They fought while Jews burned

By Steve Rodan

In January 1944, Breckinridge Long was concerned: His good friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for a fourth term as president, and pressure was building on Washington to help the Jews in German-occupied Europe. Throughout World War II, Long, given the title assistant secretary of state for "special problems," had blocked every effort to take in Jewish refugees, regardless of how small the number.

But Long had an ally that he felt could avoid any American rescue policy. It was the major Jewish organizations, which more than anything were trapped in a senseless cycle of envy and competition.

"The Jewish organizations are all divided amid controversies," Long wrote in his diary that month. "...there is no cohesion of sympathetic collaboration -- rather rivalry, jealousy and antagonism." [1]

Long named the organizations that fought each other as six million Jews were being killed in Europe: The World Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee and the American Joint Distribution Committee. For years, Long and his colleagues at the White House and State Department exploited the rifts between the Jewish groups, created factions to fuel rivalries while holding out the prize of financial and political support. [2]

Long and the State Department focused on the battle between the World Jewish Congress and the Joint, also referred to as JDC. WJC was the upstart, established in 1936 by Stephen Wise, an Orthodox Jew turned Reform rabbi, to dominate the Jewish communities outside the United States. WJC, with headquarters in New York, was closely aligned with the Zionist movement, and Wise's deputy, Nahum Goldmann, also served as the Jewish Agency in Palestine's liaison to the League of Nations in Geneva.

JDC was strictly old school. Established in 1914, the relief organization was run by the upper crust of American Jewry. At first, it focused on Palestine and later extended to Europe and the Soviet Union. The group, which from the start resented WJC, sought to remain apolitical and above board.

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration fomented competition between WJC and JDC. The fight was mostly over donors. JDC could show that it was spending millions of dollars to WJC's thousands. But WJC's alliance with the Zionist movement gave it clout in London and Washington. Goldmann, a German propagandist during World War I, used his dual position with WJC and the Zionists to develop ties with senior officials, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

WJC's official position was that Jewish refugees must be sent to Palestine. Whenever there was a rescue opportunity, WJC insisted that the Jews, particularly children, should await entry to the Land of Israel. In contrast, JDC placed no conditions on the rescue of Jews.

In 1943, the two organizations battled for control over Jewish children from France. JDC sought a license from the U.S. Treasury Department to spend money in France, technically an enemy country. JDC wanted to pay both Jews and non-Jews to smuggle what could have been thousands of Jewish children from France across the Pyrenees to Spain.

The State Department used the rivalry to delay the Treasury license to JDC as well as approve a similar license to WJC. At the same time, State also threatened to annul the licenses so that money could not be transferred from the United States to Europe.

Throughout the feud, Breckinridge Long sought to take the high road. Long left the dirty work to his assistant, William Irving Riegelman, who argued that the fight between WJC and JDC would "interfere" with rescue operations. The only hope for rescue was that Riegelman name a U.S. diplomat to mediate between the two Jewish groups.

The candidate was Leland Harrison, U.S. minister to Switzerland who in the fall of 1944 became involved with German ransom demands in Hungary, headed by SS Col. Kurt Becher and his Zionist sidekick Rudolf Kastner. John Pehle, a former senior official at Treasury and head of the new War Refugee Board, opposed, believing that Harrison would be ordered to block cooperation between WJC and JDC.

Pehle was right. Riegelman, who insisted he was following Hull, warned Harrison that the rivalry between WJC and JDC could hamper rescue operations along the French-Spanish border.

"The sole fact that two organizations are now engaged in operations in the same general area for the same general purposes is recognized as making possible the development of certain difficulties," Riegeman wrote. "The entire program may well be endangered by competition between them. In order to insure that the objectives contemplated by each of the two plans are attained to the fullest possible degree you are requested to take such reasonable action as may appear expedient or advisable to you." [3]

To Pehle, the message to Harrison meant that he would have to approve every transaction for rescue. The most likely result, Pehle believed, would be to paralyze the rescue of Jews.

Pehle needn't have worried. WJC was already working to undermine JDC even before the first Jewish child had been rescued. WJC was said to have established separate relief child care facilities on the pretext that JDC opposed immigration to Palestine. The result was confusion among those committed to housing, caring and evacuating the refugees from Europe. For its part, Portugal warned that it would ban refugees unless they possessed a visa for the United States or another country.

"...[War Refugee] Board is deeply disturbed that friction among private agencies operation in Portugal will interfere with the actual rescue of children from France," Pehle wrote to Robert Dexter, WRB's representative in Portugal, in May 1944. "...Our main goal is the saving of lives and nothing must prevent the attainment of this end." [4]

Eventually, the rivalry between JDC and WJC was understood. It had nothing to do with sending children to Palestine, which JDC did not oppose. Instead, this was a war over money. JDC was receiving and spending some $15 million -- culled from donations, mostly from American Jews -- on rescue and relief. WJC and the Jewish Agency wanted that money. That meant that WJC, together with the Zionist movement, needed to give the impression of rescue. To maintain that pretense, State Department officials reported that Hull was examining the British White Paper, which blocked significant Jewish immigration to Palestine since 1939, and could pressure London to change its policy.

WJC, particularly Wise and Goldmann, were easily manipulated by Roosevelt. From March to December 1943, State sat on an order from the White House to issue a license to finance a WJC plan to help the Jews of France and Romania. The plan, which involved the Jewish Agency, also called for the evacuation of Jewish children from France to neighboring Spain and Switzerland. There was barely a whimper from either Wise or Goldmann. [5] By 1944, few of those children were believed to have survived the German death machine.

WJC and the Zionist movement also created largely fictional organizations in France and Switzerland, including an "army" headed by Zionist leader Marc Jarblum, who worked closely with David Ben-Gurion's Mapai and the Jewish Agency. In 1943, Jarblum submitted a plan for the evacuation of 2,000 children from France for an undisclosed sum.

Under pressure from WJC, the World Zionist Organization and their supporters in the Roosevelt administration, Jarblum received 37 million French francs [$740,000], mostly from JDC. He provided virtually no accounting of the money. Very few children were saved.

"Mr. Jarblum knows that when he 'presses the button' in America [WJC], then the Joint will get up at once," a JDC memo from August 1944 read. [6]

As it became more desperate for money, WJC flouted any need for discretion. On Sept. 15 1944, the mass-circulation daily New York Post claimed that up to 15,000 Jewish children were smuggled from France to Switzerland with the help of U.S. Jewish groups.

More than two months later, WJC openly took credit for rescue. On Nov. 28, 1944, the Post's rival, the New York Mirror, said WJC saved 5,000 Jewish orphans from France. WJC's delegate in Lisbon, Portugal, Issac Weissman, provided details of how the children were smuggled by Spanish and French "professional smugglers" through "forbidden military zones." Weissman, urged by WRB not to publicize rescue operations, said many organizations helped WJC.

The rival JDC was not mentioned. WRB believed that Weissman's claims were wildly exaggerated.

WRB and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau concluded that many thousands could have been saved had the Jewish organizations avoided a fight over money and fame. A united front would have resulted in intense pressure on Roosevelt to save European Jews and finance their evacuation. After World War II, both WJC and JDC published books about their efforts during the war. None mentioned the debilitating fight that only made Hitler and his Western supporters smile.

Notes

1. The War Diary of Breckinridge Long: Selections from the Years 1939-1944. Breckinridge Long. Page 336. University of Nebraska Press,, 1966

2. ibid.

3. “Memorandum for the Files [Henry Morgenthau],” /MD/ 691 (Jan. 6, 1944): 174

4. Cable No. 16, page 1, May 6, 1944, WRB, Box 46, Folder 15.

5. Report to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenathuau Jr., Jan. 13, 1944

6. In Jewish Blood: the Zionist Alliance with Germany, 1933-1963. Steve Rodan and Elly Sinclair. Page 254

Below: Report to the Secretary of the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews. Morgenthau Diaries. Vol. 693. Jan. 13, 1944.