Trading the Dead for the Living

By Steve Rodan

On July 16, 1944, the Jewish Agency leadership was feeling good. The agency had just completed another prisoner exchange with Hitler's Germany and brought some of its top Zionist apparatchiks from Europe to Palestine. The Zionist leaders demanded credit.

"We must point out that the exchanges were achieved on the basis of intensive action by the Jewish Agency Executive, and particularly its Aliya Department," Moshe Shapira, a member of the agency's Executive, said.

Over the course of World War II, the Jewish Agency carried out three prisoner exchanges with Germany. The agency had long lists of eligible candidates but only a tiny portion of them were released from occupied Europe. The cost of the exchanges was collaboration by the agency in the Final Solution.

The prisoner exchanges were among the handful that took place during World II between Germany and the Allies. In the United States, there were some 400,000 German prisoners of war and they filled an acute labor shortage throughout the country. Britain held far fewer prisoners, most of them in the Middle East.

The fact that Hitler would agree to free any Jew was remarkable. Each case went to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who in 1942 received specific instructions from the fuhrer: Jews could escape death only through massive bribes -- whether money or goods. These instructions remained in force until the end of the war.

But Berlin agreed to exchange Jewish civilians until Britain stopped the practice in mid-1944. The Jewish Agency, as Shapira boasted, played the leading role. There has been no record that any other Jewish organization was involved.

The first exchange took place in December 1941. Forty-six people, most of them women, arrived in Palestine in exchange for a similar number of Germans, called Templers and regarded as devout Nazis. The Palestinian Jews had been trapped in Poland during the German invasion in September 1939 and transferred to Berlin. The exchange was said to have been arranged in May 1941 but was delayed by the British, who two months later deported more than 500 Templers to Australia. The release was aided by the U.S. consulate and Swiss delegation in Berlin as well as the Red Cross.

The second exchange took place in November 1942. The number of Jews freed by the Germans was slightly higher -- 69, most of them from Poland. This time, the exchange included 45 British nationals, who arrived in Haifa on Nov. 16. Berlin received a reported 270 Germans, many of them Templers interned in Egypt and Syria.

Both exchanges were played down in the Zionist media. After being greeted by the Jewish Agency and British officials, the Jewish arrivals, some of them still in shock, were whisked away for interrogation in Haifa.

The last exchange took place nearly two years later in July 1944. This marked the biggest release of Jews by Germany -- 282, most of them from the German camp of Bergen-Belsen. Again, the Jews were exchanged for Templers, held by British authorities as enemy aliens.

"I hold that we should inform the public that this [exchange] was only done through the action of the Jewish Agency," Shapira said on July 16, 1944. "Also, those exchanged know well that their rescue was due to the efforts of the Jewish Agency."

The timing of the exchanges did not appear coincidental. Each release came after the Germans completed a major stage in the Final Solution. The December 1941 release followed the deportations from Austria that essentially depleted the Jews from that country.

At the same time, Berlin had established the first Judenrat in Western Europe -- located in the Netherlands. In both Austria and the Netherlands, the Zionists helped in the deportation of Jews. Josef Lowenherz, a leading Zionist activist and Jewish community director, worked with the SS to track, persecute and finally transport the Jews to Auschwitz. Lowenherz worked closely with Alois Rothenberg, appointed by Adolf Eichmann to run the Palestine Office in Vienna.

The deportation of the Dutch Jews was facilitated by the Palestine Office. Jakob Edelstein, head of the Palestine Office in Prague, was known as a specialist in Jewish emigration. In 1941, Eichmann sent Edelstein to Amsterdam to set up the Judenrat. The quisling council was dominated by the Zionists, including Marinus Kan, chairman of the Zionist Organization. Kan, who worked with Judenrat chief Abraham Asscher, coopted such Zionist organizations as Hanoar Hatzair and the Women's International Zionist Organization, or WIZO.

The result was the rapid end of Dutch Jewry. From 1941, 110,000 Jews were deported; fewer than 6,000 returned at the end of the war.

"In the beginning you could say that the trains from the Netherlands were really rolling," Eichmann later recalled. "It was quite wonderful."

The second release marked the destruction of Polish Jewry. From the summer of 1942, the Germans emptied and then destroyed virtually all of the ghettos in Poland. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to the death camps. The Jewish Agency, which later admitted that it knew of the atrocities, dismissed such reports until after the December prisoner exchange.

One of those who arrived in Palestine in the December exchange recounted how the Polish ghettos were being emptied. She said the only Jews left were women, children and the elderly. All of the able-bodied men were taken away.

The 1944 release of Jews marked the biggest German prize to the Zionist leadership. Here, the Jewish Agency worked out an agreement with Himmler for the extermination of the Jews in Hungary. The agreement was meant to save some 2,000 Zionists and others while the remaining one million Jews would be sent to Auschwitz. Here Eichmann worked directly with the agency's emissary, Rudolf Kastner, to deport nearly 500,000 Jews in less than three months, far more than had been envisioned by the SS.

During the extermination, Kastner was reminded by the Jewish Agency's Nathan Schwalb, who monitored Hungary from Switzerland, not to forget the money of the doomed Jews. In a letter to Kastner and his partner Joel Brand on May 5, 1944, Schwalb, who received orders from the agency leadership, urged the Zionist emissaries to make the Jewish money a key part of their agenda with Eichmann.

"Besides murder, deportation and dissolving the concentration camps, Aliya and emigration, you have to talk about the frozen [bank] accounts so that the frozen accounts can be used for charitable purposes and for emigration," Schwalb wrote. "In this way, your acquisitions could be combined with rescue."

The State of Israel rewarded the Zionist collaborators of the Germans. In one of his first acts as president, Chaim Weizmann met Asscher despite being told that he participated in the deportation of Jews. When Asscher returned to Amsterdam, he and his wartime colleague, David Cohen, a leading Zionist, was indicted on charges of helping the German expulsion of Dutch Jews.

For his part, Kastner was welcomed to Israel in 1947 and soon became a leading member of the ruling Mapai Party. After being exposed as a collaborator, he was shot and died in an assassination attempt that included an agent of Israel's secret police, Shin Bet.

"The paradoxical situation is that many war criminals...find a calm shelter in Israel," Israeli police inspector Joseph Gorski wrote to his superior in 1949.

Below: A Jewish prisoner is exchanged in a deal with Germany.