The Rabbi Who Wouldn't Quit

By Steve Rodan

Most people try once maybe twice and then give up. Rabbi Chaim Michoel Dov Weissmandl spent World War II trying to save Jews, and didn't stop despite numerous rejections by the West and the Zionist leadership.

The young Weissmandl, born in 1903, was a brilliant scholar and orator, and in his twenties in Hungary authored several volumes of Talmudic commentaries. He was also an inventor, which he saw as a means to become financially independent. His travels took him from Lithuania to Britain, where he gained access to the famed library at Oxford.

The rabbi's rescue mission began in 1938 after Austria was conquered by Hitler. The first thing the Germans did was order the persecution and pillage of the Jews. Some 60 rabbis were put on a ship toward Czechoslovakia, which refused to them entry. Weissmandl flew to London and received an audience with the archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church. He then pleaded with the British Foreign Office. The deportees, largely on the endorsement of the archbishop, were given visas for Britain. This was the last time, the British government cooperated with Weissmandl's rescue efforts.

I am afraid that we cannot do anything in the matter and the Home Secretary does not propose to send any reply. [1]

'Bribery blinds'

The German persecution in Slovakia became genocidal in 1942. In March, deportations began to Auschwitz. Weissmandl was a member of the Rescue Committee in Bratislava and bribed the SS representative, Dieter Wisliceny, to stop the trains to the death camps. After Wisliceny, the brother-in-law of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, received $50,000, the deportations -- which already brought nearly 60,000 Slovak Jews to Auschwitz, were suspended for two years. This gave the rabbi the idea that the extermination machine could be slowed down if not halted by massive payments to the Hitler regime. He quoted Exodus 16:19, "Bribery blinds even those who see clearly."

The result was the "Europe Plan." Weissmandl, in partnership with a cousin on the Rescue Committee, Gisi Fleischmann, called for some $3 million to be delivered to the SS in exchange for a halt of deportations and the gas chambers. The SS would receive an installment for each month that it honored the agreement. To persuade the Germans that he was prestigious, Weissmandl fabricated letters from a fictitious representative of world Jewry named Ferdinand Roth who agreed to raise the ransoms.

Fleischmann was assigned to lobby foreign Jewish organizations to provide the money to Wisliceny. She represented both the American Joint Distribution Committee as well as the Women's International Zionist Organization. She was also in contact with the World Jewish Congress.

The first disappointment came from JDC. The organization's representative in Switzerland, Saly Mayer, rejected supplying $50,000 to save Jews. In his letter in the summer of 1942, Mayer dismissed reports of the German genocide, saying the Eastern European Jews were exaggerating. He also stressed that the United States outlawed the transfer of money to an enemy country. JDC had access to $64 million during World War II. [2]

The more shocking response came from the Zionist movement. Natan Schwalb was the representative of Hechalutz in Switzerland. From his post in Geneva, Schwalb monitored occupied Europe and maintained communication with Zionist figures. He sent money and instructions to the Zionists trapped in ghettos and German camps.

'Only with blood'

Schwalb did not cite U.S. law or financial restrictions. Instead, he argued that the Zionist aim of a state after the war depended on Jewish victims. Every nationality that had suffered under Hitler would demand compensation and sovereignty. The Jews could not afford to be different.

"Only with blood will we have a state," Schwalb wrote.

In mid-1944, Weissmandl pleaded with the West to stop the massive deportations from Hungary to Auschwitz. At the time, some 14,000 Jews a day were sent to the death camps. The rabbi supplied maps showing how U.S. and British bombers could prevent the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews by merely destroying one bridge. He also detailed the German train schedule, the route to Auschwitz and the number of Jews packed into each carriage.

The Zionist leadership, particularly Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion, opposed the bombing of either Auschwitz or the rail lines to the camp. At one point, Ben-Gurion, following British dictates to the letter, reprimanded a senior agency official who had sent a private appeal to the Americans to stop the deportations from Hungary. All the while, however, Weissmandl believed that bribes would still be effective. [3]

'Have you gone mad?'

Brother Jews! Have you gone mad? Do you know the hell we are living in? You are keeping the money...How many times have we begged you? Murderers. Madmen? Who is the giver? You, who give a few pennies from your lofty pedestals, or we who are giving blood and tears in the depths? [4]

Weissmandl saw the destruction of Slovak Jewry in the fall of 1944. After an unsuccessful revolt, the Germans sent nearly 10,000 Jews to Auschwitz. Those on the trains included the rabbi and his family. Weissmandl sawed through the wooden carriage and jumped. His family perished. So did Gisi Fleischmann.

Most historians have ignored the role of Weissmandl. Perhaps the most dismissive is Yad Vashem's Yehuda Bauer who failed to see him as anything other than an ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist rabbi. Bauer justified the refusal of Mayer and Schwalb to bribe the SS.

Documents disappear

After the war, Weissmandl, severely weakened by his ordeal, collected documents on the efforts to save the Jews. He searched the archives of JDC, the World Jewish Congress, Jewish Agency for his letters that begged for help. None of the letters -- as well as the refusals by these organizations -- were made available. Schwalb's correspondence with Weissmandl, including his explanation that Jewish blood must be shed, is believed to be locked up in the archives of the Zionist Labor movement.

In 1957, Weissmandl died in mourning for the six million killed by Hitler. Several Zionist leaders praised him in death but did not admit their failure to save the Jews.

Rabbi Eliezer Silver, head of the Rescue Committee of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S.A. and Canada, sought to make amends.

If only we would have been wise enough to pay more attention -- with more holy audacity and with more self sacrifice -- to the cries and the warnings of Rabbi Michoel Dov Weissmandl, that man, great in Torah and heroic in deeds of rescue...If only? If only! If only! [5]

Notes

1. FO 371/21587/C 14581. Cited in The Unheeded Cry. Abraham Fuchs. Page 30. Mesorah, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1984]

2. A History of the United Jewish Appeal, 1939-1982. Marc L. Raphael. Page 13. Brown University, Providence, R.I., 1982.

3. A few days after his rival relayed his appeal to the American consul in Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion sent a telegram that urged the Allies to save the Jews by giving the Germans trucks and equipment.

4 Min Hemeitzar. Rabbi Chaim Michoel Dov Weissmandl. Page 109. Jerusalem, 1960

5. Churban un Retung. Introduction. Page 25. Cited in The Unheeded Cry. Page 255

Below: Rabbi Weissmandl