Racing Against History

The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler

Rick Richman

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781594039751
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Racing Against History is the stunning story of three powerful personalities who sought in 1940 to turn the tide of history. David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann—the leaders of the left, right, and center of Zionism—undertook separate missions that year to America, then frozen in isolationism, to seek support for a Jewish army to fight Hitler.Their efforts were at once heroic and tragic. The book presents a portrait of three historic figures and the American Jewish community—at the beginning of the most consequential decade in modern Jewish history—and a cautionary tale about divisions within the Jewish community at a time of American isolationism. Based on previously unpublished materials, the book sheds new light on Zionism in America and the history of World War II, and it aims to stimulate discussion about the evolving relationship between Israel and American Jews, as the Jewish State approaches its 70th anniversary under the continuing threat of annihilation. A book for general readers, history buffs and academics alike, it includes 75 pages of End Notes that enable readers to pursue the stunning story in further depth.

NOTES

Preface

1. See “World Zionist Organization,” http://www.wzo.org.il/world-zionist-organization. As of 1940, the name of the organization was the “Zionist Organization.” In 1960, it changed its name to the “World Zionist Organization.”

2. See the summary of the Revisionist Movement at the website of the Israeli Knesset: https://www.knesset.gov.il/vip/jabotinsky/eng/Revisionisteng.html. Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party was the forerunner of the Herut Party formed by Menachem Begin in 1948, which became the Likud Party in 1973. The Likud has been headed since 2009 by Benjamin Netanyahu.

3. See “History of the Jewish Agency for Israel,” http://jafi.org/JewishAgency/English/About/History. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922 provided in part as follows:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers [Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan] have agreed . . . to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire . . .; and

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917 . . . and adopted by the said Powers [in 1920 at San Remo], in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people . . .; and

Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country; . . .

* * *

ARTICLE 4. An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognized as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the [British] Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home . . .

The full text of the Mandate for Palestine is at: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/PalestineMandate.html.

4. In his address to Congress on April 2, 1917, seeking a declaration of war against Germany, President Woodrow Wilson had told Congress that:

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. . . .

[W]e shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

See “Making the World ‘Safe for Democracy’: Woodrow Wilson Asks for War,” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4943/. By 1939 that view of the war had long since soured.

5. More than 116,000 Americans died in World War I. See U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “America’s Wars,” https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fsamericaswars.pdf. The vast majority of Americans, watching a new European war begin, wanted no repetition of the high-minded experience into which President Wilson had led them.

6. Chaim Weizmann devoted only three pages to his 1940 trip in his autobiography, Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 418–421. For reasons noted in the chapter on Weizmann in this book, he did not tell the full story. Norman Rose’s excellent 520-page biography devotes a single sentence to it. See Norman Rose, Chaim Weizmann: A Biography (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1986), 358. Jehuda Reinharz’s magisterial two-volume biography ends with the adoption of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and its aftermath, and thus does not cover the 1940 trip at all. See Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

David Ben-Gurion, in Israel: A Personal History (New York and Tel Aviv: Funk & Wagnalls and Sabra Book, 1971), mentioned his 1940 trip only in passing, devoting only a single page of the 862-page book to it—for reasons we will also explore. Allon Gal covers the trip in David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 118 et seq., and Shabtai Teveth covers it in Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground 1886–1948 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.)

Vladimir Jabotinsky, for reasons beyond his control, never wrote a memoir about his 1940 trip, but the trip has been described in the two magisterial biographies of him, Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, Vol. 2 (New York: Barricade Books, 1996), 1754–1783, and Joseph B. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet: The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story: The Last Years (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961), 384–398, and by Rafael Medoff in Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926–1948 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 45–64; see also David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (New York: The New Press, 2002), 16–19.

Introduction: The World in 1940

1. See Roger Moorhouse, The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 (New York: Basic Books, 2014), xxiii–xxvi.

2. Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989), 9. Roger Moorhouse, The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 301–303.

3. Antony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2012), 35.

4. After meeting with Hitler’s Army chief of staff on September 9, a week into the German invasion, a Nazi colonel wrote in his diary that it was Hitler’s intention “to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation. More than that cannot even be hinted at in writing.” Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History, 6.

On September 10, the head of the German Secret Intelligence Service traveled to the front line and was told of “an orgy of massacre.” Ibid., 8. On September 13, the German SS began the arrest and shooting of large numbers of “suspicious elements, plunderers, Jews and Poles,” in more than thirteen Polish towns and villages. Warsaw was bombed on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, September 14. Ibid. On September 21, SS commanders were summoned to Berlin and told that Polish Jews were to be concentrated in several large cities, with Western Poland to be “cleared completely of Jews.” Ibid., 12.

In December 1939, the World Jewish Congress issued a fifteen-page “Jewish White Book” that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported was “the darkest narration ever known in Jewish history.” The report charged that “a quarter of a million [Polish] Jews have been wiped out by military operations, executions, disease and starvation . . . [and] at least 80% of the remained have been reduced to complete beggary.” The report stated further that:

The White Book estimates that a majority of the 40,000 Jews who attempted to escape from Warsaw during the Nazi bombardment were killed by Nazi bombs in the suburbs of the former Polish capital. This is in addition, the document states, to 30,000 who perished in Warsaw during and after the Nazi occupation.

The White Book charges that cities populated chiefly by Jews were burned down completely, that Nazis executed 400 Jews in the public market place of the township of Lukow, that a similar execution took place in Kalushin and other Jewish populated towns, and that uncounted numbers of Jews died as a result of torture inflicted by Gestapo agents while working on forced labor projects. The document dwells lengthily on the Nazi plan to set up ghettos and on the Lublin “reservation.”

“War, Executions, Disease Wiped out 250,000 Jews in Nazi Poland, ‘White Book’ Charges,” JTA, December 18, 1939.

5. Roger Moorhouse, The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941, supra at 46.

6. Antony Beevor, The Second World War, 51.

7. Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), xxx. The Poles were highly anti-Semitic and their army in exile was of no help to Polish Jews. It was heroic from a Polish perspective, but not from a Jewish one.

8. Obligated under the 1922 League of Nations Mandate to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national homeland, Britain had progressively reneged on that obligation, restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine to 29,727 in 1936, 10,536 in 1937, and 12,868 in 1939 before issuing its new “White Paper.” American Jewish Yearbook, 1940 “Statistics of Jews,” 632.

9. Ibid., 601.

10. In Never Surrender: Winston Churchill and Britain’s Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940 (New York: Scribner, 2015), 49, John Kelly notes that a Gallup poll in October 1939 found Americans favored neutrality by 95 to 5 percent, with Americans resentful that they had suffered 116,708 dead in the previous war and still had $10 billion in unpaid European debt:

Beyond that, every American had his or her own personal reasons for supporting isolationism: German and Irish Americans because of a historic enmity toward Britain; Midwestern isolationists from the conviction that the only country an American should defend was his own; businessmen because a world war would disrupt the international economy; and the parents of draft-age sons, such as Ambassador Kennedy, for fear that American boys would be dragged back into the European abattoir.

11. Antony Beevor, The Second World War, 22. See “The World at War: History of World War II, 1940–1945,” www.euronet.nl/users/wilfried/ww2/1940.htm.

12. Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn (New York: Henry Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: The World in 1940
• Chaim Weizmann: January–March 1940
• Vladimir Jabotinsky: March–August 1940
• David Ben-Gurion: October 1940–January 1941
• Epilogue: 1948
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Photograph and Image Credits
• Index