Salo Baron, 1940, The World War and European Jewry

What follows are some selected extracts of an article published in the Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 3, July-August 1940 and based on Address delivered at the joint session of the National Conference of Jewish Social Welfare meeting in Pittsburgh May 25, 1940.

World War II had begun eight months earlier, Kristalnacht happened  18 months previously, the Nuremburg Laws were promulgated four and a half years before this meeting.

Salo Baron was the outstanding Jewish historian of Jewish history at the time and, as has been noted:

Baron opposed the "lachrymose conception of Jewish history"...[that] the main elements of Jewish experience through the ages to be suffering and spiritual scholarship. In a 1975 interview, Baron said "Suffering is part of the destiny [of the Jews], but so is repeated joy as well as ultimate redemption."

What was his view of the present and the future? Was a Holocaust forseen? Did his thinking overly influence the lack of activism in American Jewry's practical response? What did he expect would happen during the war?

I purposely employ PDF copy of the article to indicate no change or editing was made.

Such was the mindset of organized American Jewry leadership in 1940.

The end result was vastly different and, quite probably, this mindset facilitated the poor response to what later happened to European Jewry.

^

No, There Was Not a "Polish Holocaust". But...

No, there was not a "Polish Holocaust". 

But...

...it seems there was an initiative for Jewish Ghettos as well as criminalizing talk that could be construed as "insulting the Polish state - in 1937!

^

Brody and the Holocaust and the Memory

If you go to this site, one of several that repeat the same basic story, you can read of Brody, then in Poland's Eastern Galicia region (now in the Ukraine), during the Holocaust and specifically this rendering: 

...At the beginning of 1943 a resistance group was organised in the ghetto. The leader was Samuel Weiler. The resistance organisation made contact with the Polish underground, a unit of the Polish People's Army from whom they obtained several guns. The Jews wanted to organise resistance in the event of the liquidation of the ghetto. Some of the members of the group decided to escape to the forest prior to the liquidation...In the Pianica forest a so-called "family camp" was organized, where 80 - 200 Jews from Brody were hidden.

The final liquidation of the ghetto occurred on 21 May 1943, in the course of which members of underground organisation opened fire on the Ukrainian policemen and Germans. Several Ukrainians were killed. The Germans set fire in the ghetto and many people were burned alive. Others were executed on the streets or in the forest near the town but in the chaos that ensued, many Jews escaped from the ghetto. Among them were some members of the resistance, led by Weiler. He survived the war in a partisan unit. Of the many people who tried to escape only a very few survived with the help of Poles and Ukrainians. In this final deportation, more than 3,000 inmates of the ghetto were probably sent to Sobibor. From the entire pre-war Jewish population of 10.000 in Brody, only 88 people survived until the liberation. 

Weiler was a member of Betar.  If you've read Moshe Arens article today, you know that the answer to the question:

Why were there two organizations and not one? 

lies 

in the ideological and political hostility that characterized the politics of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine. 

Brody was where my mother's family lived, the Shteckler and Nadel families.  

I think the story of Weiler should be told in full:

Samuel Weiler

From Publications of the Partisan Fighters Museum,

Tel–Aviv, Tevet 5732 – December 1971

By Joseph Parvari (Leiner)

Translated by Moshe Kutten

Edited by Rafael Manory

One of the last commanders of the Beitar organization (In Hebrew the acronym for “The covenant of Yosef Trumpeldor”[1]) in Brody was Shmuel Weiler, of blessed memory, great–grandson and grandson to a Rabbinic dynasty, a graduate of the Polish Gymnasium, a handsome youth, brave and fearless, and limitlessly dedicated to the national movement.

In 1941 he was a resident of the ghetto [he was born in Vienna - YM]. Here, in Brody, despite all of the suffering and the horrible conditions in the ghetto he dreamt about rescuing his nations' honor and about raising the flag of the struggle against the invader and the oppressor of the Jews.

He was one of the few who survived the war. Based on his written testimony[2] that he provided to the Jewish Historical Institute in Krakow, one can assemble a short review of the fight of the local youth against the Nazi regime.

Shmuel Weiler, the commander of Beitar, together with several friends, including Shlomo Halbershtadt, a former member of the “Hashomer Hatzair”[3] movement, Yaakov Linder, a member of the “Komsomol” (The Communist Youth Movement) and the teacher Adolf Klar, established a fighting organization in the ghetto by the name of ZOB (Zydowska Bojowa Organizacja = The Jewish Fighting (or Combat) Organization), headed by Shmuel Weiler, which was the nucleus of the local partisan movement. The Jewish fighters contacted the Polish fighters in Lvov and asked for their help; however, the Poles refused to accept them in their ranks, and to provide any weapons. Thus, the organization, which was isolated from the outside world, decided to secure the needed financial means on its own, and to acquire the necessary weapons by purchasing it or by force. Among the few who were willing to assist the organization, was the Ukrainian Communist activist, Yashko Buraczek, a friend of the Jews, who has meanwhile passed away. The organization received the first handgun from him.

Weiler managed to contact an ethnic Pole, a soldier who served in the 45th battalion of the German army infantry (there were Poles from Pomerania, Silesia and Poznan who served in the Wehrmacht). This Pole told Weiler about the huge defeat suffered by the German forces headed by von Paulus, during the winter of 1942/43 in Stalingrad. The organization published and disseminated this and other news via leaflets. The news helped in raising the morale among the Jews and in forging their will to survive. However, the organization was not satisfied with only this type of actions. It decided to start open struggle, get out of the ghetto, and run away to the surrounding forests. They planned to join the partisans and fight against the Germans.

The organization continued its activities by performing sabotage actions. Near the village of Sukolovka, its members blew up a tar factory. Tar was a needed raw material for producing ammunition. The forced labor camp at the Sasov quarry was attacked too in order to get hold of dynamite for the production of mines. An underground member, the engineer Fauerstein, invented a mine for blowing up railroad tracks. The mine was placed about 40 kilometers from Brody between Krasna and Kolkosh stations and caused the derailment of a train locomotive, the destruction of two boxcars full of weapons and ammunition, and the death of tens of German soldiers.

Despite the harsh conditions and the never–ending lurking dangers, at every moment the fighters were also keen at preserving their cultural life even while in the forest. They organized meetings on Saturdays and evenings, in which they gave lectures on current events. Moishe'le Shapira stood out in these meetings in which he read from his poems about the Jewish people, its enemy and the fight against it.

At about the same time, it was announced that the organization was accepted into the ranks of the GL–Gwardia Ludowa–organization, the “Elite People's Guard,” the Polish underground leftist resistance organization in Lvov. The GL organization promised to provide commanders, as well as non–Jewish partisans and weapons.

When its funds had dwindled, the organization decided to rob the national bank branch in Brody. Twelve people set off to carry out this undertaking on 13th of May 1943. At noontime, the members heard that the force encountered a German army unit. A battle ensued, in which two of the group members – Bunyo and Izyu Reinhold, were slightly wounded. The group was forced to retreat toward the forest. The German succeeded in capturing two of the fighters in the swamps and they handed them over to the city gendarmerie. While their clothing were being searched, the fighters managed to draw their guns, kill a policeman and run away to the ghetto. The house in which they were hiding, was surrounded by the police force and its residents were taken out and shot to death. When the fighters saw that they do not have any hope of escape, they committed suicide.

At that point, it was clear that the time had come for an uprising. The organization called for active resistance against the oppressor. They encouraged the Jews to follow the example of Ghetto Warsaw, which fought heroically against the Germans. They appealed the people to escape to the forest and join the partisans. Many abided by the appeal. In order to sustain themselves, groups of members attacked the farms of rich “volkdeutsches” and confiscated meat and flour. They left a note in every place they raided, acknowledging the confiscation of the produce, stamped by the organization logo.

On 17th May 1943, a force consisting of two German army companies, Ukrainian police and the gendarmerie attacked a group of the organization members. The ensued battle lasted the whole day. Unfortunately, the attackers had the upper hand. Thirty Jewish warriors died a heroic death. The survivors returned to the city and hid in the attic of the ruined synagogue. The police discovered their hiding place and they were captured. After that incident, the head of the Judenrat demanded that Shmuel Weiler sign a declaration that he would not incite the youths to fight against the Germans. Weiler refused. The Judenrat then demanded that Weiler's mother sign in his name and she refused as well.

During the night of May 20/21, 1943, the ghetto was surrounded by S.S. units that arrived from Lvov, headed by Major–General Katzman, may his name be damned, and Ukrainian police forces that were mobilized from throughout the environs joined them. They entered the ghetto and forced out people from their homes and hideouts. After robbing them of everything they owned, they loaded them up on trucks and transferred them to the train station. From there they transported them in crowded and sealed boxcars to the death camp of Majdanek (one of the survivors testified later that the train bypassed the Belzac camp). Many tried to jump off the moving train, but only three managed to survive.

Miraculously, Shmuel Weiler himself survived. After the liberation by the Red Army, he and his mother moved to Poland and from there to France. In France, he continued his work in the movement and became the secretary general of the right–wing Herut–Hatzohar Union party[4]. He served as a journalist for the party's newspaper, “Herut”, in Israel and acted on behalf of and for the benefit of the state of Israel. He played a major role in organizing the weapon shipment via the ship Altalena. He served as a delegate in the Zionist congresses and visited Israel.

The author would like to mention that a group of Jewish partisans from the neighboring city of Radzivilov, was also active in the area of Brody during the conquest years (see article by Yekhiel Porochovnik in the Yizkor book for the city of Radzivilov–Sefer Radzivilov, pp. 232–250[5]. Shmuel Weiler did not mention the group in his testimony since most of their activities occurred after the extermination of the ghetto. Most of the members of this group later joined Russian units and fought in the ranks of the Red Army.

Shmuel Weiler passed away in Paris in 1962, at the age of 48, after suffering from a malignant disease. His mother, Adela Weiler transferred his body in December 1962 to Israel, and he was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery [near Tel Aviv. M.K]. Adela Weiler passed away in October 1971. She was a public figure and an industrious Zionist leader in Brody. She was buried near her son.

Her memory and the memory of her son would be forever bound in the bundle of the living among all of Israel heroes.

Translator's Notes

Beitar–A Revisionist Zionist youth organization founded in Riga, Latvia, by Zeev Jabotinski (the leader of the Revisionist Movement, linked to the right wing Herut Party. The organization was named after the leader of Jewish settlers in Tel–Hai, Yosef Trumpeldor, who was killed in defense of the settlement. Return
Shmuel Weiler's testimony was taken from the collection “Underground Movements in the Ghettoes and the Camps,” edited by Betty Eisenstein, 1946, published by the War Archives, the Jewish Committee in Krakow (in Polish). The testimony also appears in Brody Yizkor Book, pp. 170–174: (l) 
Hashomer Hatzair–Translated literally as “The Young Guard” is a leftist Marxist Zionist youth movement affiliated with a party by the name of Hashomer Hatzair–Workers Party of Palestine (later unified with other movements to form the leftist Mapam and Meretz parties). The organization was established in Galitzia in 1913. The movement is active today in Israel and internationally. 
Likud Party – Literally translated as “consolidation”, is a union of center–right wing parties formed by Menahem Begin. The senior party in the Likud is Herut (translated literally as “Freedom”) which was formed in 1948 as a successor to the Revisionist Irgun militant underground organization. The first union was formed in 1965 between Herut and the centrist Liberals party. Several other small parties joined in 1988.

Radzivilov's Yizkor book.

Survivors of Brody at the Foehrenwald displaced persons camp 

on the first day of the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, 1946

In the book Ner Tamid - Yizkor L'Brody, he is mentioned, see pages 170-175, but no pictures of Betar Brody or of Weiler, which I have seen when I visited one of the editors, are included in the book!

A portion of what appears there:

Shmuel Weiler, who brings this testimony, turned to the Pole, Tadeusz Z'ak, and asked him to find out whether the Polish Fighting Organization – or the“Home Army” (“Armia Krayova”) in Lvov would agree to accept the Jewish fighters into its ranks, or, at least, maintain a contact with the Jewish organization in Brody. Z'ak returned and brought an absolute negative answer. The members of the Polish organization said that they do not want any contact with the Jews.

The Jewish youth didn't give up. It was decided to establish an organization called “The Jewish Fighting Organization” [or ZOB - Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa]. In Polish, the name of the organization begins with the word “Jewish,” and thus, it was felt that it was a separate organization that didn't receive help from any cause. Based on a suggestion by the teacher, Keller, it was decided to postpone combat operations to the following spring and use the period of fall and winter of 1942 for organization and preparation. A leadership was elected: Shlomo Halbershtadt, Yaakov Linder and Shmuel Weiler. A contact was established with the Ukrainian, Yashek Borchak, a known communist activist. The Organization was based on “trios” (troika). Meetings took place every evening. Funds were collected, weapons were acquired and bunkers were prepared. A bulletin, which publicized the news from Radio London, was published. Underground leaflets – “Gwardzistah” [Militiamen] “Neipodelgloshets” [Freedom] and “Volnoshets” [Independence] were brought from Warsaw, and leaflets of the “Polish Workers Party” (PPR) were brought from Lvov.

In December of 1942, Weiler established a contact with a soldier from the German army, a Pole from Pomeran near Poznan (The 452nd German battalion was made up of Polish residents from Poznan and Pomeran). The soldier told Wailer that twenty-two German divisions, under the command of General Paulus, encircled by the Red Army in Stalingrad. The information flowed two-ways. The Jewish organization also provided information, which was carried back t by the German soldier, to the Polish soldiers in the German battalion as well as leaflets.

A branch of the organization was also established in the labor camp where the Germans concentrated the majority of the men from the ghetto who were of working age. Meir Foyershtein, Marian Altura and Mans Klugshlager headed the group in the camp.

in February of 1943, it was decided to open operations in Brody. Two of most devoted members of the organization – Shteiner (aka “Yoshko”) and Baumvald (aka “Bunyo”), were sent to the forest to select an appropriate location for digging a shelter for a large company. They were given two handguns, shovels and provisions for the road. Six days later, the two returned and announced that they established in the forest, about 21 kilometers from the narrow-gauge railway, a bunker for twelve men,


On their return, the young men met two Jews in the forest who were sent by the Jewish Fighting Organization of Krakow to explore potential locations for partisan operations. The Krakow fighters had weapons, Aryan papers, underground literature and also a small military pharmacy. They told that they had another member with them who disappeared without a trace. They walked to Lvov on foot. In the town of Oleshko they were stopped by a Ukrainian police commander who demanded to see their identity cards. The young men shot the policeman and fled.

^

Jabotinsky's Mention in New Film

"We, warriors of the Zionist Revisionist movement, 

in the name of Vladimir Jabotinsky, 

promise to fight to the end and we will never surrender..."

From "Chosen".

Trailer here.


Thanks to Dovid S.

A review. ^

Jabotinsky and 6,000,000

From a news report on June 5, 1938:

Vladimir Jabotinsky, president of the New Zionist Organization, speaking at the Anglo-Palestine Club, declared last night that European belts of Jewish distress comprised 6,000,000 whose hopes centered on migration to Palestine.

Chaim Weizmann employed that figure back in 1937:

"The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No'....From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people...The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world...Only the branch of the young shall survive...They have to accept it."

^

Bauer's Anti-Wyman Address

Last week, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Professor Yehuda Bauer lectured for over 90 minutes, a talk that was a direct attack on Prof. David Wyman and his school.

Wyman, the author of The Abandonment of the Jews, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 and  A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, and founder of the institute that bears his name, champions the position that FDR and the Allies could have saved many more Jews than they did.  As noted:

In January 2012, Bauer's article in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Holocaust, America and American Jewry" precipitated a bitter debate between himself, Rafael Medoff (Wyman Institute) and Alexander J. Groth (University of California, Davis), on what the US Government and the Jews of America could and could not have done to rescue the Jews of Europe.

I was a part of that argument on a parallel issue.  On the argument, see here, too. Also here. And a contra.  Bauer has also been behind the stonewalling over the years of any proper acknowledgement of the Bergson Group's activities by Yad Vashem (there was more success at the US Holocaust Memorial).

Bauer was afforded a very special platform at the Israel Academy of Sciences in its Van Leer hall.

And he used to it to the fullest, going over his earlier arguments and adding more points. For him, it didn't really matter in the end whether FDR and his State Department officials were anti-Semitic or whatever.  The point he made was that it was not possible to save Jews in any significant number.

Points from my notes of the talk:

a. Were FDR, etc. obligated to save the Jews?

b. Wyman assumes, based on the Protestant background, a religious/moral approach rather than an analytical/political one in judging the issue based on the specific time period.

c. Was the US really obligated to Jews more than any other group threatened?  Did the US intervene in the Abyssinia invasion?  Nanking?  Why should we expect the Jews to be treated better than those?

d.  Germany controlled Europe and there was no way Jews could escape.  By ships?  How could they even reach ports?

e.  He went through specific numbers of possibilities which were minuscule.

f.  The fact of the matter that even when reliable information was passed out from occupied Europe on the fate of the Jews, no one believed it, including many establishment Jews.  So why blame FDR, etc.?

g. Was there anything to bomb?  And when?  He charted distances and flying capabilities. This he needed to do after being roundly criticized at an international conference.

h.  The idea that Zionist leaders, foremost among them Jabotinsky, foresaw the Holocaust is not at all exact.  What Holocaust?  Did they knoiw of an industrial murder machine? Actually, it is a fantastical idea.

i.  The ability of the Allies to accomplish any sort of rescue operations was almost zero. No military action could have been put in place.

j. Even the 400,000 claimed by Wyman/Medoff doesn't exist.

k.  Wallenberg was not a War Relief Board appointee by actually a US-sponsored spy.  And that was why the Soviets treated him they way they did instead of a humanitarian mission.

l.  The Holocaust, as such, wasn't even known until late 1942 and by then the numbers left were not large and there were not planes capable at that time of reaching areas to be attacked as that only happened in late 1943-early 1944.  There weren't that many Jews left to save.

My immediate thought was that even within the framework Bauer constructs, even he cannot know what would have been the effect on Germany had some operations been attempted and declarations made.

On this matter, a review of a new book was brought to my attention.  The book, “1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History,” we read that the author thinks that

Roosevelt should have imbued World War II with a higher moral purpose, making it not only a fight against the Axis but also “a war against the Final Solution.” He adds, “In 1944 he had his chances.”

Such arguments sidestep certain realities, beginning with the emphasis on 1944 as a potentially pivotal year for Jewish rescue. 

Was it that

the opportunity to save a sizable percentage of Jews had long since vanished...By the time of D-Day, a vast majority of European Jews were dead. Winik argues that many thousands of Jews in Hungary could have been saved if the Allies had bombed Ausch­witz in 1944, but whether such raids could have had a significant effect is still hotly ­debated.

And the reviewer also notes

In all, the War Refugee Board and its operatives were credited with rescuing more than 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust — an impressive feat, to be sure, but only a tiny fraction of the millions murdered by the Nazis. The success of the board’s 11th-hour effort underscores the haunting question that runs through Winik’s book: How many more could have been saved had America acted sooner?

So, is Bauer the more correct historian?

To Bauer's claim of "how would the Jews have gotten to the ports?" and "Would the British could have opened Palestine to Jewish refugees?", the Wyman/Medoff school would reply

Some would have managed to find a way, many wouldn't; we don't have to produce some foolproof method. What's important is that the Allies obstructed the possibility of rescue - not because they thought not a single Jew could escape, but because they didn't want the "burden" of having Jewish refugees on their hands.

To Bauer's doubt that even if the Roosevelt administration had established the War Refugee Board in 1943, instead of fighting tooth and nail against its creation, and establishing it only in 1944, how could the WRB staff found ways to rescue more refugees? the reply would be

The exact same way that they did in 1944--sending funds to Europe for bribing and sheltering, sending emissaries to negotiate the opening of blocked-off escape routes, etc; but they would have been doing it for a whole extra year, so more would have been accomplished.

Other responses:

- if the War Refugee Board had been appropriately funding by the U.S. government instead of 90% of its budget supplied by private Jewish organizations, rescue attempts would have benefited from more money = more staff, more funds for bribes, more funds for sheltering Jews underground in Europe, and in general more rescue work.

- as for the claim that the American public was so anti-Semitic that it prevented FDR from setting up numerous temporary shelters for Jewish refugees, instead of just the one token camp in Oswego, New York, where 982 refugees were housed, Bauer knows that the White House commissioned a Gallup poll in April 1944 which found that 70% of Americans were willing to admit an unlimited number of Jewish refugees temporarily until the war ended.

- that a bombing option, which Bauer agrees is but a "moral" matter, is really one of efficacy is answered so: what's not an open question is this: the reason the Allies turned down the bombing requests was not because they thought bombing the camps or the railway tracks wouldn't be effective. They never did study to determine if it would be effective. Instead, the War Department lied and claimed it had done a study and bombing would divert planes from the battlefield. They knew that planes didn't have to be diverted because they were already bombing targets within five miles of the gas chambers. But they lied because they didn't want to use even the most minimal resources for a humanitarian objective--and they didn't want to be left with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees to deal with.

I can only presume that issue will continue to be contentious.

___________

P.S.  

I was reminded by a comment about something Bauer said which, to me, indicated he is still motivated by a personal political approach.

He recalled that he had appeared on the same platform as then PM Yitzhak Shamir at a Holocaust memorial event and Shamir had declared the lesson of the Holocaust was that Israel had to be strong.  That last part, Bauer said with a bit of denigration and scornful disrespect.

But he also added a description of the event, saying that "Shamir ascended the speaker's p[odium to his full height".  That brought smirks from the audience.  Why?  Because we all know that Shamir was quite short.  Bauer was simply making fun of a physical characteristic that had nothing to do with his point, unless you grasp that Shamir was Lechi and Bauer was Palmah.

He also said something condescending about Barak and his wish that the IDF be a small and compact fighting force but I don't recall the exact words.  But the intent was similar - making fun of him rather than a point of dispute.

^

CAIR Can't Care for Historical Accuracy

CAIR, again, twists history.

In reaction to Donald Trump's suggestion that a 

"total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that

Trump's ''outrageous'' comments on banning Muslims echo ''the policies enacted by nazi Germany against the Jews.''

But that's not true.

If anything, it's what F. D. Roosevelt and his cronies in government before and during the Holocaust did by refusing Jews entry to the United States.

Nazi Germany persecuted Jews, jailed them, took away their livelihoods, kicked them out of universities, boycotted their businesses and eventually killed them.  It did not ban them from entering Germany.

^

Was Netanyahu Wrong?

After these blogs, here and here, I bring you something I found at Bernard Lewis' 1999 book, "Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice", pages 146-7

The "Final Solution"?

The extermination of World Jewry?

UPDATE

And see now Elder.  And this.

UPDATE II

"There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the Mufti had an important role in the Holocaust," Boris Havel of Croatia's ministry of foreign affairs, the author of a recent journal article about Husseini, wrote The Washington Post in an email. "By the end of 1930s Germany still allowed its Jews to emigrate. No Jews were allowed to emigrate after Mufti established himself in Berlin. The Mufti has been calling on killing Jews since early 1920s, i.e. even before Nazi regime came to power in Germany." (In an email, Havel his views "do not reflect the official policy or position of the Institution by which he is employed.")
One book, "Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam" (2008) - citing Hitler's alleged comment to Husseini "the Jews are yours" - argued that the Mufti's sit-down with the Fuhrer was pivotal.

Spoerl's paper.


And, starting in 1939, we learn from this study:

American diplomats in Cairo began to send reports about Arabic language broadcasts coming from Germany and Italy in summer 1939. Kirk sent the first of his dispatches about them to Washington on September 13, 1941. 

...The transcripts reveal the intertwining of Nazi ideology and the Nazi narrative of World War II with themes of Arab nationalism as well as those of what we would now call fundamentalist or radical Islam. The transcripts reveal Germany, and fascist Italy’s efforts to present themselves as partisans of Arab independence against British colonialism. Husseini celebrates Rommel’s victories. Many broadcasts repeat the general themes of radical anti-Semitism, describe World War II as a Jewish war and some call on the Arabs to kill the Jews in their midst...the Sichherheitsdienst and German military intelligence was reporting back to Berlin that if Rommel’s North Africa Corps was victorious and was able to enter Cairo and Palestine, it could count on support from some elements of the Egyptian officer corps as well as from the Moslem Brotherhood.43 They reveal that an Einsatzgruppe in Rome was armed and prepared to depart to Palestine to murder the Jewish population there had Rommel been successful at Al Alamein ...

_________

UPDATE

"...thanks to Netanyahu's words we come out of this with a benefit, because he dealt with the centrality of the mufti who for some reason has been taken off the historical stage in everything related to the Holocaust...When Haj Amin al-Husseini met Hitler in November 1941, he told him that there's a stark similarity between Nazism and Islam...Husseini was responsible for establishing SS units in the Balkans. He was friendly with senior SS commanders, and was responsible for Berlin Radio broadcasts in all the Islamic lands."

"His Berlin Radio broadcasts would always end by calling to slaughter the Jews.

"...The Prime Minister’s remarks were not far from reality.  There was a plan by the Mufti to burn the Jews from Arab countries and Jews in Palestine after the German victory in the battle of El Alamein in 1943. Haj Amin al-Husseini was an officer in the Turkish army. I have no proof, but apparently he knew about the Armenian Genocide and drew his ideas from that. None of the historians have referred to that...he played a part in the Farhud - the pogrom against the Jewish population of Baghdad on June 1 and 2, 1941, following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War.

“The Mufti was responsible for the killing of hundreds of Jews; he planned to build incinerators in the Dotan Valley to implement the ‘Final Solution’ in the Middle East,”

MORE

An addition

And just as I wrote:

Focusing on the details of the meeting is a key error that has plagued much of the commentary about Netanyahu's statement. The real question is what impact the Grand Mufti and those he ordered, inspired and incited had on the Holocaust. What role did the Grand Mufti and his Palestinian followers have in preventing Jews from escaping the Nazis and getting to the only territory that would take them, the Jewish community in British-run Mandate Palestine?
Here the evidence is clear: The Mufti influenced the Germans to directly prevent the escape of Jews who otherwise might have survived the war, and he provoked his followers to violence in the Palestine Mandate, leading the British to enact the infamous White Paper. That new British policy called for greatly restricting Jewish immigration for five years, after which any further immigration would have required Arab ascent:
This again prevented Jews from escaping from the Nazis in Europe, and thereby helped implement their extermination.
That is, at the very moment when the desperate Jews of Europe most needed a haven to escape to, the Mufti had played a key role in slamming the door.

.

^

The Holocaust, The Naqba and Natalie

I have for several years believed that a weak-willed phenomenon in large elements of Israel's populace, especially those who are the 'elite' in business, academia and politics, can, in part, be traced back to the quarter million or so Jews who, having survived the Holocaust, arrived in Israel and instilled what I termed a psychological gene in their children.

Well, now we have the results of this study that has found:

that the trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors caused genetic changes, which can be passed down to their children.  The results are an example of “epigenetic inheritance”—genetic changes caused by environmental factors, such as smoking, diet, or stress. In these cases, the underlying genetic code remains unchanged, but some of the chemical tags that get attached to genes throughout a person’s life get passed down.

My thinking was that the survivor was still in Europe in 1945 mainly due to his/her or the parents of not believing warnings, like those of Jabotinsky and others, to leave and/or had no ability to analyze what was happening on the continent.

And so, things are taken a step further and now, we have an 'official' Holocaust - Naqba comparison book which Dan Margalit calls "Polluting the historical truth" in that "the comparison between the Nakba and the Holocaust harms the memory of the latter and undermines its validity, as these two events could not be more different."

The third link is Natalie Portman's statement:

“I think a really big question the Jewish community needs to ask itself, is how much at the forefront we put Holocaust education. Which is, of course, an important question to remember and to respect, but not over other things... We need to be reminded that hatred exists at all times and reminds us to be empathetic to other people that have experienced hatred also. Not used as a paranoid way of thinking that we are victims.”

She continues:

“Sometimes it can be subverted to fear-mongering and like ‘Another Holocaust is going to happen’. We need to, of course, be aware that hatred exists, anti-Semitism exists against all sorts of people, not in the same way. I don’t mean to make false equivalences, we need it to serve as something that makes us empathetic to people rather than paranoid.”

...I was shocked that that [genocide] was going on while I was in school. We were learning only about the Holocaust and it was never mentioned and it was happening while I was in school. That is exactly the type of problem with the way it’s taught. 

Basically, we Jews are just like all the rest.  No need to grasp any special circumstances.  The killing is all the same.

Well, I see that she displayed an early expression of her type of thinking and maybe it has its roots in her genes?

__________

UPDATE

Abbas presents Holocaust as something Jews "say":

a 

"They say they made sacrifices in World War II -

we respect what they say"

Abbas adds libel: Israel doing to Palestinians what Nazis did to Jews:

"We must not be a victim of the victim"

^

Roosevelt and the Jews of Europe

The Nation published an article which asks:

How did a president beloved by Jews come to be regarded as an anti-Semite who refused to save them from the Nazis?

and explains:

Presidential scholars have consistently ranked [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt as the best chief executive in the nation’s history for his handling of the Great Depression and World War II. But even among liberal Jews who still hold him in high regard for those achievements, his reputation has been tarnished as he has been viewed increasingly through the prism of the Holocaust. What started out in the late 1960s as legitimate historical revisionism—looking critically at what the Roosevelt administration and American Jewry did during the Holocaust—has morphed into caricature, with FDR often depicted as an unfeeling anti-Semite. 

I received this:

 

The current issue of the political weekly The Nation features a 3,000-word article denouncing those who have questioned President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust. However, the editors of The Nation have declined to publish the following 900-word reply.

=============

    Progressives Confront FDR's Response to the Holocaust

    by Rafael Medoff

    In early 1943, at the very height of the Holocaust, one of America's most prominent journalists denounced President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Nazi genocide in remarkably harsh terms. 

    "You and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt," she wrote. "If we had behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the two million Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler’s other crowded graveyards would be alive and safe. And other millions yet to die would have found sanctuary. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and we did not lift a hand to do it—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we lifted just one cautious hand, encased in a tight-fitting glove of quotas and visas and affidavits, and a thick layer of prejudice."

    This stunning critique of FDR's Jewish refugee policy was authored by none other than Freda Kirchwey--a staunch New Dealer, Roosevelt supporter, and editor in chief of the liberal political newsweekly The Nation. What Kirchwey wrote in 1943 is particularly relevant in view of The Nation's publication, this month, of an essay zealously defending Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust and claiming that criticism of FDR is all a plot by political conservatives and rightwing Zionists to drum up support for Israel. ("FDR's Jewish Problem," August 5-12, 2013)

    Evidently the essay's author, journalist Laurence Zuckerman, was not aware of the Holocaust record of the magazine for which he was writing. It is a record that is admirable--and that completely refutes Zuckerman's thesis.

    The Nation spoke out early and vociferously for U.S. action to rescue Europe's Jews. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, the journal called for admission to the U.S. of at least 15,000 German Jewish refugee children. (The administration declined to endorse the proposal.)

    The Roosevelt administration’s refugee policy “is one which must sicken any person of ordinarily humane instinct,” Kirchwey wrote in 1940. “It is as if we were to examine laboriously the curriculum vitae of flood victims clinging to a piece of floating wreckage and finally to decide that no matter what their virtues, all but a few had better be allowed to drown.”

    In 1941, FDR's administration devised a harsh new immigration regulation that barred the admission of anyone with close relatives in Europe--on the grounds that the Nazis might compel them to spy for Hitler by threatening their relatives. The Nation's editors denounced that theory as “reckless and ridiculous."  Nation editor Kirchwey blasted the espionage claim as “an excuse concocted by the [State Department]” to keep refugees out and “a good story with which to win popular support for a brutal and unjust restriction.”

    In 1944, Kirchwey authored a particularly insightful and moving appeal for U.S. action against the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz. The millions of European Jews already killed were victims of both “Nazi ferocity and Allied indifference,” she wrote. “It is untrue to say that little could have been done, once the war was started, to save the Jews of Europe. Much could have been done. At most stages Hitler was willing to permit his Jewish victims to substitute migration for deportation and death. But the other countries refused to take in refugees in sufficient numbers to reduce by more than a fraction the roll of those destined to die.” 

    The Roosevelt administration's claims that it was impossible to rescue the Jews was just a flimsy excuse, Kirchwey emphasized. "[U.S.] troopships which have delivered their loads at Mediterranean ports could be diverted for a single errand of mercy. Transport planes returning from India or the Eastern Mediterranean could carry out of Hungary the 10,000 children to whom Sweden has offered shelter....The last opportunity to save half a million more lives cannot be treated as a matter of minor concern…[W]e must hurry, hurry!"

    In the years since the Holocaust, numerous prominent progressives have followed in the footsteps of Kirchwey and The Nation, by frankly acknowledging FDR's failings in this regard. 

    For example, then-Vice President Walter Mondale, in a 1979 speech, called President Roosevelt's 1938 refugee conference in Evian, France, a "legacy of shame." He said the U.S. and other participants in the conference, by refusing to open their doors to Jews fleeing Hiter, "failed the test of civilization." 

    At the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, then-President Bill Clinton pointed out that under the Roosevelt administration, "doors to liberty were shut and even after the United States and the Allies attacked Germany, rail lines to the [death] camps within miles of militarily significant targets were left undisturbed." He has also called FDR's rejection of the refugee ship St. Louis "one of the darkest chapters in United States history."

    Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in her recent autobiography, recalled how she broke with a Democratic president over human rights (in China) and described with pride how her father,  Democratic congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, broke with FDR over the Holocaust: "Although he was a New Deal Democrat and followed Franklin D. Roosevelt's lead, there was one area in which he disagreed with the administration. Daddy supported an organization called the Bergson Group, which had rallies, pageants, and parades focusing attention on the plight of European Jews during World War II and calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which was not yet the administration's policy." (p.97)

    Former presidential nominee George McGovern, in a 2004 interview, discussed the missions he flew near Auschwitz as a young bomber pilot in 1944: “Franklin Roosevelt was a great man and he was my political hero. But I think he made two great mistakes in World War Two" -- the mass internment of Japanese-Americans without due cause, and the decision “not to go after Auschwitz...God forgive us for that tragic miscalculation.” McGovern said: “There is no question we should have attempted...to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”

    Prominent progressives have a long and admirable record of honestly acknowledging FDR's failings alongside his achievements. President Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust is no more defensible than his internment of Japanese-Americans or his troubling record concerning the rights of African-Americans. Recognizing that fact does not endanger the legacy of the New Deal or diminish FDR's accomplishments in bringing America out of the Depression or his leadership to victory in World War II. It merely acknowledges Roosevelt's flaws as well.

    (Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and author of 14 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.)