How an Informer Turns Into a Savior

By Steve Rodan

Tonight, Teddy Kollek becomes a hero: a savior of Jews during World War II. On Jan. 23, Kollek, who died in 2007, was awarded the "Jewish Rescuers Citation" for his "heroic efforts to rescue fellow Jews in Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria." The former mayor of Jerusalem was commemorated by his daughter Osnat as well as the B'nai Brith and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.

Now for the truth: Teddy Kollek was a good soldier who did everything his British masters demanded. His specialty was to inform on Jews.

Given the name Theodore, after Herzl, Kollek was born in Hungary, and at age seven his family moved to Vienna. In 1935, they arrived in Palestine where he helped found Kibbutz Ein Gev along the Sea of Galilee.

Five years later, Kollek began working for the Jewish Agency, specifically for David Ben-Gurion. His work was known in the intelligence world as “dirty tricks.” He directed the infiltration and roundups of Ben-Gurion’s critics, especially from Irgun and Lehi. His activities were coordinated with the British. In 1942, Kollek was appointed the agency’s deputy head of intelligence, and, in 1945, was assigned to work directly with Britain’s MI5 against the Jewish underground. He told the British virtually everything, including the arrival of illegal boats to the shores of Palestine.

Despite his loyalty, the British kept a close watch on Kollek. “There is no doubt but that he has been well chosen,” a British report on Kollek read. “He is of prepossessing appearance, not at all obviously Jewish. He speaks cultivated English without accent.”

In mid-1938, Kollek was assigned to help evacuate Zionist professionals from German-occupied Vienna. He arrived at the Central Office of Emigration with a large number of British entry certificates. He had met the center's director, Adolf Eichmann, several times and the two men -- Austrians with a taste for la dolce vita -- got along well.

On this trip, Kollek worked largely with Berthold Storfer, a Jewish banker who underwent a Catholic baptism, appointed by Eichmann to facilitate emigration. Storfer obtained the release of hundreds of Jews from Dachau and selected for exit from the Reich. He allowed those on Kollek’s list to sail to any country of their choice. The obstacle was Britain and the United States. The Gestapo solved that problem. It supplied Zionist emissary Moshe Bar-Gilad with hundreds of visas to Mexico and South America. Many of the recipients eventually made it to Palestine. As Kollek's successor in Europe, Ehud Avriel, put it: Eichmann treated the Zionists as "preferred customers" for emigration and other services.

Later, Kollek was also ordered to obtain assets from Jews stranded in the Reich, a practice authorized by the Zionist leadership during and after World War II. He became the target of a U.S. investigation after acquiring money from a Jew who died in a German concentration camp. The funds were transferred to Kollek by the Anglo-Palestine Bank in London on July 12, 1939. Anglo-Palestine had received the money from the National City Bank of New York, whose leading clients included Keren Hayesod. Then, National City expressed suspicion over the transaction, which ostensibly sent money to Dr. Moriz Zalman.

At the time, Zalman was imprisoned in Germany where he soon died. The U.S. bank told Anglo-Palestine that “it was impossible for him [Zalman] to have personally received this money or even sign a receipt.” In other words, somebody had fraudulently signed to acquire Zalman’s assets from Germany. After the war, Anglo-Palestine, which operated in the United States, urged Kollek to “settle the unpleasant matter.”

Wherever and whenever, Kollek's main job was to work with London. In 1942, Kollek led a 20-man Zionist network based in Istanbul, Turkey. His job was to provide intelligence to the British while sending messages and aid to Zionist cells in occupied Europe. After the war, Kollek would boast of how his agents had extricated downed British and other Allied airmen from Romania. He said some of his agents even managed to infiltrate Poland.

In November 1943, Kollek ordered Avriel to contact Germany's ambassador to Turkey, Fritz von Papen. A former chancellor, von Papen had been issuing peace feelers to the Allies. His sincerity proved highly doubtful. He had brought Hitler to power in 1933. Fourteen years later, a post-war West German court determined that von Papen had been the main culprit in crimes by the Hitler regime and was sentenced to eight years of hard labor. In wartime Turkey, he was in contact with the Zionist leadership during the worst atrocities of the Holocaust.

In Istanbul, Kollek helped establish a network of Gestapo and Abwehr couriers who relayed Zionist directives to Poland. The couriers then informed their Nazi masters of the composition and location of the Jewish underground throughout occupied Europe. Regardless, Kollek was so enamored with the couriers, one of them persuaded to invest his fortune in Palestine, that he introduced them to the British and Americans as anti-Hitler agents who could help stop the war. When the couriers succeeded in infiltrating Allied intelligence, both London and Washington suspected that Kollek and his Zionist superiors were working with Berlin. A report by the Office of Strategic Services concluded that Kollek showed "poor judgement" in bringing the Nazi agents to the Allies. By that time, OSS severed its relationship with the Jewish Agency. The U.S. Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps went further: "...the greatest mistake by Allied intelligence and security officials is the presumption that a Jew, any Jew, is perforce Anti-Nazi and Anti-Axis."

There is no record that Kollek was involved in Jewish rescue during the war. He was part of a Ben-Gurion team that oversaw the Zionist network of Rudolf Kastner in 1943-44 in Hungary. Decades after the war, Kollek claimed that the Haganah was to have sent 250 fighters to Hungary to help the Jews resist and escape. But Kollek said the plan was "wrecked in the last minute when people [were] about to set out." Instead, Kastner was ordered to work with Eichmann and the SS to deport more than 400,000 Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz in the most rapid decimation of a Jewish community during the war.

Concealing the Zionist alliance with Hitler became a key element in Kollek's post-war career. In 1954, he was directed by Prime Minister Moshe Sharett to torpedo the defense in a criminal libel suit by Kastner. Kollek threatened a key defense witness, Joel Brand, with being sent to a mental institution if he testified. After the judge found Kastner to have been the chief collaborator of the SS, Kollek was ordered to launch a media campaign to portray Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership as the heroes of the war. The linchpin in this effort would be a Hollywood movie.

"We also need as soon as possible a long background record for a Hollywood film producer who wants to make a film based on this period of our history, if he can find enough cinematic meat in the report," Kollek wrote to Moses Leavitt, a leader of the powerful American Joint Distribution Committee, in December 1955.

During the last months of World War II, Kollek became the main liaison with the British campaign against the Jews. British intelligence files on Kollek showed that he provided intelligence that led to the arrest of 1,000 Jews, many of them tortured and then deported from Palestine. He had told the British the location of a secret Irgun base north of Tel Aviv. He kept working for the British until virtually the last day of their presence in the Land of Israel.

Once, during the last years of the British occupation, Kollek lost his cool and fumed that he hated being a quisling for London. In 1946, he quit the Jewish Agency and said it had done little other than restrain the Yishuv. He told the British Defence Security Office that Ben-Gurion could have driven the British out of Palestine as early as 1939 and saved European Jews. Instead, the agency chief remained loyal to London's agenda of stopping a Jewish homeland at any cost.

"...The worst thing that the Jewish Agency ever did was to impose 'restraint' on its forces during the last disturbances," Kollek was quoted by his British handlers as saying. "He seemed to feel that if an all-out aggressive policy had been adopted, the Jews would have achieved their end long ago."

There is a reason Kollek received an award tonight. But it has nothing to do with saving Jews.

[The information for this article was taken from "In Jewish Blood: The Zionist Alliance with Germany, 1933-1963" Also, "Teddy Kollek To Be Awarded Jewish Rescuers Citation Posthumously in Advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day" https://www.bnaibrith.org/.../teddy-kollek-to-be-awarded...