of an independent state.   

Tamir   explains: 

 At that time, a very special process was occurring among Hungarian Jewry.  The Zionist minority, which was a small minority within the Hungarian Jewry, was ruling over all of the Jews.  The assimilated majority, called ‘Neologists’, and the religious, called ‘Orthodox’, retreated and gave way to the Zionists.  Brand confirms this in his memorandum as does Freudiger in his testimony.    

Among the Zionists themselves, after having received money from Eretz Israel through Kastner’s group, ‘I Chud’, the minority governed.  According to the testimony of Kraus, this group constituted less than a quarter of the Zionist movement, resulting in a situation that was paradoxical: The minority among the Zionists ruled over Hungarian Zionism, therefore controlling all of Hungarian Jewry.   This minority headed by Kastner, controlled the internal lives of one million people.  When the Germans searched for collaborators among the Zionists, they immediately met Kastner and his colleagues; for they, too, were doing all that they could to make contact with the Germans.⁷⁹ 

7.5    Australia

We don't have to look to distant Britain, America or Sweden for evidence of this Zionist callousness and treachery in closing the doors. 

The same thing was happening right here in Australia where the Zionist leadership violently opposed proposals for a  Jewish settlement in the Kimberleys, agreed to by the Western Australian Government, or for an alternative in Tasmania proposed by the Tasmanian Government.  This is a major topic in itself, which should be dealt with in separate evidence.⁸⁰ 

In the meantime, we don't need JAZA to give evidence about it.  Ask the heroic fighters against anti-Semitism from the VJBD to tell the story.  They know.

next: A DELIBERATE, CONSISTENT, AND SUCCESSFUL POLICY

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