51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis [Hardcover]

 

 

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In 1953 the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kastner, brought a libel action in Israel against a holocaust survivor, Malchiel Greenwald, who accused him of collaboration. Kastner was a senior official in the Israeli Labour Party Mapai and due to become one of its members in the next Knesset. Kastner had, in exchange for 700 (which grew to about 1680) of the Jewish elite - members of Zionist groups, the rich, family members etc. - (one thousand of the elite, bourgoeis and Zionsits, shipped out on a train, provided the Gestapo in Hungary with both lists of names and the whereabouts of Jews to be deported. Even worse, the Auschwitz Protocols, complied from the account of Rudolph Vrba (died March 26 2006) and his companion Wetzler, which detailed the whereabouts of Auschwitz and described the operation of the gas chambers, was suppressed by Kastner, who acted as the representative in Hungary of the Jewish Agency, the Palestine wing of the World Zionist Organisation. The result was that nearly 450,000 Hungarian Jews were deported before the Vrba/Wetzler report was broadcast on the BBC and printed in the New York Times in mid June 1944, 6 weeks after the deportation of Hungary's Jews and their extermination. But at least 100,000 of Budapest's Jews were saved, despite the best efforts of the Zionist organisations to suppress the Report.

In 1944 the Nazis were facing defeat. They weren't able to round up the Jews like in Poland. For one they were an assimilated community, secondly there were very few SS to do the job. Auschwitz was coming to the end of its life with its exposure in the West.

Kastner lost his libel action in the Jerusalem District Court where Judge Halevi wrote that he 'sold his soult to the devil'. After a fierce rearguard action (by which time Kastner, had been assasinated by Israel's Shin Bet) the verdict was reversed on political grounds. All the facts proved in the lower court were accepted as true and one aspect of the collaboration was upheld. SS Colonel Kurt Becher, who had led the SS in their task of liquidating Hungary's Jews, was imprisoned after the war by the Americans. Who rescued him? Kastner who testified, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, that Becher was a saviour of the Jews! Indeed he testified on behalf of all the war criminals with Eichmann - Wisliceny, Krumey - claiming they had rescued Jews!

This book contains much more about the deals between the Nazis and Zionists. The latter accepted the racial politics of the Nazis. They were the racial Jews. They too wanted a racial state, and after the war they got one. They even broke the anti-fascist boycott of Germany in 1933 because boycotts were 'unZionist' (the resulting Transfer Agreement (Ha'avarah)) led to 60% of capital investment in the Yishuv (Zionist state in the making) being from Nazi Germany.

The precursor of this book, that blazed the trail, was Perfidy, by famous Hollywood Producer Ben Hecht, who was himself an ardent Zionist. For 30 years the Zionists did their best to suppress Perfidy. They erased the name of Rudolph Vrba from Holcaust historiography (even today the Holocaust Propaganda Museum in Washington does not sell or have any mention of the name of Vrba - just as it removes the communists from Pastor Niemellor's famous saying about 'they came for the Jews....'

Tony Greenstein

I have also added here a reply to the comment by a Zionist as it is of general interest.

Mikey Ezra unfortunately tries to defend the indefensible. He seems to forget that the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kastner, brought an action in an Israeli court in 1954 for libel against an elderly pamphleteer, Malchiel Greenwald, who had accused him of collaborating with the Nazis in Germany. He 'forgets' that those who testified against Kastner were primarily Hungarian Jews who had, notwithstanding Kastner's efforts, survived the Hungarian Holocaust. Some 20 survivors of the concentration camps gave evidence against Kastner. And according to Ben Hecht's Perfidy (p.173) on October 15th 1945 all the survivors of the deportation from Cluj `Zionists, Social Democrats, Communists, Jews of every sort - try him in absentia in a people's court and pronounce him a war criminal'. Mikey however, in the service of a state ideology, Zionist, knows better than those who survived against all the odds.

The State, which insisted on Kastner's libel action, in the form of its Attorney General, Chaim Cohen was quite explicit that the Zionist practice was to save the few out of the many. It was called 'selectivity'. Those who wish to read up on these things can read e.g. Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Ben Hecht's 'Perfidy' or indeed S Beit Zvi's 'Ugandan Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust'. The latter two are Zionists. All agree that the aim of Zionism was the political goal of achieving statehood and everything else was secondary. Let me quote Attorney General Cohen, was by this time was not so much prosecuting a libel action as defending Kastner:
`If in Kastner's opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few.
`He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions. In fact, if that's how he saw it, rightly or wrongly, that was his duty.... It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine [the Weizmann Blueprint'. Are we therefore to be called traitors?' Hecht, p.195.

Kastner incidentally failed in his libel action in the Jerusalem District Court, because of the evidence amassed. All the factual findings of the lower court were upheld by the Supreme Court which, on narrow political and legal grounds, primarily that one couldn't judge the past or what constituted collaboration, reversed the previous verdict by a majority verdict (with 2 judges rejecting Kastner's sophistry). However they upheld the charge of collaboration on one key issue, that Kastner went to Nuremburg to testify in favour of the Nazi war criminal, Lt. Col. Becher (later promoted) of the SS. In fact it later turned out that Kastner had testified in favour of 3 more Nazis - SS General Hans Juttner, Krumey and Wisliceny, the architect of the Holocaust in Slovakia, who was hanged in Bratislava after the war.

These are the facts that Mikey would like erased. If he had read the 300+ page Report of Kastner to his bosses in the Jewish Agency after the war, a Report which doesn't even mention the Auschwitz Protocols whereby Vrba and Wetzler, the Auschwitz escapees reveal the existence of the Auschwitz extermination camp, he would notice the REPEATED references to the train rescue of the Prominents. Its primary purpose was to rescue the Zionist and Jewish elites, the Prominents. Some others scrambled aboard at the last minute, others included nearly 400 friends of Kastner's from Cluj, his home town and some of the Orthodox Jewish establishment. What it didn't consist of was the working classes of Hungarian Jewry.

As to the alleged 'mistakes'.
(1) dealt with
(2) Kastner and the Jewish establishment, including the Judenrat that was set up, certainly did provide lists of local Jews. The allegation is in Eugene Levai's 'Black Book of Hungarian Jewry.' amongst other sources.
(3) The Zionist Moshe Krauss was a bitter enemy of Kastner and in a minority of one. A number of dissident Zionists wanted rescue above all, unlike the Zionist leadership. People like Ben Hecht and Bergson/Merlin of the Emergency Committee in the USA that Zionist leader Stephen Wise labelled as 'bad as Hitler' despite being responsible for the creation of the War Refugee Board which saved some hundreds of thousands of Jews. Wise and the American Jewish Congress and US Zionist Organisation had done their best to attack other Jews who did want to make rescue, as opposed to statehood their priority. There is no genetic or biological quality among Zionists which prevent their wanting to oppose anti-Semitism. The problem is the politics of the Zionist movement which mitigate against the most natural inclinations to oppose racism. So some Zionists live with these contradictions until one or other gives way.

The Auschwitz Protocols were handed to Kastner on April 29th by the Slovak Jewish Council leader and also a Zionist, Oskar Neumann. This is testified to by a number of sources including Vrba. Kastner sat on them. The only people told were his own comrades, the passengers on the train of the elite and political associates. They were however translated into a number of languages and passed to the Vatican, other emissaries and Jewish leaders and were first publicised by papers in Switzerland. That is what led to the threats by the WRB, Anthony Eden and the decision of July 9th by Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian Regent, to call a halt to further deportations, thus saving the bulk of Budapest Jewry.

But by Mikey's own admission it wasn't Kastner, who we know received the Auschwitz Protocols, who sent them to Switzerland but Krauss. In fact it was probably the Vatican Nuncio who sent them to Switzerland although they were by this time widely disseminated in diplomatic pouches.

4. Auschwitz ended its life on November 25th 1944. It began in 1941 as a labour camp which became transformed with Birkenau into an extermination camp. Mikey's pedanticism fools noone. Vrba and Wetzler specifically escaped from Auschwitz because of the imminent preparations of the camp for the Hungarian deportees, including the construction of a new ramp which would take those to be murdered right up to the gas chambers. That this acceleration of the Holocaust... Read more ›

History can be deceptive. It's fair to say that some of the sensational never-published-before documents, in this book, will shock those who have accepted Zionism and its supposed history, at face value, as a political movement that was the hope of the Jews. Lenni Brenner, the intrepid author of "Zionism in the Age of Dictators," reveals disturbing new evidence in his latest effort, that suggest just the opposite. In fact, he makes a compelling case that the Zionist record was "dishonorable." You can consider this excellent tome as a worthy sequel to his first expose' on the myopic Zionist zealots of that bygone era.

For openers, Brenner showed how the Zionists had a long history of shameless cooperation with the Nazis, especially after the dictator Adolph Hitler had came to power in 1933. The Zionists were also in bed, to some extent, with the other members of what later became known as WWII's "Axis of Evil," that included Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Tojo Hideki's Japan. For example, in March 29,1936, Zionists praised Il Duce, and his regime, at the opening of a maritime school, funded by the Fascist government, at Civitavecchia. This is where a Zionist youth group, the "Betar," trained its sailors for the future Revisionist state. The speakers ignored the fact that on Oct. 3, 1935, Italian troops had invaded Abyssinia.

On another front, the "Third Congress of the Jewish Community of the Far East," was held in Jan., 1940, in Harbin, Manchuria, then reeling under a brutal military occupation by the Japanese imperial forces. At that time, too, Tokyo was already aligned with Hitler and Italy's Mussolini, in the notorious Anti-Comintern Pact. Also, keep in mind, that the Japanese's murderous "Rape of Nanking," had occurred in Dec., 1937, and the "Crystal Night" incident on Nov. 9, 1938. Nevertheless, the Zionist confab went out of its way to legitimize the Japanese occupation by certifying it as a guarantor of the "equality of all citizens," in that beleaguered land.

The Zionist also had a trade plan with the Berlin government by which German Jews could redeem their property in Nazi goods exported to then British-occupied Palestine. And to top it all off, the infamous SS-Hptscharf. Adolf Eichmann, had visited Palestine, in October, 1937, as the guest of the Zionists. He also met, in Egypt, with Feivel Polkes, a Zionist operative, whom Eichmann described as a "leading Haganah functionary." The chain-smoking Polkes was also on the Nazis' payroll "as an informer."

Brenner isn't the first writer to address the mostly taboo subject of how the Zionist leadership cooperated with the Nazis. Rolf Hilberg's seminal "The Destruction of European Jews"; Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"; Ben Hecht's "Perfidy"; Edwin Black's "The Transfer Agreement"; Francis R. Nicosia's "The Third Reich and the Palestine Question"; Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic's "I Cannot Forgive"; and Rafael Medoff's "The Deadening Silence: American Jews and the Holocaust," also dared, with varying public success.

After the Holocaust began in 1942, Eichmann dealt regularly with Dr. Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jew, whom he considered a "fanatical Zionist." Kastner was later assassinated in Israel as a Nazi collaborator. At issue then, however, was the bargaining over the eventual fate of Hungary's Jews, who were slated for liquidation in the Nazi-run death camps. Eichmann said this about Kastner, the Zionist representative, "I believe that [he] would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. `You can have the others,' he would say, `but let me have this group here.' And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful. I would let his groups escape."

Readers, too, will be surprised to learn, that after the Nuremberg Anti-Jewish Race Laws were enacted in Sept., 1935, that there were only two flags that were permitted to be displayed in all of Nazi Germany. One was Hitler's favorite, the Swastika. The other was the blue and white banner of Zionism. The Zionists were also allowed to publish their own newspaper. The reasons for this Reich-sponsored favoritism was, according to the author: The Zionists and the Nazis had a common interest, making German Jews emigrate to Palestine.

As early as June 21, 1933, the German Zionist Federation was sending a secret memorandum to the Nazis, which said, in part:

"It is our opinion that an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state [German Reich] can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims as a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry- -indeed, that such a national renewal must first create the decisive social and spiritual premises for all solutions..."

Incredibly, Avraham Stern, the leader of the notorious "Stern Gang," late in 1940, made a written proposal to Hitler, by which the Jewish militias in Palestine, would fight on "Germany's side," in the war against England, in exchange for the Nazis help in resolving the "Jewish Question" in Europe, and their assistance in creating an "historic Jewish state." By this date, German troops had already marched into Prague, invaded Poland, and had built the first concentration camp at Auschwitz. The deranged Stern had further bragged about how the Zionist organizations were "closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in [their] ideology and structure." Stern's obscene proposal was found in the German embassy, in Turkey, after WWII.

Finally, I think Brenner was right, when he wrote, "This book presents 51 historic documents to indict Zionism for repeated attempts to collaborate with Adolf Hitler. The evidence, not I, will convince you of the truth of this issue...Exposing the Zionist role in the Nazis era is part of the scrutiny of the past, required of historians."

If there is one certainty about Lenni Brenner's work in "51 Documents" it is that attempting to defame his assertions is futile. The book is too well-documented for shrill denunciations and Brenner is quite open to public debate on the topic. As sickening as the collaboration between Zionists and Nazis was and remains, there is in fact unintentional humor in the book. Reading about the seeds of the future Israeli Navy, a Zionist Maritime Squadron, training in Mussolini's Italy in 1936 is reminiscient of a Mel Brooks movie plot, but the truth is far more shameful and truly not funny. For a bracing view of this dark chapter of Zionist history, venture into the text. 5 stars, no hesitation.

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