The Abandonment: From Talk to Policy

By Steve Rodan

Chaim Weizmann rarely made public statements off the cuff. He was guided by British and later U.S. policy to stop the rescue of the Jews under Hitler. In 1936 and 1937, Weizmann declared that a huge part of European Jewry would perish. The Western powers would not open their doors to Jewish refugees The Jews would face two blocs, "the countries where they cannot live and the countries they cannot enter...The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them."

At the Zionist Congress in London in 1937, Weizmann left no hope for the Jews. "The old ones will pass," he said. "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."

Weizmann's words reflected policy in London and Washington. That policy trickled down to the Zionist organization in the West and the Jewish Agency in Palestine.

A key British official who implemented the policy of abandoning the Jews was Eric Mills. Formally, he was the commissioner for migration in the British mandate. Actually, his job, in full coordination with London, was to dissuade any serious attempt by the Zionist leadership to rescue Jews, including youth groups from Poland.

Mills' mandate was not simply to stop Jews from entering Palestine. It was to prevent Jews from leaving Europe, period. In November 1938, following Kristallnacht, Mills dismissed a proposal for the Zionist leadership to appeal to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to allow entry to 100,000 German Jews based on a quota for the next five years. The priority was to be the Zionist leadership in Germany, in all 300 people.

The British official deigned to speak for Roosevelt, the only Western leader believed capable of pressuring London. He told Jewish Agency Executive member Bernard Joseph that the president could not bring in Jewish refugees: It would increase anti-Semitism and "warned us against overdoing it."

Joseph didn't understand Mills. Was the commissioner advocating simply abandoning Jews? Exactly, he said.

"Certain things were inevitable in a world constituted as it was today, and one had to face these facts," Mills said.

As the weeks passed, the British restrictions grew tighter. In late December 1938, the British ordered consuls outside Palestine not to accept applications for so-called capitalist entry certificates, reserved for the wealthy. Their fate would simply be blamed on the trapped Jews. During the war, Zionist leaders were warned that neither the British nor the American Red Cross could be relied upon to transfer food to Jewish refugees. Joseph was told both groups hated Jews. The British refused to cooperate even to bring Jews into Turkey.

But that did not stop the Zionist leadership from wooing the British regardless of their policy toward the Jews. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, head of the Yishuv council called Vaad Leumi, told a senior British official that the Jewish Agency was trying to persuade the Jews in Palestine to cooperate with the British, despite efforts in Washington to organize a petition by prominent senators and 200 members of the House of Representatives.

Mills, treated kindly by the Zionist narrative, was a cynical man who mused that the more dead Jews, the better the solution. In December 1938, Joseph and Jewish Agency political chief Moshe Shertok, later Israel's second prime minister, met Mills in Jerusalem. The Zionist leaders appealed to the British to at least allow Zionist youth into Palestine. Mills asked what was the point of bringing the youth or the elderly to Palestine. Here is how Joseph quotes Mills in the former's diary:

"When we spoke of the problem of bringing Jewish children from Germany, Mills began to talk in a philosophical vein and said he wondered what were we saving them for: For the gas masks we would have to wear in the next war?"

In the end, the Zionist leaders quietly acknowledged that their wooing of the British achieved nothing for the Jewish people or even the Zionist rank-and-file. Yitzhak Weisman spent the war in Lisbon as the representative of World Jewish Congress and specialized in caring for Jewish refugees. In a July 20, 1946 letter by Weisman to Jewish Agency Information Department chief Yeshayahu Klinov, Weisman concluded that the British ended up being just like the Nazis.

"The English masters are trying to achieve their aim by employing methods worthy of Hitler," Weisman said.

The article is based on Joseph's diary, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, S25/43-47

Below: Bernard Joseph, later Dov Yosef