Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis - Edwin Black Recants

Would there be a State of Israel without Hitler? 

A slightly modified version of the Hebrew original from 20 June 2012:

Graffiti on the holocaust propaganda museum, Yad Vashem, from ultra-orthodox Jews protesting at the Zionist misuse of the extermination of European Jewry for political purposes

 I am cross-posting this from the site of Shraga Elam, a researcher and investigator into the history of Zionist relations with Nazi Germany and the post-war period.  A period in which the Israeli government used ex-Nazis as agents including Jacob van Harten, Ottoz Skorzeny and most disgracefully of all, the inventor of the gas truck, Walter Rauff.

I do not therefore agree with Shraga’s take on all these matters however.

Firstly the term Shoah itself is a Zionist term for the holocaust of European Jewry or Judeocide as Shraga calls it. I copy below an exchange of Moshe Machover, an Israeli anti-Zionist, with one Karen Armstrong, over this very issue.  But this aside.

I disagree that the Zionists sabotaged the Europa plan, dreamt up by Rabbi Michael Dov ber Weissmandel, an Orthodox Rabbi from Slovakia with an unusual history.  The Slovakian deportations, which were the earliest ones to Auschwitz and  Maidenek, began in the spring of 1942 and were halted in the fall of 1942 after the payment of a ransom, some $200,000 by the Slovakian Judenrat.

What Weissmandel could not know was the Nazi commander in Slovakia, Dieter Wisliceny had stopped the deportations from Slovakia because of pressure from the Vatican amongst others.  Money had not played a significant or indeed any part.

That was why the dream of a $2m ransom to save the whole of European Jewry was a pipe-dream.  For a start the extermination had no economic rationale -  it was like burning the seed corn.  It was the destruction of valuable human labour, the cost of which in itself was incomparably greater than the spoils obtained by ransacking the murdered victims’ property.  E.g. Slovakia paid the Nazis a couple of hundred Reichmarks per deportee.  But as the Nazis discovered towards the end of the war, they had created a massive labour shortage which they could not overcome.

I am strengthened in this view by Rudolph Vrba, the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz, who condemned the Europa Plan in stronger terms.  Likewise I don’t, unlike Shraga (& Lenni Brenner too) credit the Brand agreement.  For a start the Brand agreement, Kasztner’s deputy in the Budapest ‘Rescue Committee’ flew to Turkey alongside a Jewish-Gestapo double agent, Bandi Grosz, was a front.  The main agent was Grosz, not Brand.  The ostensible purpose of the mission was to exchange a million Jews for trucks on the Russian front.  It was an obvious non-starter, aimed at dividing the  Allies.  It had no chance of success and the Nazis knew it.

That was why the deportations to Auschwitz from Hungary started on May 15^th 1944 (apart from two trains which had been sent at the end of April).  Brand and Grosz flew out to Istanbul on May 17^th.  All the evidence I have seen is that the Zionists did indeed take the mission seriously but that the British were determined to squash it.

There is a sidepoint.  One doesn’t doubt the urgency and honesty of Rabbi Weissmandel and his integrity.  But he was an Orthodox Jew, and as Neturei Karta have demonstrated, Orthodox Jewry is politically stupid.  To have hinged one’s rescue plans around their pipe dreams would have been absurd.  In fact Weissmandel, whose bravery none can doubt (he escaped by cutting through the bars of a train to Auschwitz) made some terrible political mistakes, not least the letter he sent with Wisliceny vouching for his honesty and integrity.  Wisliceny showed this to Chief Rabbi Freudiger of Hungary, who was in any event willing to collaborate with the Nazis, and this undoubtedly ensured that the Nazi invaders were trusted when the clear message to Hungarian Jewry should have been to have nothing to do with the Nazis and their interlocutors.

There is an interesting interview with Edwin Black http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/TheTransf which Shraga points to with the author of the book he wrote on Ha'avara – the economic transfer agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement (and which also broke the Boycott of Nazi Germany).  Zionists don’t like Boycotts, whether it is of them or the Nazis!  .

Black describes how the Zionist movement set psychologists on him to analyse him, defamed him, picketed his meetings etc.  There is an uncanny resemblance with the treatment of Hanna Arendt, who also described in her ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ some of the unsavoury contacts between the Zionist movement and the Nazis and touched on the collaboration between them.  Black’s mistake, and he is no Arendt or indeed a great thinker, nonetheless wrote a great book which described in detail how Ha'avara had been used to break the Boycott of Nazi Germany.  Black himself has retreated and now pretends that Ha'avara would have been the way to rescue millions of Jews, although it was confined to the richer capitalist Jews of Germany who could have found refuge elsewhere.  In fact as the years passed by Ha'avara faded into insignifance as most Jews who left Germany  did not go via Ha'avara and even the majority of Jews who went to Palestine did not go via Ha'avara.  But Black has wilted under the political attack, because he is a Zionist, whereas Arendt was a quite different figure, as was Ben Hecht who wrote Perfidy exposing Kasztner’s treacherous role.

Unsurprisingly the Zionist movement doesn’t like the glare of light being shone on its misdeeds during the holocaust, which basically consisted of opposing all rescue attempts that didn’t involve Palestine and prioritising building the Jewish State over and above rescue.  This is no longer even disputed (see for example the biography of Ben Gurion by Shabtai Teveth, his official biographer.

Although he is a devoted Zionist, one gets a sense of deja vu from Black’s description of his treatment at the hands of his Zionist critics, with psychiatrists hired to analyse him, claims that he was a holocaust denier and anti-Semite etc.  It is reminiscent of the treatment that Hannah Arendt received after her book ‘Eichman in Jerusalem’ was published, attacks which she said could have come out of a ‘mimeograph machine’.  The difference was that Arendt was a philosopher and thinker and gave as good as she got.  Black is a Zionist who has recanted.  He originally said that Hitler could have been toppled by the boycott.  Now he says that more Ha’varahs were needed!

Tony Greenstein

Shraga Elam

Truth never dies, but lives a wretched life. Yiddish: Der emes shtarbt nit, ober er lebt vi an oreman

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Would there be a State of Israelwithout Hitler?

A great deal of hypocrisy, pretense and perhaps even ignorance were manifested in the sanctimonious outcry over the anti-Zionist graffiti on the walls of Yad Vashem. It is not clear why it is sacrilege to point out that the Zionist leadership has cynically exploited the Nazi Judeocide (misleadingly called “the Holocaust”) for generations. Just as by way of example: one of the central figures at Yad Vashem, Chaim Posner, who worked at that institution for 15 years and was its Deputy Chairman, represents the hypocritical attitude to the Shoah  (big disaster as this Judeocide called in Hebrew) maybe more than anyone else, for he himself whitewashed Nazi criminals who were willing to pay a ransom and that experience undoubtedly played an important role in his work as head of fundraising for Yad Vashem.

Graffiti on Yad Vashem saying with a small orthographic mistake: "If there was no Hitler, the Zionists would have invented him". The original  inscription: 'Bedamaich Chayi' — 'In your blood you shall live' [Ezekiel 16:6]. "Dam" here declined, means in Hebrew "blood" or "money".

It was the most important Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion who coined the concept “Shoah is power” (as he put it, “there’s a big catastrophe – and that’s power” 25 October 1942) [1], and the phrase “there’s no business like Shoah business” is attributed to former foreign minister Abba Eban.

Indeed many historians disagree about the claim that the State of Israel came into being only because of the Shoah, but it is impossible to deny that by means of the German reparations payments the State of Israel survived economic collapse in the 1950s, armed itself with conventional and nuclear weapons and to this very day makes use inflated use of the “cudgel” of the Holocaust in order to silence all criticism of Israel, even when it is justified. That is to say that the Shoah is a very important asset for the State of Israel.

Not only did the State of Israel occupy Palestinian territories but it also illegally appropriated to itself and colonized the right to speak in the name of all Jews, and especially of the Shoah victims, despite the fact that during the Nazi era the leadership of the Jewish Agency, that is, the pre-state government, adopted a policy that was very problematic, to put it as mildly as possible.

Soon after the rise of the Nazis to power the cornerstone of what can be called “the Holocaust Industry” (a term that by the way was not invented by Norman Finkelstein, who in his scathing but superficial and polemic book by that title does not describe or define it adequately) was laid, with what was called the Transfer Agreement, which at one blow converted the leadership of the Yishuv in Palestine from just Jewish Agency into the primary agent for Nazi products in the Middle East. In light of the subsequent policies of Ben-Gurion and his colleagues as well as the reception with which the German Jews were greeted in Palestine (full disclosure: my father was a “Yekke Potz” [derogatory term in Israel for a German Jew] who arrived in 1934), it is hard to believe that the leadership was primarily motivated by the desire to rescue Jews; rather, they saw the agreement as an important source of financing and the fact that by means of the agreement they had broken the efforts to boycott Germany that had been initiated by Jewish organizations (see Edwin Black’s book on the transfer agreement – here is a discussion with him:  was of no particular concern to them.

In his important book Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial, the right-wing historian S. B. Beit Zvi claims that the leadership of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine sabotaged the Evian Conference in 1938 and prevented the rescue of the Jews of Europe on the grounds that, since there was no realistic prospect of absorbing refugees in Palestine, the prospect of their emigration to other countries constituted a serious threat to the Zionist project.

Accordingly, on 17 December 1938 Ben-Gurion, who already then had foreseen the destruction that threatened the Jews of Europe, wrote:

“Millions of Jews now face physical annihilation. (…) And England is trying to separate the question of the refugees from the question of the Land of Israel – and anti-Zionist Jews are helping them. The terrible scale of the refugee problem demands a territorial and rapid solution, and if the Land of Israel cannot absorb [them], then we have to search for other territories. And Zionism is now in danger [Emphasis in the original: S.E.]. All other territorial efforts … will require vast amounts of money, and the Jews are faced with the refugee question, the rescue of Jews from the concentration camps on the one hand, and help for the National Museum [in the original. In my opinion this must refer to the “National Home” – S.E.]  in the Land of Israel on the other – compassion will have more weight, and all the nation’s energy will be diverted to the rescue of the refugees in different countries, and Zionism will be taken off the agenda  …”

That is to say, for Ben-Gurion the rescue of the Jews of Europe under the political circumstances of the time actually constituted a danger to Zionism, and he set his policy accordingly. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 1942 the Ben-Gurion leadership sabotaged the mass rescue effort in the framework of what was called the “Europa Plan”, which obviously could have rescued at least all the Jews who had not yet been sent to concentration camps. At the time the important rescue activist Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl from Bratislava heartrendingly begged for “golden dam for red dam”, that is, money to pay the ransom to the Nazis (as mentioned above the Hebrew word "dam" means not only blood but also money).

Later, in 1944, Eichmann's Jewish envoy Joel Brand was handed over to the British by the Jewish Agency instead of being allowed to return to Budapest to prevent the destruction of the Jews. As is known, Eichmann promised Brand when he sent him to Istanbul with a proposal for “goods for blood” (10,000 trucks and various goods in return for the Jews of Hungary) that he would immediately stop the deportations to Auschwitz if Brand would return with a positive reply. Brand begged of the representatives of the Jewish Agency that they give let him return to Hungary where he would lie to the Nazis and tell them that there was willingness to talk with them about their satanic extortion plan. By then it was also possible to see that the Nazi enemy really meant what they promised and it would have been possible to play for time, because the Russians were not far from Hungary then, and hundreds of thousands could have been saved. One has to bear in mind that the Jews who were supposed to be included in the deal were permitted to leave the area under German control to any place in the world except the Palestine. 

Was it only a coincidence that soon after Brand was handed over to the British, who had overtly sabotaged the chances of that rescue, they suddenly agreed to the creation of the Jewish Brigade, which for years the English had very adamantly opposed until then?

Moshe Sharett (previously Shertok), who was at that time the unofficial foreign minister and later became PM, was filled with feelings of guilt also in that regard. When he heard from Jan Masaryk, the Czech Foreign Minister in exile, that within about a month Winston Churchill would approve the decision for the creation of the Jewish Brigade, it immediately occurred to Sharett that this was a kind of “prostitute’s fee” or payment for silence on the British sabotaging of Brand’s mission.

The journalist Amos Elon wrote in his book Sha’at ha-Efes [Zero hour], based on conversations with Sharett:

“The creation of the Brigade was a personal accomplishment of Moshe Shertok after years of fruitless lobbying. But for all that, the feeling arose in his heart that the cancellation of Brand’s initiative would probably be the price that they would be asked to pay for the Brigade. He trembled when this thought first came to his mind, late at night, in his hotel. Flags and symbols were a miserable substitute for the lives of hundreds of thousands – or millions. The words of Isaiah the Prophet were always on his mind: only ‘the remnant shall return’ (Isaiah 10:21)…” (Sha’at ha-Efes, Edanim, Jerusalem 1980, p. 212).

Even Martin Gilbert’s non-critical book Churchill and the Jews strengthens the impression that Churchill pushed the matter of the Brigade precisely at that very moment as compensation for his government’s treatment of Brand and its failure to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz.

 Among other things, for example, Gilbert quotes – without putting the words in their proper context – a discussion on 3 July 1944 from the protocols of the War British War Cabinet and tries to glorify Churchill, who said, in the face of the opposition of the War Minister and others:

Moshe Sharett was tormented by the thought that they could have done more by way of rescue. He “wondered where he and his comrades had gone wrong”, as Elon wrote. The former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister also told journalists that at the time the Jewish socialist publisher Victor Gollancz had criticized the policy of the Yishuv’s leadership:

“You yourselves may be a little guilty (…) instead of yelling ‘save the Jews’ you are yelling ‘save them by sending them to the Land of Israel!’ What does that look like? Like a house that’s going up in flames and instead of calling for help you are saying to the Allies, ‘you have to take us to the Ritz hotel’”.

(…)

Was Gollancz right? Shertok agonized over that question. Or maybe he himself failed in his dealings with the Brand affair? Maybe he should have told Brand to return directly [to Budapest] from Istanbul?” [ibid.]

It is clear that this is not the whole picture and it is not only the leadership of the Jewish Agency that should be blamed, but especially the Allies; but the Yishuv’s pretension to represent all Jews conferred a special responsibility on it. It is abundantly clear from Elon's book that in fact one of the main reasons both for the failure to bomb Auschwitz and the sabotaging of the Brand mission and the Kastner negotiations that followed was the opposition of Stalin. British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden told Haim Weizmann that “the agreement of the Russians is crucial. We will telegraph Moscow again” (Sha’at ha-Efes, p. 207). The deportation of the Jews of Hungary to Auschwitz served the military interests of the USSR because it constituted a serious burden on the German rail system for non-military purposes. The Nazi proposal for negotiations through Brand/Kastner was the kind of initiative that was hated by the paranoid Stalin, who suspected that his Western allies were trying to link up with Nazis in order to create a joint front against him. Not only did that suspicion cause the war to be prolonged unnecessarily, but it also caused the deaths of many Jews and of course many non-Jews.

Holocaust exploitees

In the framework of the efforts to maximize the benefits from the Shoah after the Second World War, a long-playing and widescale project was initiated for the exploitation of Holocaust exploitees/survivors [1a] for political and financial needs as well as the whitewashing of Nazi vermin who were able to make a reasonable contribution, such as Kurt Becher, Jaac Van Harten, Walter Rauff and many others. 

Survivors and guides over the Alps towards Italy (Beit Yatziv)

Arik Karman, a former navy man, helps to smash the myth of the “haapala” (the smuggling of Jewish refugees to British-ruled Palestine after World War II) and states in his book Oniat ha-milhama shel ha-ma’apilim (The illegal immigrants’ warship) that the number of survivors who were taken to Palestine by means of “Ha'apala” after the Second World War was no greater than the number of “certificates” that the British agreed to issue, and so there was no need to smuggle them to Palestine, endangering their lives in the process and under very uncomfortable conditions. Even earlier, Idith Zartal, in her book Zehavam shel ha-Yehudim [The Gold of the Jews] (Am Oved, 1996- in English: From Catastrophe to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, 1998) quoted a document of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee at the time that claimed that it was possible to bring the survivors to the Land of Israel more cheaply and safely and comfortably by legal means rather than through the wasteful and dangerous “Aliyah Bet” [i.e. the movement of illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine from 1934 to 1948] (p. 396), and adds: “the liberation of the illegal immigrants who were caught on ships of the Mossad [for Aliyah Bet – S.E.], and the deduction of their numbers from the ceilings of authorized immigration meant in fact that that the Mossad immigrants were precisely what the Joint Distribution Committee claimed they were – immigrants who cost sometimes three or four times the cost of regular immigrants (note 104, p. 609). A critical examination of the “Escape” [Heb: “Bricha”] movement shows that many survivors were transferred in that framework with a sense of urgency and haste, for example through the snow-bound Alps without suitable equipment, even though they had by no means been facing danger to their lives, the Second World War was over by then and the survivors were living in displaced persons’ camps without any danger. Even women in advanced stages of pregnancy were forced to cross the passes in the Alps. For untrained people that is not exactly a simple undertaking even in summer with suitable shoes and clothes, let alone in the snowy winter and cold weather without suitable supplies (I myself crossed that route in the summer). Correspondingly an unknown number of Shoah survivors died en route. 

The only possible logic behind those irresponsible actions was that photos of British soldiers manhandling Shoah survivors would make the desired impression in the international media and increase support for the Zionist project. And so there was an urgent need to send them through the snowy Alpine passes and then load them onto leaky tubs for the trip to Palestine by sea. A cynical abuse of people who had already suffered enough!

One of the central figures at Yad Vashem, Chaim Posner, has not only raised money for that institution, but immediately after WWII, as an important agent of the Holocaust Industry, he raised funds for the Zionist project from Nazi criminals. It was none other than the chairman of the financial committee of Yad Vashem and that institution’s then-vice-chairman who undertook to whitewash the war criminal Kurt Becher, who was responsible for robbing the Jews of Hungary and in fact for their destruction as well (for a certain period he was Eichmann’s superior). Since Becher was willing to pay a high ransom, to all appearances not only did the central Zionist activist Rudolf Kastner, but even more, Posner behind the scene – intercede in his favour at the Tribunal for war criminals at Nuremberg, but they also set him up in commercial dealings with Israel that lasted at least until 1953. Judge Halevi claimed that Kastner sold his soul to Satan for the sake of whitewashing Becher. Correspondence between Becher and Posner in 1948 that was published by the historian Shoshana Ishoni- Barri proves unmistakably that the government of Israel was involved in contacts with Becher (see below). And a German document that was partly released recently strengthens the thesis that it was Kastner and Posner who created the Nazi criminal’s commercial contacts with official Israeli commercial agents. So if Kastner indeed sold his soul to Satan, what is the verdict on Posner, or Ben-Gurion, Eliezer Kaplan etc.?

*** *** ***

The Journal of Israeli History, vol. 18, nos. 2 and 3, 1997

The Kastner Affair: The Correspondence between Kurt Becher and Dr. Chaim Posner, 1948

Hamburg, May 30, 1948

Dear Dr. Posner,

I have been informed by cable, in Dr. Kastner's name, that he intends to continue with his flight to Palestine on May 8, and that I must establish immediate contact with you, since you will now be handling all the rest.

I assume that Dr. Kastner has already provided you with precise information with regard to the discussions between us, and that you are already in possession of the pertinent statements and lists.

(...)
Insofar as the purchase of machines5 is concemed, I am presently engaged in serious negotiations, and I am hopeful that I will soon be able to provide you with precise documents on this matter. The matter itself is very difficult, since there are no new objects. And with regard to used machines, it is necessary to fully ascertain the matter of repairs and the supply of spare parts. If this causes a change in your view, I ask that I be informed. I will discuss final arrangements of execution and payment with Mr. Levy of the Jewish Agency in Munich in early June (...)

For now, I send warm regards.

Yours most respectfully,

Kurt A. Becher"

*** *** ***

Posner had also advocated for the protection that was given by Golda Meir to the Nazi agent Jaac Van Harten, who from 1947 lived in Tel Aviv, where sold jewelry that had been stolen from Jews, among other things. One of Van Harten’s roles during WWII was as Becher’s financial advisor (according to testimony he himself gave). In the Posner collection at Yad Vashem archive there is a file devoted to Van Harten, who, along with Becher, is not mentioned in in Posner’s biography published by his son, the former ambassador Avi Pazner, due to “lack of space”.

1.  Edith Zartal, Zehavam shel ha-Yehudim [The Gold of the Jews], Am Oved, 1996.

Translator’s note

1a. A rather popular pun in Hebrew: the Hebrew word for “survivor” (nitzol) and “exploitation” (nitzul) are very similar and actually look identical here because of the absence of diacritical vowel marks in ordinary Hebrew texts, including this one.

Translatedfrom Hebrew by George Malent

Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 11:58:42 +0000

To: Karen Armstrong

From: M Machover Subject: A question of terminology
 

Dear Ms Armstrong,

I have read your article in today's Guardian with great interest, and
found myself in agreement with most of what you say in it.

However, one detail -- one word -- in it struck me as jarring. Admittedly,
this issue is somewhat tangential to the main topic of your article.
Nevertheless, it is important in itself.

I am referring to your use of the word "Shoah". ("Historically, Europe has
found it extremely difficult to tolerate minorities; one member of the AoC
group recalled that before the Shoah, in preparation for what was to come,
Nazi propagandists encouraged the publication of anti-semitic cartoons in
the German press.")

I know that you choose your words with great care. So I must ask why, in
an article written in English, you use a Hebrew word (which means
catastrophe in that language) to denote the Nazi genocide of Jews.

At first sight this question may strike you as odd. However, the genocide
to which you refer as "Shoah" happened in Europe. Its victims were
European Jews, 99.9% of whom would not have known this word.

On the other hand, Hebrew (which happens to be my native tongue) is the
language spoken in one country: Israel, where the word "shoah" has long
been used -- with the definite article "ha-shoah" -- to denote the Nazi
genocide of Jews.

You must surely realize that the use of the Hebrew term "Shoah" in any
language other than Hebrew carries a hidden but heavy ideological load.

As you probably know, this usage of "Shoah" has spread following Claude
Lanzmann's film of that name.

As a brilliant Zionist propagandist, Lanzmann was able to get people to
eat his propaganda without them being aware of it. His film is so
impressive that most people don't begin to realize how one-sided and
biased it is (not a word about the Romany people getting the same
treatment as the Jews; not a word about the many brave non-Jews who risked
their lives helping Jews to survive). The name he chose for his film -- a

name that spread like a real contagious meme -- is just one part of a
clever strategy.

The term that had been in general use before Lanzmann's film was
"holocaust". This term too is not ideologically innocent. It was
originally chosen in order to single out the genocide of Jews by the Nazis
and make it difficult to discuss it in rational terms and compare it with
other atrocities of the same genus.

But gradually that term acquired a generalized meaning, and it started to
be used for describing other acts of genocide (for example, the "Armenian
Holocaust" -- a usage much resented not only by the Turkish government,
but also by Israeli and Zionist ideologues).

A new term had to be invented. Lanzmann's clever idea was to make a
subliminal terminological connection between the genocide of Jews and the
State of Israel, as between a problem and its solution. This is why he
gave his film that name.

So please do not use the term "Shoah" in English -- unless you believe
that the Zionist colonization of Palestine is a proper solution to the
problem of anti-semitism and a just recompense for the genocide of Jews --
albeit at the expense of the Palestinians ("the Jews of the Jews").

Best wishes,

Moshe' Machover

--

From: "Karen Armstrong Info" 

 To: "'M Machover'" 

Subject: RE: A question of terminology
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:31:41 -0000

Thank you, I hadn't realized this and am most grateful that you pointed it
out.