Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler

© 2018 by Rick Richman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2018 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

God Bless America by Irving Berlin

© Copyright 1938, 1939 by Irving Berlin

© Copyright Renewed 1965, 1966 by Irving Berlin

© Copyright Assigned the Trustees of the God Bless America Fund International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

A portion of Chapter IV appeared, in different form, in the December 2013 issue of The Tower Magazine.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48‒1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Richman, Rick, 1945-author.

Title: Racing against history: the 1940 campaign for a Jewish army to fight Hitler / Rick Richman.

Description: New York; London: Encounter Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017031503 (print) | LCCN 2017032868 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594039751 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Weizmann, Chaim, 1874–1952—Travel—United States. | Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 1880–1940—Travel—United States. | Ben-Gurion, David, 1886–1973—Travel—United States. | Zionists—Travel—United States—History—20th century. | Jews—History, Military.

Classification: LCC DS125.3.W45 (ebook) | LCC DS125.3.W45 R53 2017 (print) | DDC 940.54/12089924—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031503

To the memory of my parents,

Ruth Elaine Richman and Matthew M. Richman,

who instilled in me a love of books

and gave me the lasting gift

of a Jewish education.

And to my brother,

James D. Richman,

a blessing to them and to me.

We have been assailed . . . by a persecution against which the medieval persecutions are dwarfed into insignificance . . . Community after community has gone under . . . First Germany, then Czechoslovakia, and last of all, Poland. Poland! With the greatest Jewish community in Europe.

Chaim Weizmann, January 16, 1940, addressing 4,000 people at the Shriners’ Temple, New York City

[T]here are still immense probabilities for quite decisive changes. One need not name them: enough to say that God’s box of tricks is by far not emptied yet.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, June 19, 1940, addressing 5,000 people at the Manhattan Center in New York City, after the fall of France

There is no time to lose. History will never forgive us if we fail to do in time whatever is humanly possible to give the Jewish community the chance of defending itself.

David Ben-Gurion, July 2, 1940, in a cable to the Zionist Organization of America, New York City

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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The popular conception is that writing a book is a solitary endeavor. I have found instead that to research, write, edit, design, and publish a book, it takes a shtetl. It is a pleasure to record my thanks to those who have helped me through this extraordinary process.

My most profound gratitude is to Anne Mandelbaum, my incomparable editor, who also acted as the agent for Racing Against History. No book—or author—could have a better friend. She immediately understood the significance of the project and gave me the immense benefit of her intelligence, insight, and inspiration; she not only edited the book but also assisted me in the research; gave the book its title; personally presented it to Roger Kimball, President and Publisher of Encounter Books; and co-designed the cover, with its suggestion of both a gathering storm and a light beyond the clouds. This is her book as well as mine.

I am deeply indebted to Roger and Susan Hertog for supporting the publication of this book.

I am enormously grateful to Norman Podhoretz, from whose encouragement I have benefited for more than a decade. I have used a technique he has frequently used in his books, providing frequent block quotations from primary sources, which permit a reader to evaluate an author’s account more knowledgeably.

I have been blessed to have had an extraordinary group of people read the manuscript in whole or in part and offer their comments, including Gary Bialis, Professor Angie Cloke, Professor Phyllis K. Herman, Roger Hertog, Neal Kozodoy, Anne Lieberman, Seth Lipsky, Doris Wise Montrose, Norman Podhoretz, Magda Rados, David Richman, Judy Richman, Robert Richman, Dr. Robert Wexler, Professor Ruth R. Wisse, and Rabbi David J. Wolpe. Of course, any errors in this book are solely my responsibility.

I am grateful to Dr. David Hazony for publishing an early version of a part of Chapter 3 in The Israel Project’s Tower Magazine; to Anne Lieberman and Seth Lipsky for impressing upon me Vladimir Jabotinsky’s historical importance, and to Louis Gordon for sharing his lifelong knowledge of him; to Irving White for a very helpful conversation about Chaim Weizmann; and to Dr. Robert Wexler for his close reading of the manuscript and his significant insight about David Ben-Gurion. Norman Podhoretz, Neal Kozodoy, and Ruth R. Wisse were especially generous, on multiple occasions, with their time and suggestions.

I have been fortunate to have had access to many exceptional libraries, and have been the beneficiary of the efforts of their dedicated librarians, including the Ostrow Library at American Jewish University in Los Angeles (Patricia Fenton, Jackie Ben-Efraim, and Stephen Singler); the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York City Public Library (Eleanor Yadin and Stephen Corrsin); the Center for Jewish History and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City (Gunnar Berg, Michelle McCarthy, and Vital Zajka); the Library of the University of Southern California Cinematic Arts Division (Edward Sykes Comstock); the Los Angeles Public Library; and the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv (Amira Stern).

I thank O’Melveny & Myers LLP, which provided me the office in which I wrote most of this book. I am grateful to my colleagues there for their assistance: Christopher C. Murray, who gave me the benefit of his expertise and experience on intellectual property law, and Eron Ben-Yehuda, who referred me to Einat Meisel, the head of O’Melveny’s Israel practice, who in turn introduced me to Ella Tevet and Roee Laor of Gross, Kleinhendler, Hodak, Halevy, Greenberg & Co. (GKH), one of Israel’s major law firms. They skillfully represented me in securing consents and releases for the letters, diaries, and speeches that form the heart of this book from the Archives at Yad Chaim Weizmann, Rehovot, Israel; the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel; and the Ben-Gurion Archives and Library, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Avi Shilon, PhD, searched the Ben-Gurion Archives for the diary entries and letters for the period covered by Ben-Gurion’s 1940 trip. I am grateful to Aliza Perl Klainman and Ophir Klainman for their skillful translation of the Ben-Gurion documents from Hebrew into English for this book.

O’Melveny’s Office Services team graciously accommodated my seemingly endless requests for copies, PDFs, supplies, mailings, and assistance with my temperamental computer: thank you to Jim Eshelman, José Torres, LaVonda Davis, Enrique Hilado, Ebony Mariano, and Douglas Orellana. I am grateful to O’Melveny’s two stellar librarians, Patricia Smith and Deborah Fisher, for their help on many occasions.

For their generous assistance, advice, or encouragement, I thank Michal Gorlin Becker at the Shapell Manuscript Foundation; Rabbi Nosson Blumes of the Educational Institute Oholei Torah in Brooklyn, New York; Professors Michael Mandelbaum, Marc Saperstein, and Dan Schueftan; Adele Silver; my brother-in-law (and fellow author) Dr. Bill Cloke; and my friends Greyson Bryan, Michael Cohen, Mark Haloossim, Cary Lerman, Samuel W. Schaul, and Michael Silverstein.

It has been a pleasure to work with Encounter Books—especially Roger Kimball, Katherine Wong, Lauren Miklos, and Sam Schneider—and a great honor to be included in the roster of its authors. I thank each of them for the extraordinary attention they gave to this book.

I thank God for the sustaining love of my wife, Judy, and our extraordinary sons, Robert and David: blessings beyond compare.

November 2017

Los Angeles, California

PREFACE

In 1940, in the opening months of World War II—more than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into the war—the three most prominent Zionist leaders in the world undertook missions to America.

They traveled across an ocean patrolled by German submarines to alert American Jews to a European crisis even more dire than they realized; to rally support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine; and to form a Jewish army to join the fight against Hitler. The three leaders were:

(1) Chaim Weizmann, 65, the president of the Zionist Organization, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. In 1940, he was the leading Zionist figure in the world;¹

(2) Vladimir Jabotinsky, 59, the president of the New Zionist Organization, formed in 1935 when he withdrew his Revisionist Zionist party from the ranks of the Zionist Organization in opposition to what he considered Weizmann’s too-moderate Zionism;² and

(3) David Ben-Gurion, 53, the longtime leader of the Labor Zionist movement in Palestine and the head of the Jewish Agency, formed in 1922 to work with Britain to establish the Jewish national home under the League of Nations Mandate.³

Chaim Weizmann

Vladimir Jabotinsky

David Ben-Gurion

All three had been born in the nineteenth century in the Pale of Settlement, the area to which the czars confined the Jews and strictly regulated their lives. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion had grown up in small shtetls, while Jabotinsky grew up in the city of Odessa. Each had embraced Zionism at an early age and worked for decades in pursuit of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—sometimes together, often apart. They represented, roughly speaking, Zionism’s left (Ben-Gurion), right (Jabotinsky), and center (Weizmann).

At the end of 1939, after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland—with its three million Jews—the United States was the only country where a significant Jewish community lived in freedom. America, however, was frozen in isolationism, still smarting from the Great War it had entered two decades earlier on President Wilson’s assurance it would make the world safe for democracy.⁴ That war had produced hundreds of thousands of American casualties, without achieving its goal.⁵ Very few Americans were in favor of participating in another European war.

Weizmann’s trip to America lasted two months; Jabotinsky’s five; and Ben-Gurion’s four. There was thus a leading Zionist in America for virtually all of 1940, but they were never in the United States at the same time. Their relationships with one another, moreover, were frayed. Weizmann and Jabotinsky, close colleagues at the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, now favored different versions of Zionism. Ben-Gurion championed yet a third, and by the time of his trip to the United States, he was no longer on speaking terms with either Weizmann or Jabotinsky. The American Jewish community was divided as well, deeply apprehensive about its own precarious status in its relatively new home.

The story of these trips is a portrait, as the most consequential decade in modern Jewish history began, of three of the leading Zionists of the time, and of the American community they sought to engage. It is told using accounts from published sources, as well as from unpublished letters, speeches, and diaries, chronicling all three missions for the first time in a single volume.⁶

They were part of a heroic struggle at a critical time. The importance of the story, however, transcends that moment in history. Many of the issues the Zionist leaders confronted then about the identity of Jews and their role in the world endure more than seventy-five years later, with the Jewish state under continuing existential threat, as its enemies seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD IN 1940

On September 1, 1939—two decades after World War I—a new European war began, triggered by a pact between the two totalitarian powers that dominated the continent by then.

On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a ten-year non-aggression pact, consisting of 280 words.¹ Its key provision was hidden in an undisclosed protocol, which by its terms was to be kept strictly secret by the signatories, specifying a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state. The secret protocol included a map with a line drawn through the middle of Poland, marking the contemplated division of Poland in the imminent territorial and political rearrangement.²

Source: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The pact paved the way for what happened next. A week after signing it, Hitler invaded Poland from the West; two weeks later, Stalin invaded from the East.

By the end of September, Poland no longer existed as a country: it had been invaded, defeated, partitioned, and annexed by Germany and the Soviet Union.

Source: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The estimated Polish losses from the month-long Nazi invasion included 70,000 killed, 133,000 wounded, and 700,000 captured. An additional 50,000 Poles were killed in the Soviet invasion.³ The elite of Poland’s civil society and its ruling class were decimated, and Polish Jews of all classes were specifically targeted.⁴ The Nazi and Soviet occupiers began cleansing Poland in their respective areas, with the Nazis employing racial standards and the Soviets using class criteria. Poland became a vast region of ideological reorganization, the entire population sorted, expropriated, expelled, confined, or murdered, with the land divided between the two invaders.⁵

What remained of the Polish military reorganized itself in Paris under General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who formed a government in exile that later made its headquarters in London.⁶ From the scattered remnants of the defeated Polish army, Sikorski built a force that fought first in France in 1940; then elsewhere in Europe; and finally at Normandy in 1944, on behalf of a defeated Polish nation, trying to recover the land taken from it five years earlier.⁷

For the Jews of Poland—who comprised the largest Jewish community in Europe—matters were about to become extremely dire. The Jews had no army; they had no government in exile; they had no generals; they had no country to protect or shelter them; and the land they once possessed had been taken from them not five years before, but two millennia earlier.

NAZI GERMANY AND THE SOVIET UNION now controlled millions more Jews, who were unable to emigrate to Palestine or America. With the issuance of a new White Paper in May 1939, the British had prohibited any further significant Jewish immigration to Palestine—which Britain had already severely curtailed since the mid-1930s. ⁸ Virtually all Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were now held captive, trapped by two armed national ideological movements, one of which intended to annihilate them, while the other aimed to ban all religions. By mid-1940, all of Western Europe had fallen under the control of the genocidal Nazi empire as well, and Britain—the last remaining holdout—had come under ferocious attack.

In 1940, only one country in the world had a politically significant number of free Jews: the United States.⁹ In America, however, the immigration-friendly laws of the early twentieth century had vanished after the Immigration Act of 1924, and American public opinion in 1939 was overwhelmingly against any new wave of immigration from Europe. The fate of the Jews in Europe—like that of the English and the French people themselves—would ultimately depend on the American response to European events. But American Jews, like almost all other Americans, wanted nothing to do with the European conflict.¹⁰ In any event, America lacked a military force that would have enabled it to join the war effort. As of September 1939, the German Army had 200 divisions, consisting of almost three million men, with 400,000 horses and 200,000 military vehicles.¹¹ The United States Army had a total of five divisions.¹² In size and combat power, the American army ranked seventeenth in the world—behind Romania’s.¹³

THE NAZIS AND SOVIETS ADVANCE

On September 3, 1939, two days after the German invasion of Poland began, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the American people by radio, assuring them the country would not participate in the new war: Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields. At this moment, there is being prepared a proclamation of American neutrality.¹⁴ He issued the proclamation two days later. The United States and the other Western Hemisphere countries declared an American Security Zone extending up to 600 miles from their coasts.¹⁵ The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would be their Maginot Line (the state-of-the-art defense line built by France in the 1930s on its border with Germany that ultimately proved useless).¹⁶

On the day that America declared its neutrality, Britain and France declared war on Germany. They had no choice: five months earlier, they had publicly committed themselves to the defense of Poland, after Hitler had violated the 1938 Munich peace-for-our-time agreement by taking over Czechoslovakia.¹⁷ France and Britain had hoped that a public commitment to Poland would deter Germany from further aggression.¹⁸ British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain warned Hitler that no greater mistake could be made than believing the British would not come to Poland’s defense, with all the forces at [British] command.¹⁹ Later in 1939, Britain proclaimed a formal treaty with Poland, confirming those security guarantees.²⁰

In reality, however, Britain lacked the armed forces to meet its commitments. For years, despite Winston Churchill’s warnings, there had been no significant military preparation in Britain; its army was not only small, but it also lacked sufficient officers even for its reduced size.²¹ France maintained a large military, but having lost a million men in World War I, it was neither psychologically prepared to defend Poland, nor even to protect itself.²² After the Nazi blitzkrieg on September 1, the French could not have mounted a counterattack until the end of the month, by which time Poland had already been defeated and divided.²³

As soon as Hitler invaded Poland, both France and Britain sought to avoid their obligations to defend it. They declared war, but proceeded to fight it only half-heartedly.²⁴ On September 4, as an immediate response, Britain sent the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France—four divisions to be stationed in defensive positions along the Franco-Belgian border. But it was only a symbolic step.²⁵ Britain was simply not a significant military power at that time.²⁶ Hitler had a hundred divisions available for use against the West, saving the remainder of his forces for other purposes; the forces of the demoralized French and the under-armed British had only seventy-six divisions combined.²⁷ In the wake of the Polish invasion, Britain resolved to create a fifty-five-division army and a modern air force and navy—which it estimated would take two to three years.²⁸

Through early 1940, British efforts on the continent consisted primarily of dropping leaflets over Germany urging the public to remove Hitler from power.²⁹ While battles continued to rage in Scandinavia, with the Soviet Union moving against Finland and occupying the Baltic States, the public in both Britain and France believed the new war posed no real threat to them. Daily life there continued more or less as usual.³⁰ After sending the BEF to France and deciding to build a serious military force in the coming years, Britain waited to see what would happen next.³¹ The battle in Europe settled into a deceptively low-level conflict that became known as the phony war.³²

WINSTON CHURCHILL

In January 1940, at the age of 64, Winston Churchill was the head of the British Admiralty. Had his story ended there, he well might have been remembered as a political failure. Over the previous forty years, he had been involved in almost every major issue in the political life of Great Britain—invariably on the losing side. He had switched parties twice; and had taken unpopular positions on issues such as the women’s vote, the Gallipoli disaster, the gold standard, and Indian self-government, among others.³³ But in the words of British historian Andrew Roberts, he had a preternatural eloquence and world-historical sense.³⁴ In an essay he wrote when he was only 23, entitled The Scaffolding of Rhetoric, Churchill had observed that:

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force on the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable.³⁵

On January 20, 1940, although he would not become prime minister for another five months, Churchill addressed the nation as First Lord of the Admiralty, since, as he said, [e]veryone wonders what is happening about the war.³⁶ He reported that [a]ll Scandinavia dwells brooding under Nazi and Bolshevik threats. The small but ancient and historic States which lie in the North and the anxious peoples in the Balkans or in the Danube basin all were wondering which will be the next victim—each hoping if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. Churchill presciently assured the public that the size of the German army would not be the determining factor in the war, because very few wars have been won by mere numbers alone:

Quality, will power, geographical advantages, natural and financial resources, the command of the sea, and above all, a cause which rouses the spontaneous surging of the human spirit in millions of hearts—these have proved to be the decisive factors in the human story. [Emphasis added.]³⁷

The phony war ended abruptly on May 10, 1940, when Germany launched another predawn blitzkrieg on Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and later, on France—all of which was as stunning as the attack against Poland eight months earlier. Chamberlain resigned immediately, and Churchill assumed office that day. He cabled President Roosevelt that the Low Countries had been simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood.

Three days later, in his first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister, Churchill said Britain was about to face an ordeal of the most grievous kind, with many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. But, he said, without victory, there is no survival.³⁸ A week later, he made his first broadcast to the nation as prime minister, later known as his Be Ye Men of Valor speech. The Nazis had broken through French defenses and were proceeding toward Paris, virtually unopposed. Churchill said Britain would have to rescue not only Europe but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. He noted that he was broadcasting on Trinity Sunday—the day on which Christians honor the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—but he closed his address by citing a passage not from the New Testament, but from the Jewish Apocrypha:

Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valor, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be."³⁹ [Emphasis added.]

The quotation is from the Book of Maccabees (I Maccabees 3:58–60), the story of the Jewish heroes who miraculously prevailed over a vastly more powerful Greek force.⁴⁰

THE JEWISH SITUATION IN AMERICA IN 1940

As of 1939, there were some 15.8 million Jews in the world, with two-thirds—9.7 million—in Europe and 80 percent of that number in just four countries: Poland (3.2 million), the Soviet Union (3.0 million), Romania (850,000), and Hungary (625,000). Those 7.7 million Jews comprised half the Jews in the world. Germany had comparatively few (345,000), as did France (320,000) and Britain (380,000).⁴¹

There were about 450,000 Jews in Palestine, of whom 130,000 lived in Tel Aviv (a Jewish city founded in 1909 on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea) and about 80,000 in Jerusalem (comprising 60 percent of its total population). Another 800,000 Jews lived in Arab countries. The American Jewish Yearbook for 1940 listed 432,000 stateless Jews throughout the world.⁴²

One-third of all the Jews in the world lived in the United States: 4.8 million, nearly four percent of the American population.⁴³ The 1940 Annual Report of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), prepared in the opening months of 1940, expressed both the scope of the disaster facing the European Jews and the opposition of Jewish leaders in the United States to American participation in the new war.⁴⁴ The AJC, founded in 1906 to combat discrimination against American Jews, was anxious lest the new war in Europe be perceived in America as a Jewish war. The first paragraph of the Report acknowledged that the war would affect half our brethren who live in the countries directly or indirectly involved, but emphasized that the war was part of a larger, non-Jewish concern: The [Jewish situation] in Central and Eastern Europe, intensely tragic as it is, is part of a calamity almost world-wide in its scope. The AJC was convinced . . . of the futility of war, and was thus pleased not to be involved in the new one: Happily, the AJC concluded, our country is not a party in this conflict.

Turning first to Germany, the Report informed its readers that the Nazis now had 1.5 million more Jews under their control and that:

The well-known Nazi techniques . . . are being applied with indescribable ferocity and ruthlessness in German occupied Poland. Its 1,500,000 Jewish inhabitants are being robbed of all their belongings; stripped of their professions and businesses; condemned to forced labor amidst the debris of cities devastated by the military attack; segregated in Warsaw in districts wholly inadequate to house their number. . . .

The Report further noted that the Nazis planned to round up all Jews and send them to a small