Zionist-Nazi Collaboration - Letters to the Editor

https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/hlps.2015.0123

  

Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 14.2 (2015): 235–240     Edinburgh University Press© Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studieswww.euppublishing.com/journal/hlps 

Letters to the Editor Zionist-Nazi Collaboration Dear Editor: Tony Greenstein’s article, ‘Zionist-Nazi Collaboration and the Holocaust: A Historical Aberration? Lenni Brenner Revisited’, 

Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol.3, No.2 (2014) gave the readers a distorted picture of my 1983 book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, and I must rebut his critique, point by point. According to Greenstein, the book has ‘major shortcomings’. Among them, he criticises my ‘failure to analyse the Holocaust in depth’ (p.187), without telling us what an in depth analysis would entail. This is known as critiquing a book the author has not written, instead of exposing errors in the book he actually wrote. My preface explained that: Unless this book were to become an encyclopaedia, the material had necessarily to be selected, with all due care, so that a rounded picture might come forth. The book’s focus was exactly expressed in its title: Zionism in The Age Of The Dictators. Its documentation of sundry Zionist factions’ relationships with Nazism got favourable reviews from London’s Times, Moscow’s Izvestia, the official organ of the Soviet Union, and numerous other journals. No reviewer, pro or con, lamented about how it didn’t analyze the Holocaust. Greenstein complained about my ‘treating Yad Vashem as a dispassionate, neutral academic institution dedicated to Holocaust research, rather than a propaganda institute’. (p.187). But I did not discuss Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum. I only quoted Yisrael Gutman, one of its scholars, regarding the misleadership of some of Holocaust Poland’s Zionist leaders (Brenner, pp.204, 209). I have challenged Greenstein, ‘Do you have a problem with those quotes?’ (azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/ 2015/01/zionist-nazi-collaboration-revisited.html) He never answered that question. Greenstein frets that I ‘failed to analyse the role of the Judenräte within the process of the extermination of the Jews. Instead he focussed on the character of their individual members’ (p.193). In fact I wrote that ‘not all leaders or members of the Jewish Councils collaborated, but the moral atmosphere within them was extremely corrupting’ (Brenner, p.205). I dealt, in detail, with ‘individual members’ because they were Zionists. Greenstein arraigns my ‘belief that Europe’s Jews could be saved through bribery, Weissmandel’s Europa Plan in particular. Brenner uncritically adopted the politics of the Jewish Orthodoxy’ (p.188). Rabbi Weissmandel thought it possible to bribe some Nazis to slow the extermination. But I added that he ‘was thinking beyond just bribery. He realized immediately that with money it was possible to mobilize the Slovak partisans’ (p.236). There is not a word in the book endorsing Orthodoxy’s bribery strategy. Greenstein claims I ‘uncritically accepted the argument that Adolf Eichmann’s ‘Blood for Trucks’ offer could have saved Hungarian Jewry’ (p.188). That is also false. I cited what 236 Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies Zionist Joel Brand thought might come of Eichmann’s proposal to let some Jews live in exchange for London and Washington giving Hitler trucks to use against Stalin: ‘Brand hoped that it would be possible to negotiate for more realistic arrangements or, at least, to decoy the Nazis into thinking that a deal could be made’ (Brenner, p.254). Greenstein has me ‘personally blaming Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism and the Jewish Agency’s ‘Rescue Committee’ (Va’ada) in Budapest, for the rapid extermination of Hungarian Jewry whilst ignoring the role of the Jewish Agency’ (p.188). Again, that is untrue. My Hungarian chapter details the role of Moshe Shertok, the head of the World Zionist Organisation’s Jewish Agency’s Political Department. It ends with the exact opposite of blaming the disaster personally on Kasztner: That one Zionist betrayed the Jews would not be of any moment: no movement is responsible for its renegades. However, Kasztner was never regarded as a traitor by the Labour Zionists. On the contrary, they insisted, that if he was guilty, so were they. . . . by far the most important aspect of the Kasztner-Gruenwald affair was its full exposure of the working philosophy of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) throughout the entire Nazi era: the sanctification of the betrayal of the many in the interest of a selected immigration to Palestine’. (pp.263–264) Greenstein deplores ‘A failure to mention Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who escaped from Auschwitz on 10 April 1944, or the Auschwitz Protocols’ (p.187). On my page 255 I told how: Weissmandel had sent detailed diagrams of Auschwitz and maps of the railway lines through Slovakia to Silesia to the Jewish organizations in Switzerland demanding ‘absolutely, and in the strongest terms’, that they call upon the Allies to bomb the death camp and the railways. I wrote about WZO President Chaim Weizmann taking the info to ‘the British Foreign Secretary. . . in an extremely hesitant manner. . . . A memorandum by Moshe Shertok to the British Foreign Office, written four days later, conveys the same hangdog scepticism’. Suppose I had written ‘Weissmandel had sent detailed diagrams of Auschwitz and maps of the railway lines through Slovakia to Silesia’. which he got from Vrba and Wetzler, two escapees from the camp. That would not have added anything important re documenting the WZO leaders sheepish pleas to bomb Auschwitz. Likewise, my readers didn’t have to know that the Protocols were the source of Weissmandel’s alert to Kasztner. They learned that Kasztner didn’t tell Hungary’s Jews to resist being sent to Auschwitz, which he knew was a death camp. Greenstein condemns my ‘failure to ask what the implications for the future were of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. With particular reference to Argentina. The Zionist movement argues that the Holocaust was a product of having no state and Jewish weakness but the Israeli state’s attitude to anti-Semitism is no different from Zionism historically’ (p.188). That is also unfair critique. Adding Israel’s Argentine dealings ‘between 1976 and 1983’ (p.190) would not have provided the book’s readers with any information regarding Hitler-era Zionism. My chapter 8, ‘Palestine: The Arabs, Zionists, British and Nazis’, took on the role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, during World War Two: ‘[H]is Jew-hatred and his anti-Communism persuaded him to go to Berlin and to oppose any release of Jews from the camps for fear that they would end up in Palestine. He eventually organised Muslim SS troops against the Soviets and the Yugoslav partisans’ (Brenner, p.102). Greenstein did not dare write anything about my chapter 8, but he told us that ‘Yad Vashem has a special wall Letters to the Editor 237 devoted to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, a minor war criminal’ (p.190). This is very unhelpful. Mussolini met the Mufti on 27 October 1941. Hitler had a wellpublicised conference with him on 28 November 1941. The Mufti asked for a declaration of support for Arab struggles for independence from Britain and France. Hitler rejected this. Supporting Arab liberation would have created problems with Vichy France. But he assured the Mufti that, after defeating the Soviets in the Caucasus, his army would then support Arab liberation and wipe out the Jews in the British Middle East, i.e. in Palestine. Hitler set him up in Berlin. He made radio broadcasts to the Arab world and recruited Bosnians and Soviet Muslim POWs into Muslim SS units. The Nazis paid him 50,000 marks a month when German field marshals only earned 25,000 marks a year. Did Hitler pay that fortune to a ‘minor’ war criminal? His Bosnians ultimately rebelled against the Nazis because of Germany’s simultaneous alliance with Serbian nationalists who murdered Muslims. He did not order their rebellion, and continued recruiting into the SS. Germany organised SS units composed of Muslim Soviet POWs. At a 14 

December 1943 gathering, he became their ‘spiritual leader’. They murdered thousands during the 1944 Polish revolt. Greenstein is confronted by the fact that the most prominent Nazi era Palestinian leader collaborated. He can’t deny this so, after telling us about my book’s ‘major shortcomings’. he reduces the Mufti into ‘a minor war criminal’. A photo, the Mufti with Hitler, is at wiki/Haj Amin al-Husseini. The readers of Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies will recognise a major collaborator and simultaneously doubt Greenstein re my book. But that is not enough. They should read it and spread the word regarding Zionist collaboration with Mussolini and Hitler. Lenni Brenner Hamden, Connecticut, USA brennerl21@aol.com Dear Editor, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators broke new ground, in documenting Zionist behaviour during the Nazi era. Nonetheless it had serious flaws which are, in part, responsible for why it has had relatively little impact. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators was restricted by its narrow focus. What it omitted left its analysis seriously skewed. My article attempted a radical rethink of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators from an anti-Zionist perspective. Brenner would have us treat it as though it were the tablets of stone. The foundational Zionist myth of the Holocaust, in which non-Jewish victims are excluded, has become a major propaganda instrument in Zionism’s war against the Palestinians. Contradictory elements such as the role of the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) and the Jewish Resistance have to be reconciled. As Professor Israel Shahak, a childhood survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp wrote, the Israeli education system instilled ‘not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that ‘a half-truth is worse than a lie’)’ (Kol Hair, Jerusalem, 12 May 1989). Brenner does not even appear to recognise that Yad Vashem is not a neutral academic research institution but a propaganda organisation. Its work is a form of historical revisionism. When I wrote of the ‘failure to analyse the Holocaust in depth’ I meant that there is little evidence that Brenner understands or appreciates the motivation and processes that led to the final solution. Brenner treats the Europa proposals of Rabbi Weissmandel 238 Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies to bribe the Nazis with $2m to stop the exterminations sympathetically. He utters not one word of criticism yet the Nazis made far greater sacrifices in order to complete the final solution. Extermination was prioritised in preference to military transportation to the Eastern Front. Himmler was quite explicit: ‘The argument of war production, which nowadays in Germany is the favorite reason for opposing anything at all, I do not recognize in the first place’. Is it really likely that $2m would have halted the extermination of European Jewry? Brenner describes how Rudolf Kasztner and Joel Brand met with Wisliceny on 29 March 1944 and agreed to pay the $2m, how a deposit was subsequently paid but still the Jews were ghettoised and deported (252). Raul Hilberg’s argument that most of the preparatory work up to the deportations had been carried out by the Judenrate and that their behaviour was responsible for the efficiency of the extermination process caused an outcry amongst Zionist holocaust historians. At Yad Vashem’s 1977 Conference on ‘Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe 1933–1945’, Raul Hilberg was attacked by Gideon Hausner, the Prosecutor in the Eichmann Trial. Hausner asked what options did the Judenrat have and why did Hilberg not credit those Judenrat which tried to do better? Hilberg’s response was that the process of destruction could not be understood unless one also took account of Jewish behaviour and that despite their welfare activities ‘The Councils served the Nazis with their ‘good’ qualities as well as the “bad”’ (Hilberg (1979: 32). The Judenrate inevitably collaborated unless they took a conscious decision to support and join the Resistance. Hilberg argued that if one wished to prevent a reoccurrence of the Holocaust then one had to study what had transpired. Brenner describes how scholars had shown that not all the Judenrat’s members had collaborated and how the atmosphere within them was ‘extremely corrupting’. But this was irrelevant. What mattered was their role in the extermination process. Corruption was inevitable in this context. Brenner claims that ‘There is not a word in the book endorsing Orthodoxy’s bribery strategy’. He also wrote that Weissmandel ‘became one of the outstanding Jewish figures during the holocaust’ and described his post-war book, Min Hamaitzer as ‘one of the most powerful indictments of Zionism and the Jewish establishment explaining that ‘it helps put Gruenbaum’s unwillingness to send money into occupied Europe into the proper perspective’ (235–6). Brenner cites Weissmandel as saying that ‘the money is needed here – by us and not by them’, that Weissmandel was thinking beyond bribery and that he believed it would make possible the mobilisation of the Slovakian partisans. This was wishful thinking. Brenner describes, uncritically, how ‘the key question’ for Weissmandel was whether the senior ranks of the SS or Nazi regime could be bribed. This was the problem. Weissmandel’s strategy of negotiating with the SS rather than resistance was also the Zionist strategy. If he had used his religious contacts in Hungary to distribute the Auschwitz Protocols of Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who escaped from Auschwitz on 7 April and which contained maps and details of Auschwitz and described the gas chambers, then thousands could have been saved. If the Jews had had access to them they wouldn’t have willingly gone to the brickyards and could have escaped over the borders or gone into hiding. This is what George Tsoros, Elie Wiesel and others confirm. Brenner does not even mention the letter which Weissmandel wrote to Rabbi Freudiger urging that negotiations should be undertaken with Wisliceny, who could be trusted. Braham describes this as the ‘fatal advice of the Slovak Jewish leaders’. He sees the whole focus of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in terms of Weissmandel and Brand: ‘The Jews of occupied Europe, through Weissmandel and Brand, were imploring immediate action’ (256). Not for nothing was Weissmandel described by Vrba as a ‘tragic-comic Letters to the Editor 239 clown’ and his Europa plan as ‘truly hair-brained’. He rejects my claim that he uncritically accepted the argument that Adolf Eichmann’s ‘Blood for Trucks’ offer could have saved Hungarian Jewry’. Brenner devotes three pages to the Blood for Trucks deal. He describes the allegedly hostile reaction of Zionist leaders Shertok and Weizmann. He states that Brand ‘never had any illusions that Eichmann’s proposals would be accepted by the Western Allies’. But this is not true. In the Kasztner trial Brand testified that ‘the inevitable result of his failure to return to Hungary’ had been the renewed extermination of Hungarian Jews (which had never stopped). In May 1964, while testifying at the trial of Krumey and Hunsche, Brand confessed to a ‘terrible mistake’ in passing Eichmann’s offer to the British. He now realised that ‘Himmler sought to sow suspicion among the Allies as a preparation for his much-desired Nazi-Western coalition against Moscow’ (New York Times, 21 May 1964). Brenner rejects the suggestion that he placed the blame for the rapid extermination of Hungarian Jewry on Rudolf Kasztner personally rather than the Jewish Agency. This is a matter of interpretation. Nearly the whole of the chapter on Hungary focuses on Kasztner. There is no attempt to examine the role of the Jewish Agency and the denial by Eliyahu Dobkin that the Jewish Agency did not give Kasztner permission to testify on behalf of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The impression of anyone reading Brenner’s account of the betrayal of Hungarian Jewry was that it was all because of an ‘ice cold lawyer and fanatical Zionist’ (258). Brenner says mentioning Vrba and Wetzler would have added nothing to his description of how Weissmandel had sent detailed diagrams of Auschwitz to Orthodox Jewish organisations in Switzerland ‘demanding absolutely, and in the strongest terms’ that they call upon the Allies to bomb the death camp and the railways’. This is another example of a failure to analyse the Holocaust in depth. Why should Weissmandel’s call for bombing Auschwitz and the railway lines be seen as the epicentre of efforts to prevent the extermination of Hungarian Jewry? It was never likely that the Allies would divert military resources to save Europe’s Jews or that it would have saved a large number of Jews. Because the Auschwitz Protocols were translated into a number of languages and widely distributed to the Vatican, religious and political leaders, diplomats and others, the Swiss press publicised them at the end of June as did the BBC. On 26 June 1944 Roosevelt warned Horthy to stop the deportations. The American Administration understood that the weak point in the deportations lay in Hungary not Slovakia or Poland. On 2 August 1944 a particularly heavy bombing raid of Budapest coupled with messages from Pius XII, King Gustav of Sweden, the ICRC and others, led to Horthy stopping the deportations on 7 July 1944. It was the Auschwitz Protocols not Weissmandel, which had saved the Jews of Budapest. Brenner’s decision to ignore them is inexplicable. Yisrael Gutman of Yad Vashem admitted that Kasztner ‘had already made a decision, together with other Jewish leaders, choosing not to disseminate the report in order not to harm the negotiations with the Nazis’. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, knew of the final solution from Himmler by the summer of 1943 yet he lobbied the Nazis into preventing the escape of Jews from Europe, lest they go to Palestine. He made pro-Nazi broadcasts to the Middle East and helped recruit three Muslim SS Divisions in Bosnia and Albania (which didn’t take part in the deportation of Jews) before being dispatched to France where they rebelled and ended up joining the Partisans. As Brenner himself wrote, the Mufti was ‘an incompetent reactionary who was driven into his anti-Semitism by the Zionists’ (p.102). Peter Novick wrote that of the Mufti that ‘post-war claims that he played any significant part in the Holocaust have never been sustained’. 240 Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies Brenner entirely misses the point. The Zionists made the Mufti into a major war criminal, with the second longest entry in the Holocaust Encyclopedia, as well as his own wall in Yad Vashem because, as Tom Segev noted: ‘The visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs enmity to Israel’. Was he even on the same level as Walter Rauf, the inventor of the mobile gas chamber and an Israeli agent whom Israel helped escape to South America? Rauff had the blood of 100,000 on his hands. Idith Zertal, in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (p.100) wrote how the Zionist movement was responsible for ‘the transference of the Holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality . . . immensely distorted the image of the Holocaust, dwarfing the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders’. This was done through systematic references . . . to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini ‘who was depicted as a prominent designer of the Final solution and a major Nazi criminal’. Tony Greenstein Independent Researcher Brighton, UK tonygreenstein111@gmail.com DOI: 10.3366/hlps.2015.0123