RUTHFULLY YOURS

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.by John Greenleaf Whittier .

Many years ago, I was at a gun show in Connecticut with my husband who collected modern handguns. I was bored and hot and annoyed when my husband spotted a hand stitched pillow in one of the booths which read “Jew Learn to Shoot!” Impelled by the famous quote of my idol Zeev Jabotinsky, I went to speak to the owner. He explained that his father, a passionate Zionist taught him to shoot as a young boy, something that he used to good advantage as a sharp-shooter in the United States Army during world war 2. We engaged in a long discussion about the trapped Jews of Europe who could not defend themselves The subject still haunts me especially as I read:

Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler by Rick Richman

The following are reviews of this wonderful book by David Isaac and Richard Baehr, and a column on “Ritchie’s Boys “and the book by Matti Friedman. Please read them and by all means read the book.

David Isaac

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/racing-against-history-the-1940-campaign-for-a-jewish-army-to-fight-hitler-by-rick-richman-reviewed-by-david-isaac.html

Why wasn’t there a Jewish army in World War II to fight the Nazis? No group had more motivation to do so. Well, it’s not that they didn’t want one. Rick Richman’s Racing Against History skillfully recounts the efforts by three major Zionist leaders to raise a Jewish army in America to fight Hitler. Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion, representing the center, right, and left of the political spectrum, came to the United States on separate missions with the same goal in 1940.

Ritchie’s Boys and the Men from Zion By Matti Friedman

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/02/01/ritchies-boys-and-the-men-from-zion-by-matti-friedman/

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/

A second new book, Rick Richman’s Racing Against History, examines a more radical option—Zionism—by describing three visits by Zionist leaders to the United States in the desperate year of 1940. Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Vladimir Jabotinsky stepped off ocean liners in New York that year, hoping to sound an alarm about the fate of Jews in Europe and to encourage the creation of a Jewish force to fight in the war. This was tricky, because the United States was still neutral, and American Jews weren’t sure how much they could help without endangering their own fragile position at home. Arriving separately and often at odds with each other, the three Zionist politicians addressed rallies, met important people, gave interviews, and wrote down their impressions, leaving material that Richman ably mines for this concise and illuminating account.

The Ritchie Boys practice their German-language prisoner interrogation skills on mock prisoners at Camp Ritchie. (Courtesy of NARA.)

Of the three leaders in Racing Against History, Weizmann was the most careful in his public utterances. He grasped the danger of the perception that world war was being waged for Jewish interests and preferred the quiet maneuver. He privately lobbied Chamberlain, the British prime minister, to accept “Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources” and was politely turned down. He privately lobbied for 20,000 permits to Palestine for Jewish children from Poland and was politely turned down. In America, he wrote, even mentioning what was happening to Jews in Europe might be “associated with warmongering.” American attitudes, he found, had “no relation to the grim realities which today face humanity at large and the Jews in particular.”

American Jewish thinkers of the time, Richman reminds us, included rabbis such as David Philipson of Cincinnati, who regarded the Jews as a universal people and the Land of Israel as “an outgrown phase of Jewish historical experience.” In an autobiography, the rabbi wrote: “Every land is the homeland for its Jews—the United States for me, as England for my English Jewish brother, France for my French Jewish brother, and so in every country.” Those lines, Richman notes, were published in 1941, with Europe under Nazi occupation.

In this volume, the sharpest contrast to Weizmann’s style is offered by Jabotinsky, who was outspoken about his impatience:

The old fallacy, the curse of our past, has been revived: that there is no Jewish problem; that all our troubles can be cured en passant by general measures of progress, and there is no need to worry about any special remedies. The allied victory will ensure democracy and equality . . . and that will be enough for the Jews.

Jabotinsky wanted a Jewish army raised immediately and said so, even though the mainstream American Jewish leadership called him a “militarist” and published a pamphlet warning against his views. In the pages of the Forward, editor Abraham Cahan mocked him as a “naïve person and a great fantasizer.” There was no need for Jabotinsky’s Jewish army, Cahan thought, and the Jewish problem would be solved not by a Jewish state but by an allied victory and democracy: If “true democracy exists, there is no place for anti-Semitism.” In other words, the way forward was to be American citizens and soldiers, like the Ritchie Boys.

Recent events in Europe and America would seem to suggest that anti-Semitism does, in fact, have a place in democracy; the English-language descendant of Cahan’s own Forward, for example, recently printed a bizarre op-ed by a Jewish supporter of an anti-Jewish boycott expressing sympathy for some of the views of an American neo-Nazi. The old idea of “Jewish warmongering,” about which Weizmann was so careful in 1940, is still current, as evidenced by the flap in September over a tweet by Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent, suggesting just that. And though the Zionist plan succeeded and there is a Jewish army, the normalization of the Jews has failed to materialize and their existential fears continue. Both the Ritchie Boys and the three Zionist leaders profiled in these books might be surprised how much the questions of their times remain unresolved 70 years later.

1940: American Inaction and the Tragedy of European Jewry By Richard Baehr

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/1940_american_inaction_and_the_tragedy_of_european_jewry.html

1940: American Inaction and the Tragedy of European Jewry By Richard Baehr

During 1940, three of the most significant Zionist leaders in the world – Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben Gurion , all visited the United States , hoping to gain a measure of American Jewish support or US government support for the creation of a Jewish army to help fight the Nazis. Rick Richman’s new book, Racing Against History, provides an interesting and very carefully researched history of these visits, the leaders’ goals, what they accomplished, and what prevented greater success. Richman’s book is a fascinating look at a moment in time, different seemingly from our own, but with some of the same issues.

Many fewer people are aware today of Jabotinsky than of Weizmann or Ben Gurion. Richman provides an illuminating portrait of this exceptional Jewish leader and his work, which will serve as an introduction for many. Nearly 40 years after Jabotinsky’s death, Menachem Begin became the first Israeli Prime Minister whose politics were rooted in his vision.

In World War 1, the British had allowed the creation of a Jewish legion, 15,000 strong, that had fought on their side in various places, with Jabotinsky having a leadership military role. Weizmann, a highly respected British chemist with many British government contacts, parlayed the Jewish help for Britain in the war to gain support for creation of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine, laid out in the Balfour Declaration, and eventually leading to the British mandate for Palestine between the wars.

As one tyranny replaced another, Natalie Makarova was allowed to work with the immigration authorities processing refugees. She may have hoped to make some contact there or gather information that might help the family to get out of the country. Even the faintest possibility had to be followed through.

The following are two extracts from Escape from the Sun: Surviving the Tyrannies of Lenin, Hitler and Stalin by Eugene Schlusser, published last May by Australian Scholarly, $39.95. Each extract is briefly introduced by Eugene Schlusser.

I believe my father Paul learned of his sister-in-law Zinaida’s arrest in Berlin in October 1947. She was accused of spying for the CIA. As my mother Natalie later described it, he then became almost “schizophrenic” with fear.

Paul, now close to desperation, made a drastic and in many ways an inexplicable decision. He resigned from Schanzenbach & Co to take work with the US Occupation Forces. Did he hope that this could give him contacts to help with an escape from Europe? Family lore, often repeated, was that he had been dismissed because he was a foreigner. This was a fabrication, designed to dis-inform every­one as Paul tried to hide his increasingly desperate state. The strain was telling on his health. His blood pressure was high and he seemed to be tired all the time. As medication was not available, he tried water and steam baths to assist with his breathing, cleanse the skin and above all reduce his blood pressure. He improvised a sauna in our living room and tried to replicate the Russian banya. After a period in the sauna he would lie exhausted on the living room sofa trying to get his strength back with an afternoon sleep. We would be sternly instructed to remain quiet, speak in whispers and above all not slam any doors.

It is unclear what information father kept from mother, but she also felt the increasing stress. We all felt it. Loud voices of frustration came from the kitchen more frequently. Their tone of voice revealed their state of mind.

I imagine that when the disputes were not about finances, they were disagreements about Paul’s reasoning, and his plans to get the family out of Europe. Naturally, Natalie worried about his health and the many things he was involved in: his job, his family, the Russian Welfare Society. He had also recently undertaken to help build an Orthodox church in Frankfurt. All this took time, in addition to the long irregular hours he worked. His income had dropped considerably, as his teaching earned him much less than his salary as an engineer. He still had money deposited at Schroders in London but he could not access it.

‘Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” It is difficult to think of any words delivered at any university commencement that had more historical weight than those spoken in the final minutes of George C. Marshall’s speech at Harvard on June 5, 1947.

The venue was carefully chosen as a dignified but noncontroversial place. The speaker was one of the greatest secretaries of state this country ever produced. The words had been crafted and recrafted by some of the most brilliant minds at the State Department and on its Policy Planning Staff. But while key sentences took the high moral ground, there was an urgent political purpose to this declaration by Marshall. He addressed the pressing issue of how to prevent European nations from collapsing into economic ruin and despair, and in some cases suffering a Communist takeover.

Marshall’s speech announced a great act of American statecraft, and marked a significant step away from the prewar, Rooseveltian era of noncommitment in European matters. In this dramatic move, the Truman administration—glumly recognizing it was the only Western country with any money after World War II, shocked by the reports of near-starvation across Europe and desperate to shore up friendly governments—stepped up to the plate.

With an equally frightened American Congress behind it, the government offered huge sums of money to any democratic country in Europe able to come up with a plausible recovery scheme. These countries—and this was a deliberate gesture—could be on either side of the zonal division of Europe established at Yalta; all that was needed was a willingness to produce a rebuilding plan and join in the common effort. America’s aid package was unprecedented in size, threatened no one and therefore ought to have been opposed by no one. Who on earth would want to stop this act of extraordinary generosity? Who could be against the Marshall Plan?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question, because one person would definitely want to stop the scheme: the powerful and increasingly paranoid Joseph Stalin. He feared America’s economic power, was scared stiff of Germans (still) and any future unified Germany, and in fact by this time saw demons everywhere. As Benn Steil details in his brilliant book “The Marshall Plan,” the Soviets had shown ever-greater intransigence throughout 1946 and 1947 in regard to all proposals for the economic rebuilding of Europe and the political reconstitution of the defeated Germany. The exceptions, to be sure, were schemes of theirs that calculated to have all Germany fall into the Eastern orbit. CONTINUE AT SITE