www.hirhome.com

Rabbi Stephen Wise

“...in the
Jewish world, schools and museums and streets are named after Wise...
”
Louis Rapoport (1999:221)
 

THE PROBLEM OF JEWISH
SELF-DEFENSE

An HIR series

Historical and Investigative Research - 17 Jan 2006
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/leaders1.htm
 

A few words about antisemitism
_______________________________

The topic of this article is delicate, and the interest in this issue is easily misinterpreted. So I begin with a few clarifications.

In a related article, I defined antisemitism as follows:

“Antisemitism is a way of looking at the world, a perspective, and it impairs reasoning by insisting on the following sequence: first, suspend in the air the anti-Jewish conclusion; then build in a helter-skelter rush to the ground a scaffolding of ‘premises’; finally, never heed how ridiculous the crookedly resulting, upside-down staircase becomes.”[2]

For example, first, decide to apologize for those who carried out the German Nazi Final Solution; then, find a way to do it, no matter how ridiculous. One such ridiculous maneuver, as Louis Rapoport explains, is that “Enemies of the Jewish people lap up any evidence that some Jews...may have prevented other Jews from being saved from the Nazi exterminators.”[3] Why do the antisemites imagine this works for them? Because they employ it to produce the pseudo-argument that, since some of the people who facilitated the extermination of the European Jews in World War II were Jewish, “they were doing it to themselves,” and hence, who are the Jews to complain about the gentiles who murdered Jews in World War II?

What is the problem with this 'argument'?

Well, just imagine somebody saying, about the suffering of the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution, that since the leaders of this outrage were Chinese, “they were doing it to themselves.” They were? Of course not. In this case everybody can see that a majority of the Chinese were being made to suffer by a few Chinese: nobody was doing anything to him or herself. But we live in antisemitic cultures, and in consequence this sort of thing is obvious only so long as we are not talking about Jews, so I am going out of my way here to make certain things perfectly clear.

First, the ordinary Jews who perished in the death camps are the same victims regardless of who murdered them. What does this mean? That doing justice to these victims requires laying the blame at the feet of any and all who played a role in their deaths. The Jewish identity of some who functioned as indirect executioners can only compound the tragedy of the victims; what it cannot logically do is excuse these Jewish leaders, much less excuse the non-Jews who directly set the death machinery in motion and kept it running.

This article addresses the question of why some in the mainstream Jewish leadership during World War II actively discouraged and sabotaged the defense of the Jewish people. Not because it will excuse the gentile criminals responsible for the Nazi Final Solution, but because we cannot allow another such Catastrophe to take place, and the only way to prevent history from repeating itself is to understand it. The Jewish people will be attacked again: this is guaranteed, for it happens virtually every century, and as I write antisemitism is enjoying a dramatic renaissance all over the world while the Jewish state is quickly ceding territory to antisemitic terrorists pledged to the destruction of the Jewish people. So the question is not whether another genocide will be attempted -- it is being attempted as we speak. The question, rather, is simply whether the Jews will be able and willing to defend themselves effectively this time. Certainly, they will not defend themselves effectively if they allow their mainstream leadership, once again, to cooperate with their executioners. So it matters greatly whether ordinary Jews understand what happened in WWII, and this is the point of doing the present investigation and making it public.

•
The only
way to prevent
history from
repeating itself
is to
understand
it.
•

Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?
_______________________________________

Long before October 1943 everybody knew that the Jewish people was being exterminated in Nazi-occupied Europe.

“From the summer of 1941, reports were reaching the West regularly, through diplomatic and other channels, of large-scale massacres of Jews in areas of eastern Europe under Nazi control. In May, 1942, a message transmitted to the West through the Polish Government-in-Exile in London contained a compilation, by the Jewish Bund in Poland, of confirmed massacres. The Bund estimated that 700,000 Jews had already been killed and surmised that the Nazis had embarked on a campaign to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.”[3a]

A January 1943 headline in the New York Times announced, “Liquidation Day Set For France’s Jews,”[4] and another in February blared “Total Nazi Executions Are Put at 3,400,000; Poland With 2,500,000 Victims, Tops List,” followed by the explanation, in the body of the article, that in Poland “1,000,000 Jews were said to have been killed or permitted to die in concentration camps.”[5] This was, of course, precisely what Adolf Hitler had promised he would do in Mein Kampf and in his speeches: annihilate the European Jewish population. And yet, the Allies were doing worse than nothing to help stop the genocide.[6]

In October of 1943, as related in an article published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, there was an effort in the United States to change that.

“The date was October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, and more than four hundred rabbis had come to plead for U.S. government action to save Jews from Hitler.

The march was the brainchild of 33-year-old Hillel Kook of Jerusalem, nephew of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. Kook, who used the pseudonym Peter Bergson, traveled to the United States in 1940 to lobby for U.S. support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. After news of the Nazi genocide reached the United States in late 1942 and early 1943, Bergson established the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, a political action committee that sought U.S. action to rescue Jewish refugees.

Bergson understood the need for dramatic tactics to publicize his cause. To alert the American public about the Nazi massacres, the Bergson group sponsored a theatrical pageant called ‘We Will Never Die,’ authored by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht, which was viewed by more than 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden and then in other cities around the country. The Bergson activists also sponsored more than two hundred newspaper advertisements urging the United States government to rescue the refugees.”[7]

The identification of an absurdity is something that should make any rational person stop, for it is evidence that something important remains to be properly understood. But I have not shown you one yet -- so far this all makes sense. If the European Jews were being exterminated, it was perfectly natural for Jews who were in safety to try to do something about it. Jewish unity was equally to be expected, and in fact the Bergson effort brought together “an interesting array of hasidic rabbis side by side with rabbis known as mitnagdim, the traditional theological critics of Hasidism.” In other words, important differences were set aside in the Bergson effort because the Jewish people was being exterminated in Europe and unity was more important. The above does not contain absurdities: the Bergson effort made perfect sense.

No, the absurdity is here, in the article’s next sentence:

“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke antisemitism.”

Ponder that. What could be the most extreme consequence of antisemitism? Why, an anti-Jewish genocide. So what could “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” fear might happen? The Jewish people was already being exterminated.

There is a joke told of two Jews, right before they are killed:

“Sam and Irving are facing the firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the blindfold on them. Sam disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing the thing from his face. Irving turns to him and pleads: ‘Please Sam, don’t make trouble!’”

The structure of this joke is identical to what happened when Peter Bergson tried to pressure the US government to save Jewish lives in Europe, causing “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” to say to his protesting rabbis: “Please, don’t make trouble.” The joke makes fun of a pathology of reasoning but the extermination of the Jewish people is not funny; if we do not want more exterminations of the Jewish people, we must understand this pathology of reasoning.

There is a promise in the above joke, and in that promise is locked a hope of mine. The joke is Jewish not only because it depicts Jews but because it is told by Jews (it is quite famous, and I heard it first from a Jewish friend). This is important, because by telling this joke Jews demonstrate that they are -- at some level -- aware that a certain pathology of reasoning makes their self-defense difficult.[7a] I have reason to hope, therefore, that a more careful reflection may be possible for the Jewish people before it is too late again. But we must move to a level of analysis considerably more sophisticated than the passing joke. And then there must be action.

Let us now return to the Wyman Institute piece and look the full absurdity in the face:

“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke antisemitism. …Yet there were also pockets of sympathy for the Bergson group within the Jewish leadership.”

Given that the death factories from Auschwitz to Jasenovac were at that very minute busy murdering millions of innocent Jews, and billowing with smoke, where would you expect to find mere “pockets of sympathy” for those protesting this outrage? In a mostly antisemitic population. But the population in question here is “the Jewish leadership.”

“[the Bergson march] was to be the only rally in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust [but t]he idea of Jews marching through streets of the nation’s capital, promoting specifically Jewish requests such as rescue, especially during wartime, was anathema to mainstream Jewish leaders.”

The above does not make one little bit of sense. Why is the idea of rescue odious “especially during wartime”? Are people supposed to be rescued in peacetime? And why is “the only rally [!] in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust” a “specifically Jewish request”? It isn’t. This was a crime against humanity.

You see, the problem is not merely that the reaction of the Jewish leadership was absurd, but that the author chronicling this reaction writes absurdly. After all, given that the Jewish people was already being exterminated, the right thing to do here was obvious. So how could the request for rescue be “anathema” to mainstream Jewish leaders? What in the world were they for, as Jewish leaders, if they could not find it in themselves to oppose an anti-Jewish genocide?

It is significant that the author, Rafael Medoff, directs the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and also that he is one of the few people to do significant research on the Bergson effort. If he finds it difficult to write in a sensible manner, then it is unlikely that the majority of the Jewish people can learn from their own history. An institute of Holocaust studies should straightforwardly refute the arguments that supported the reasoning of Bergson's opponents, and which contributed to the deaths of millions. This is what I am doing here. My task is not difficult, because the issue is very clear, and the facts speak very loudly.

Hillel Kook
( alias Peter Bergson )

“a kind of prince... a ladies man, a bon vivant... very bright and ambitious, with British manners and a great name -- Kook
”
Eliahu Amikam, quoted in Rapoport (1999:22)
 

Ben Hecht

“Ben Hecht was Bergson's most important recruit... one of the most talented people anywhere...a formidable playwright
”
Louis Rapoport (1999:53)

“The record of their achievements refutes those who claim that ‘nothing could be done.’ Something was done, and a great deal more could have been achieved had the establishment Zionist and Jewish organizations not concentrated so much of their efforts on destroying the ‘Bergson group’. . .”[15]

•

The way to
defend
the Jews in World War II was obviously to mobilize
ordinary Americans against the
policies of the US
government.

•

Harry Truman

Henry Morgenthau

How passionate were “mainstream American Jewish leaders” in their opposition to Peter Bergson?
____________________________________________

They were passionate all right.

“During the era, Zionist leaders like Rabbi [Stephen] Wise and Nahum Goldmann told the State Department that Kook/Bergson was as big a threat as Hitler to the well-being of American Jewry.”[16]

Adolf Hitler was carrying out the systematic extermination of an entire people and culture: the Eastern Jewish ‘Yiddish’ universe, a world full of complex humor, advanced political and religious ideas, rich literature, and lots of kind-hearted, peaceful people. Example: Peter Bergson’s brother, from a family of Lithuanian Jews, would not cry revenge after surviving an entirely unprovoked racist attack; instead he would become a doctor, saving lives explicitly in order to thank God for his narrow escape.[17] The Eastern Jews were not an abstraction. They were individuals, who laughed and joked around and got drunk and danced, who thought, invented, and wrote, who kissed their children or parents goodnight, who wondered whether their loves would be returned, who got together once a week to celebrate, and pray, and who said ‘Peace’ to each other every time they greeted or parted company. This people was taken away from us. It was a part of us -- a good part -- and it was destroyed, which is why we call it a ‘crime against humanity,’ because it was a sin against us. And the man committing the crime that cannot really be named, gouging out this piece of us forever -- that man was Adolf Hitler. But the mainstream Jewish leaders Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann told the US State Department that Peter Bergson, who wanted to save as many of these people as he could, was like Adolf Hitler. It is unclear from this alone whether they spoke out of insanity or hypocrisy, but it certainly establishes that Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann felt a white-hot hatred for Peter Bergson.

Enlightenment begins with the honest absorption of this simple fact.

More enlightenment comes from extending the insight to see if it is consistent with other things that happen also to be true. For example, we may consider that Bergson was the political leader of the Irgun, a Jewish underground army in British Mandate ‘Palestine.’ The ideology of the Irgun was that all Jews were equal, and that the Irgun should represent and defend them all.

“The Irgunists felt that they were saving the Jewish family, and it did not matter at that point in history if an uncle was never going to milk a cow on the kibbutz, or that he was lazy or drank too much. He had every right to get out of the cauldron of Europe and to be brought to Palestine. They could not tell him that ‘your credentials aren’t good enough to be a New Jew; go back to Poland.’ Yet that was the openly stated position of many mainstream Zionists -- even after the war had begun...”[18]

There had been pogroms (i.e. unprovoked, anti-Jewish racist attacks, involving pillage and murder) everywhere in Eastern Europe, and the annihilation of the Jewish people was being promised by Adolf Hitler in his speeches if war broke out, and then it did begin when the war broke out. So the Irgun believed that you could not pick and choose: every Jew had a right to live in safety. This was the ideology of the Irgun, of which Peter Bergson was the political leader.

By contrast,

“Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise, the undisputed leader of organized American Jewry, called [Vladimir Zeev] Jabotinsky a ‘traitor’ for preaching evacuation of over a million eastern Jews. ...Furthermore, Wise claimed, the Jabotinsky movement was guilty of bringing unselected, ‘unsuitable’ Jews to Palestine. As the United Palestine Appeal’s director Henry Montor [an ally of Wise] wrote, ‘No responsible person has ever said that Palestine could hold all the millions of Jews who need shelter.’ Montor condemned those who ignored the ‘need’ for selecting Jews ‘worthy’ of settling in Palestine: ‘I think it is fair to point out that many who have been brought into Palestine by the Revisionists [sic] have been prostitutes and criminals.”[19]

Lots of consistency here.

First, Stephen Wise, who felt a white-hot hatred for Bergson, also hated Jabotinsky, and Jabotinsky, it turns out, had the same ideology as Bergson’s Irgun: he considered that all Jews were equal, and therefore all deserved to live in safety. Since Wise and Co. slandered supposedly low-quality Jews unworthy of a state as “prostitutes and criminals,” we have an irony, because Wise and Co. were the ones accusing Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, who believed that all Jews were equal, of supposedly being ‘fascists’ -- kind of like how Wise and Co. compared Peter Bergson to Adolf Hitler.

“Labor Zionist activist Marie Syrkin denounced Revisionism as comparable to 'German or Italian fascism,' and Stephen Wise's son James, editor of the monthly journal Opinion, criticized what he considered the 'fascist tendencies' of the Revisionist movement. ...Stephen Wise denounced [Revisionism as]...'Fascism in Yiddish or Hebrew.' [Yet] Jabotinsky in fact denounced totalitarianism and championed liberal democracy...”[19a]

Also not coincidentally, Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party was loosely allied with the Irgun, and Bergson and Jabotinsky had a very good relationship.

Neither is it coincidence that Peter Bergson, on his mother’s side, was a prince of the relatively small Lubavitch movement, which interestingly is a form of Orthodox Judaism that nevertheless has always advocated the national union of all Jews (reform, atheist, whatever), without distinction or prejudice.[20] These days, one can more easily find Jewish patriots in the Lubavitch movement than elsewhere.

Finally, it is not coincidence that the opponents of Peter Bergson’s Irgun, in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ as in the US, were the mainstream Jewish leaders; the Irgun was relatively small.

This does not exhaust the consistencies, for it turns out that Rabbi Stephen Wise opposed saving Jewish lives in many different contexts, despite the fact that he was, among Jewish leaders, the first to have confirmation, in 1942, that the European Jews would be exterminated.[24a]

For example, before the situation became hopeless, when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain suggested that Jewish refugees from Hitler go to the former German colony of Tanganyika, this was Stephen Wise's absurd reply: “I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany than live in lands which bear the imprint of yesterday’s occupation by Germany.”[21] I can hardly imagine anything more absurd: Wise expressed his supposed opposition to Nazi Germany by proudly offering the German Jews up for Hitler to slaughter! Needless to say, he was not thereby offering himself. Louis Rapoport quotes the above statement by Wise, and on the same page writes, “it is inconceivable and clearly slanderous to say that American Jewish leaders were opposed to saving European Jews.” But I doubt that Rapoport would be ruling out this interpretation if it had been a gentile thus replying to Chamberlain, which underscores the sheer extremity of Wise’s position, however interpreted.

In the summer of 1939, as immigration opportunities everywhere were being denied to the desperate Jews of Europe on the eve of war, the S.S. Saint Louis, a Hamburg-American Line ship, sailed for American shores full of Jewish passengers who had, with great difficulty, legally obtained visas for the United States. This ship was turned away by the US authorities, partly thanks to Stephen Wise.

“A few American journalists and clergymen called it one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the so-called ‘haven for the oppressed,’ the United States. ...It appears in retrospect that the St. Louis was a test case for the Nazis. It confirmed their theory that the democracies were unconcerned about the fate of the Jews, and it therefore advanced the prospects for a ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’ The American Joint Distribution Committee...did finally succeed in finding refuge in various European countries for the passengers of that ship, but most of them would eventually perish in Hitler’s death camps.

Organized American Jews, led by Rabbi Wise, had not only let down the St. Louis passengers, but they also failed to press for passage of the Wagner bill, which had called for the admission of 20,000 ‘German’ refugee children. The term ‘German’ was used instead of ‘Jewish’ in the draft of the bill because of the prevailing aversion to bringing Jews to America, led, among others, by the anti-Semitic ‘tobacco senator’ Robert Reynolds of North Carolina. ...The cautious attitude of American Jewish leaders guaranteed that the bill would be defeated when it came before Congress that fateful May.”[22]

After the war broke out, Peter Bergson’s Irgun demonstrated that they could save lives but the mainstream Jewish leaders were more interested in opposing them.

“...an Irgun ship guided by Jabotinsky’s son, Eri, brought over 2000 refugees down the Danube route to Palestine, underscoring the fact that even with war raging, it was still possible to get Jews out, even from territories under Nazi control… Since the day after the war broke out six months earlier, the Irgun had sent fourteen barely seaworthy ships out of Europe; but the mainstream Zionist movement continued to attack their efforts.”[23]

There seems to have been nothing Stephen Wise would shrink from when it came to attacking Peter Bergson. He was, for example, friends with Edgar Hoover, and starting in April 25, 1941, he began asking for interviews with FBI agents. Rapoport asks, “Did Stephen Wise provide the FBI with information on Peter Bergson?” We cannot know, because to this day the information on this remains classified, but this is not a wild hypothesis, given that a) Wise was telling the State Department that Bergson was like Hitler, b) he was opposing Bergson in every way, and c) he considered Bergson a threat to his political position, which depended on his relationship with people such as Hoover and Roosevelt (see below). What we do know is that the FBI was not acting speedily enough to please Wise, because he complained about it.[24]

It is true that, in public, Stephen Wise denounced Hitler's genocide, but so did Roosevelt, and talk is cheap. So the question is:

Why so much opposition to Peter Bergson, who after all meant to save Jewish lives?

Nahum Goldmann

Adolf Hitler

Vladimir Zeev
Jabotinsky
 

“For Hillel Kook and his friends...
Jabotinsky was a larger-than-life figure, ‘the greatest Jew since Moses’...
”
Louis Rapoport (1999:24)

And yet Morgenthau was a vast improvement over most other Jews in positions of power in the United States.

•

Compassion
by Jewish leaders towards Hitler’s Jewish victims cannot be construed as ‘double loyalty.’

•

Franklin Delano
Roosevelt

“FDR delighted in teasing ‘Stevey,’ who acted like an awed courtier whenever he visited the White House.
”
Louis Rapoport (1999:61)

Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver

How similar to “mainstream American Jewish leaders” were mainstream Jewish leaders elsewhere?
____________________________________________

I am sorry to report that there are plenty of examples of mainstream Jewish leaders elsewhere behaving much in the same way that mainstream American Jewish leaders did. I will focus on the case of the Jewish leadership in Britain for the following reasons:

1) like the US, Britain never became Nazi-occupied;

2) like the US, Britain was a democracy;

3) although the British leadership, like the American leadership, was mostly antisemitic, and though the British Foreign Office, like the US State Department, did its very best to sabotage the rescue of Jews, a clear opportunity to save thousands of Jewish lives was sabotaged by the mainstream Jewish leaders in London; and

5) this has now been well documented.

Above James Carroll says that, before the Nazis settled on the Final Solution, “Jews were offered immediate exit visas -- but exit to where?” Recently, historian Frank Shapiro has produced ground-breaking research that has answered this question: Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia, with its capital in Lusaka). The refutation of the common belief that ‘there was no place to go’ has come late because the relevant documents in Britain were kept classified for more than fifty years. He writes:

“Throughout the world a politically brutal and inhumane picture had emerged: The free western countries were swiftly closing their gates to any form of mass Jewish immigration... Palestine, which was the natural and legitimate solution -- as defined under international law in the terms of the mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations -- was now put strictly out of bounds. When war broke out in September 1939, it was too late to seek a negotiated solution for these millions of people. By then the Jews were well and truly locked within the graveyard of Europe. Their fate had been sealed.”

But there was a place Jews could go to:

“The mosaic of evidence confirms that vast numbers of Jewish refugees could have been saved and allowed to settle in Northern Rhodesia.”[33]

The main players pushing to make possible a large-scale settlement plan for Jewish refugees in Northern Rhodesia, a protectorate of the British Crown, were 1) Reverend Cohen of the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation in Southern Rhodesia, 2) J.E. (Chirupula) Stephenson, a gentile and prominent British colonist in Rhodesia, whom Shapiro considers a saint, and who with remarkable energy did absolutely everything in his power to save Jewish lives, and 3) the Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald, who -- apparently in an effort to distract from the fact that he wasn't letting any Jewish refugees enter British Mandate 'Palestine' -- was ready to act on the Northern Rhodesian scheme even if it meant upsetting both the Governor of Rhodesia (a subordinate of McDonald’s) and a faction of British colonists in Rhodesia who were antisemites. (As it turns out, however, most of the prominent Northern Rhodesian colonists who initially opposed mass Jewish immigration ended up in support when the situation of the European Jews became desperate.[34])

[INSERTED NOTE (4 April 2006): Malcolm McDonald was responsible for the British White Paper of 1939, which was a dramatically anti-Jewish measure that prevented desperate Jews from taking refuge in the most obvious place: British Mandate Palestine, where the Jews had an internationally recognized right under the League of Nations to create a national home.[34a] So this needs to be kept in mind when McDonald's enthusiasm for the Rhodesian scheme is evaluated. It is likely that McDonald was merely trying to produce a political appearance of concern, there to counter the (deserved!) appearance of British callousness toward the Jews. In any case, the desire to produce this political appearance could have been exploited by Jewish leaders in Britain to save Jewish lives. -- FGW]

There were ups and downs, plans were proposed, revised, then aborted, then new plans proposed, and so forth. However, as the situation in Europe became ever more desperate, a plan for mass settlement of Jewish refugees in Northern Rhodesia was eventually very seriously contemplated thanks mainly to Cohen, Stephenson, and McDonald, and then it was approved. This would have allowed perhaps as many as 3000 Jews to take refuge in Northern Rhodesia, which was much less than what was obviously possible, and consequently much less than what Reverend Cohen and ‘Chirupula’ Stephenson had been passionately advocating, but still better than what was being offered anywhere else.

But the mainstream Jewish leadership in Britain discouraged Malcolm McDonald, and kept the Northern Rhodesia option secret from the desperate European Jews.

Frank Shapiro explains who was in charge:

“Until the 1930s, the lay leadership of Britain’s Jewish community remained the prerogative of an exclusive cadre of personalities of well established, anglicized [Jewish] families, such as Anthony de Rothschild, Neville Laski, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, Sir Osmond D’Avigdor-Goldsmid, Lord Bearsted, Sir Herbert Samuel, and Simon Marks, who provided traditional, paternalistic-style guidance.

. . .[After offering to defray all costs of asylum seekers, freeing the British government of all responsibility,] control over the category of refugees admitted became the responsibility of the voluntary organizations which became centralized in the Emigration (Planning) Committee of the Council of German Jewry, whose chairman was Anthony de Rothschild and Professor Bentwich its director. This committee was to be the primary organization dealing with Jewish refugee settlement in Britain’s overseas colonies [because they were not being admitted into Britain!].”[35]

On June 10, 1939, a Mission headed by Sir James Dunnett and appointed to study the feasibility of a mass settlement scheme for Jewish refugees in Northern Rhodesia completed its inquiries. The Mission concluded with the most ambitious official recommendation, which was quite modest compared to what was in fact possible, but at any rate much better than nothing: 440 families (Eastern European Jewish families were large, so these might have been as many as 3000 people).

“It would have been expected that with the publication of the Mission’s findings favoring the settlement of some four hundred refugee families, Rothschild’s Emigration (Planning) Committee would have immediately struck while the iron was hot and malleable, and transported the agreed-upon quota into Northern Rhodesia as fast as possible. Unfortunately, this was not to be. The idea of the report’s findings bothered Anthony de Rothschild, who expressed the wish to keep the findings under wraps for the time being.”[36]

For the time being. This was June 1939, and the invasion of Poland, which began the World War and sealed the fate of Europe’s Jews when Hitler overran the continent, was only two and a half months away.

Colonial Secretary Malcolm McDonald was prepared to order the Governor of Northern Rhodesia, his subordinate, to accept the refugees, overriding any local opposition. In a statement prepared for McDonald’s confrontation with Sir John Maybin, the Governor, and quoted by Shapiro, the London bureaucrats expressed that:

“HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] would in all probability find themselves compelled to overrule the views of the Governor and of his Legislative Council, assuming that those views continued to be unfavorable to large-scale settlement.”[37]

But the body supposedly created to save Jewish lives, and presided by the mainstream Jewish leader Anthony de Rothschild, would not give its endorsement.

“However, the Emigration (Planning) Committee jettisoned the Mission’s plan and had no intention of implementing it. In their discussion on the Mission’s findings, rather than working out a concrete settlement plan, the members of Rothschild’s committee deliberated how to hide the positive intentions; how to keep the report hushed up, and what the likely reactions would be to any publication.”[38] [emphasis original]

And they worried they might be attacked for this, which reveals consciousness of guilt:

“One of the leading Emigration (Planning) Committee members, Lord Hailey, . . .was particularly worried about how to deal with the potential accusations against the Emigration (Planning) Committee if they did not publish the report.”[39]

The method of procrastination became the assertion that other schemes (schemes that, needless to say, came to nothing) should be considered first. Naturally, this gave Malcolm McDonald’s Colonial Office the cover it needed to do nothing, and so

“. . .the Colonial Office went along with Rothschild’s Committee’s rejection and took the view now taken by the Committee, namely that all considerations of the Mission’s Report were to be shelved until information regarding British Guiana was forthcoming.”[40]

Your capacity for shock has not yet been exhausted. Faced with the disaster of the hushing of the Mission’s Report,

“At the end of July 1939, ‘Chirupula’ Stephenson wrote directly to Rothschild offering a business deal regarding his own [Rhodesian] farm as a means to rehabilitate the refugees. Wishing to retire, he offered the Emigration (Planning) Committee his farm for sale, whereby he would become Life Director in an ensuing established limited company. According to Stephenson, the farm comprising some 12,500 acres could support 1,250 men and women growing crops for export. His message was passed on to the Emigration (Planning) Committee and almost three weeks passed before Stephenson received an answer: ‘the Committee decided that for the time being no measures will be taken in regard to refugee settlement in Northern Rhodesia.’”

For the time being. The invasion of Poland would happen in another week.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this story lies in a point that Frank Shapiro goes out of his way to document and impress upon the reader: although there was a lot of official back and forth about the mass settlement scheme, while this was going on, not one Jew who tried to enter Northern Rhodesia, with or without a visa, was denied entry. Every Jew who found out about this made it in. But the Emigration (Planning) Committee, which body knew this perfectly well, did not publicize this fact either.

The documents relevant to this case remained classified for more than fifty years: more evidence of consciousness of guilt.

Is the current Jewish leadership different? The next piece in this series will document that it is not. But casting here just a brief glance into the future, notice one deadly connection between the past and the present. As we've seen above, “the Emigration (Planning) Committee,” which body prevented at least 3000 Jewish lives from finding save haven in Northern Rhodesia, “[was] headed by such eminent personalities as...Lord [Herbert] Samuel...” This Herbert Samuel had been the High Commissioner for Palestine, and he presided over the elevation of Hajj Amin al Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem, after Hajj Amin demonstrated that he could organize anti-Jewish terrorist riots in British Mandate 'Palestine'! Hajj Amin al Husseini went on to organize bigger anti-Jewish terrorist riots with the budget and authority that Herbert Samuel gave him, and when the World War exploded he became one of the main leaders of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution in Europe. Later, he also mentored Yasser Arafat, and grandfathered Fatah, Arafat's organization.[41] This would be the same Yasser Arafat and the same Fatah that current mainstream Jewish leaders have labored energetically to empower inside the Jewish state.

Modern Zambia
( formerly, Northern
Rhodesia )