They Knew Nearly Everything

The narrative by the Zionist movement has been that its leadership knew practically nothing of the German extermination of the Jews before and during World War II. Actually, Zionist leaders were briefed on a nearly daily basis on the atrocities against the Jews of Europe. But these leaders, particularly in the British mandate of Palestine, kept these developments secret to prevent any massive protests that could have pressed the Allies into action.

From the chapter "See No Evil"

The Jewish Agency and the Zionist leadership knew long before World War II that Germany would kill Jews wherever and however it could. As early as December 1938, Shertok warned the British that Hitler was engaged “in the physical extermination of the Jews in that country [Germany].” In October 1939, the agency received a detailed report by the Czech resistance of the first Nazi transport of Jews to Poland. The following month, Greenbaum alerted the Executive to the deportation of Jews to Poland’s Lublin area, calling it “very serious.”

In December, Jakob Edelstein, a leading Zionist in Prague, urged the agency to stop the impending tragedy. “All efforts should be made to forestall this danger,” Edelstein wrote. His report was read at the Zionist Convention in Geneva in February 1940.6

In April 1940, Swiss Jewish leaders told Weizmann that the German liquidation of the Jews was being discussed openly. In October 1941, Gerhart Riegner, the WJC representative in Geneva, began sending reports that reached both New York and Jerusalem on the Final Solution. On Nov. 27, less than two months before Heydrich won cooperation from the German bureaucracy for the Final Solution, the Geneva office reported that Hitler planned to eliminate the Jews in Europe through “massacres, starvation.” By this time, the Germans had begun to deport Jews from Berlin to the East. Jews were dying everywhere in Poland, whether through starvation or the SS.7

There were few staffers in the Zionist movement as thorough as Riegner. He checked his data on Nazi deportations and killings with the Jewish Agency’s Richard Lichtheim. Both men were born in Berlin to highly assimilated Jewish families — Lichtheim in 1885 and Riegner in 1911. Riegner fled the SS storm troopers as soon as Hitler seized power and eventually completed his law studies in Paris, The Hague and Geneva. In 1936, he joined the new WJC.

Lichtheim was a brilliant Zionist organizer and publicist, a maverick who spoke his mind. He served in top positions under Weizmann in the Zionist Executive and then under Jabotinsky in the Revisionist movement – and eventually left both. In 1934, Lichtheim moved to Palestine, where he founded what became a leading insurance company. Four years later, he was sent to Geneva as a representative of the World Zionist Organization at the League of Nations. He remained in Switzerland during the war where he engaged with Zionist groups in occupied Europe and sent reports to Jerusalem and New York of the extermination of Jews.

Lichtheim oversaw a larger information network than Riegner. Lichtheim was also more pessimistic regarding the fate of the Jews under occupation. By the end of 1940, he and other Jewish representatives in Switzerland were receiving reports from more than 30 cities in German-occupied Europe as well as at least one concentration camp. Many of the dispatches were relayed by Gestapo agents of Jewish origin.8

He monitored the expansion of the Nazi extermination following the invasion of the Soviet Union. He urged agency leaders to publicize the atrocities. His goal was to build international pressure — through Britain and the United States — on Germany’s allies to refuse to collaborate in the killing.9

The Allies regarded Lichtheim’s reports as credible. In January 1942, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov supported the disclosures of Lichtheim and Riegner when the Russian official distributed a town-by-town description of the Nazi death campaign. Months later, Riegner sent a telegram to British parliamentarian Sidney Silverman on the imminent extermination of European Jewry. The telegram was based on an informant “reported to have close connexions [sic] with the highest German authorities, and his reports have been generally reliable.”

“Received alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany number 5 1/2 to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action is reported to be planned for the autumn. Ways of execution are still being discussed including the use of prussic acid.”10

During the war, Lichtheim bombarded the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem with correspondence on the slaughter of the Jews. By September 1942, he had written 807 letters. He detailed the deportations, expulsions and arrests from France in the west to the Balkans in the east. He disclosed the size of the transports to the death camps in Poland. Much of his information was based on or confirmed by Slovak Jews who had escaped from the Majdanek death camp as well as from the Polish ghettos. Some of Lichtheim’s information was also relayed by Schwalb in Geneva, perhaps the most trusted Zionist envoy in continental Europe.

The Jewish Agency leadership, however, was not moved. Instead, they were annoyed by Lichtheim. Some in the Executive expressed doubts over his accuracy. Others claimed he was simply unbalanced. Leo Lauterbach, head of the agency’s Organization Department and loyal to Weizmann, went so far as to suggest that Lichtheim could not separate reality from fantasy. The members refused to fathom that all the Jews on the European continent were targeted for death. In London, Weizmann’s secretary, Doris May, was struck not by the Nazi deportations, rather that they encountered virtually no resistance in civilized France.11