On his way to the Middle East in an attempt to force the American plan of imperialist control over the region known as the "road map" (that actually pushes for a civil war within the Palestinians), U.S. President George Bush junior recently toured the former Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, where 1.5 million Jews and tens of thousands of others were killed during World War II. The American president, who has committed such terrible crimes against the people of Iraq, said in his disgusting hypocrisy that his visits were "a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need to resist evil."
While the US crimes against the Vietnamese or the Iraqis are more or less known, what is less known is the role the ruling classes of the US and Britain had in the Holocaust against the Jews.
The claim, made during the war and repeated by hired pens such as Martin Gilbert, according to which the Allies' political leadership were not aware of the fact that a genocidal Holocaust was planned or was even taking place in Europe until very late in the war lacks any credibility. Anyone who read Hitler's Mein Kampf manifesto or listened to the speeches of the Nazi leaders could have no illusions about what the Nazis had planned for the Jews.
In reality Britain's Churchill and US President Roosevelt admired Hitler and Mussolini for their tough anti-communist and anti-union policies. When the mass killings did start, these governments claimed that they couldn't be certain of what was happening. This was a lie. The code-breakers working for British intelligence had cracked the German police radio codes already by 1939 and this allowed them later to reveal large-scale massacres of Polish and Soviet Jews after the German Army had invaded Eastern Europe.
When the extermination camps in occupied Poland were in full steam from 1942, the code-breakers had already broken, two years earlier in December 1940, the more sophisticated Enigma codes used by the SS who were running the camps. Regular SS reports about hundreds of thousands of prisoners at camps like Auschwitz that showed the Holocaust to be in full swing were thus able to be decoded. By the same means they knew that German railway network was moving " special cargo" into the camps.
Information from eyewitnesses, refugees, the Polish underground and anti-Nazi German industrialists operating the mines near Auschwitz corroborated the radio interceptions.
The US State Department's initial reaction was that the information was "a wild rumor inspired by Jewish fears", while the chair of the British Joint Intelligence Committee said the information was being used "to stoke us up". In the eyes of these governments, the Jews simply did not exist.
The British and US governments refused to take in Jewish refugees. The British home secretary only talked of admitting one to two thousand to be confined on the Isle of Man, because of a lack of accommodation! When Romania, a German "satellite" country, offered to release 70,000 Jews, the British Foreign Office called this "a frightful prospect".
The United States' "closed gates" policy offered no hope to the potential victims of genocide. The story of the famous St Louis ship is known after a movie was made with the same name. In 1939, the St Louis ocean liner, carrying 1128 German-Jewish refugees, was turned back by US immigration officials because the immigration quota for Germany had been met. The mass graves and the gas chambers were not so discriminatory!
At the same time they claimed that the railway lines and bridges leading to the slave labour/extermination camps, and the gas chambers and crematoria that they housed, could not be bombed because the planes did not have the necessary range, payload or precision.
Roosevelt and Churchill opposed large-scale rescue plans, not because of logistical problems, but because they were fearful they would be successful. They fed the public the official line that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war as soon as possible. The costs of this unnecessary and inhumane policy of military victory at all costs were borne by the Jews.
The final act of the American and British imperialists was to organize together with the Vatican the infamous "rat line". They helped the Nazi war criminals who were deemed to be valuable to the Cold War crusade against "socialism" to emigrate to the US, Canada, Australia and in particular to Latin America. Some of these special new immigrants were to be put in charge of the torture chambers under General Pinochet after the coup in Chile in 1973.
US trade and investment flourished in Nazi Germany, even during the war years. Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil and IBM were just some of the companies that took advantage of the war-profiteering opportunities made possible by Nazi terror.
Why then did the Israeli state not remind any one the role of the US government during Bush's visit but rather presented it as a real homage to the victims of the Nazis? The answer is very simple: The Zionist movement was a partner to this crime. Its policy was to settle Palestine with Jews and those Jews they could not use were as good as dead.
If anyone has any doubts about this it is sufficient to quote Ben Gurion when he informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."[1]
This obsession with colonizing Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any idea of rescuing the Jews who were facing extermination, because this would have impeded the ability to select and divert manpower to Palestine. From 1933 to 1935, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) turned down two thirds of all the German Jews who applied for immigration certificates.
The WZO did not only fail to seek any alternative for the Jews facing the Holocaust, but it also opposed all efforts aimed at finding refuge for the fleeing Jews.
As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the US Congress proposed to set up a commission to merely "study" the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principle American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine.
This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in US immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge in the USA. He stated: "It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. (...) It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws."[2]
The entire Zionist establishment made its position absolutely clear in its response to a motion by 227 British Members of Parliament calling on the government to provide asylum in British territories for persecuted Jews. The meager undertaking which was prepared was as follows: "His Majesty's Government issued some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits in favor of threatened Jewish families."[3]
But even this token measure was opposed by the Zionist leaders. At a Parliamentary meeting on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being pursued by over one hundred Members of Parliament, a spokesperson for the Zionists announced that they opposed this motion because it did not contain preparations for the colonization of Palestine. This was a consistent stance.
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit: "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... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it."[4]
Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate the condition of European Jews, said: "When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once again no!"[5]
June 2003.
1/Brenner, Zionism, p., p. 149.
2/-Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Britain's chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris Yahya, Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p. 53.
3/-Chaim Weizmann reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission in London, July 1937. Cited in Yahya, p. 55.
4/- Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943. Ibid., p. 56.
5/-lbid., p. 53.