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
