How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism - Rilegato

Ginsberg, Benjamin

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1442222387 ISBN 13: 9781442222380

Casa editrice: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013

Riassunto

One of the most common assumptions about World War II is that the Jews did not actively or effectively resist their own extermination at the hands of the Nazis. In this powerful book, Benjamin Ginsberg convincingly argues that the Jews not only resisted the Germans but actually played a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The question, he contends, is not whether the Jews fought but where and by what means. True, many Jews were poorly armed, outnumbered, and without resources, but Ginsberg shows persuasively that this myth of passivity is solely that-a myth.

The author describes how Jews resisted Nazism strongly in four major venues. First, they served as members of the Soviet military and as engineers who designed and built many pivotal Soviet weapons, including the T-34 tank. Second, a number were soldiers in the U.S. armed forces, and many also played key roles in discrediting American isolationism, in providing the Roosevelt administration with the support it needed for preparing for war, and in building the atomic bomb. Third, they made vital contributions to the Allies-the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain-in espionage and intelligence (especially cryptanalysis), and fourth, they assumed important roles in several European anti-Nazi resistance movements that often disrupted Germany's fragile military supply lines. In this compelling, cogent history, we discover that the Jews were an important factor in Hitler's defeat.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Benjamin Ginsberg is David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include The Fall of the Faculty, Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced, and Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

How the Jews Defeated Hitler

Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism

By BENJAMIN GINSBERG

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Copyright © 2013 Benjamin Ginsberg
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4422-2238-0

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
ix
1 Introduction: The Problem of Jewish Resistance...........................
1
2 The Soviet Union: The War of the Engineers...............................
7
3 The United States: The Anti-Nazi Coalition...............................
37
4 Jewish Intelligence......................................................
69
5 Partisan Warfare.........................................................
99
6 Aftermath and Afterward: From Tragedy to Farce...........................
131
Notes......................................................................
171
Selected Bibliography......................................................
199
Index......................................................................
203
About the Author...........................................................
223

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Problem of Jewish Resistance

During a class discussion of Nazism, one of my students said he simply couldnot understand why the Jews hadn't resisted the efforts of the Germans toexterminate them. This assertion is, of course, quite common and not limitedto undergraduates. The noted historian Raul Hilberg, for example, wrote,"The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack ofresistance. Measured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinksinto insignificance." My response to the student, which became the topic ofthis book, was that the Jews had not only resisted but actually played a majorrole in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The question, I said, was not whether theJews fought but where and by what means.

Let me make two points at the outset. First, Jewish resistance to the Nazisshould be characterized as a form of cumulative rather than collective action.That is, for the most part, Jewish resistance lacked even a modicum of centralcoordination or leadership. It consisted of a host of disparate groups, individuals,and organizations on several continents mounting various responses,ranging from partisan warfare through nuclear research, to the threat of Nazism.These uncoordinated efforts, however, were channeled by a commonthreat and cumulated into what we shall see was a potent, albeit sometimesfutile, response to the Germans.

A second point concerns the meaning and scope of the term "resistance."Jewish resistance is often defined narrowly to refer to the activities of Jews in theoccupied lands of Europe. Yet, just as the French Resistance operated outside aswell as inside France, Jewish resistance and opposition to the Nazis manifesteditself in a number of settings both inside and outside German-occupied territory.To ignore this point is to risk distorting the historical record. The discussion ofJewish resistance normally focuses on villages, ghettos, concentration camps,and other locations where whatever resistance arose was certain to appearfeeble and was usually futile. Desperate and unarmed Jews in Eastern Europeanshtetlekh (villages), city ghettos, and death camps hardly had the means to resist.Unarmed individuals cannot exactly mount armed resistance. Some foughtnonetheless. There was resistance in nearly every major ghetto, and revolts brokeout in virtually every concentration camp. Jewish undergrounds were organizedin, for example, the Warsaw, Minsk, Vilna, and Bialystok ghettos, and some Jewswho survived the liquidation of those ghettos, as we shall see in chapter 5, joinedpartisan groups in the forests. And revolts broke out even at the Treblinka, Sobibor,and Auschwitz Vernichtungslager (extermination camps), among others.These were, however, easily and quickly suppressed by the Germans.

There seems little doubt, though, that in the ghettos and death camps,hoping to save their own lives and those of their family members, more Jewscooperated and even collaborated with the Germans than resisted. How couldit be otherwise? Without weapons or military training or outside support, andguarded by ruthless and heavily armed German paramilitary police and theirUkrainian, Croatian, or other Hilfswillige (non-German volunteers known asHiwis who worked in various capacities for the German army), few would resist,whether they were Jews or Americans, Englishmen or Frenchmen. Mostwould cooperate hoping to live another day. Some would collaborate hopingto survive even longer.

Hannah Arendt claimed that the Nazis depended on the cooperation of theJudenräte (the Jewish Councils established by the Germans to administer theday-to-day life of the ghettos), the Jewish police, and so forth to administerthe "final solution." "To a Jew," said Arendt, "this role of the Jewish leaders inthe destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of thewhole dark story." Arendt's claim is certainly true, particularly in the case ofthe Lodz ghetto, led by Chaim Rumkowski, who insisted on cooperation withthe Germans until the very bitter end. Arendt was correct to view this as anexceedingly dark story. But the part of the story that so offended her doesn'tdistinguish the Jews from anyone else.

The head of German security in Amsterdam, for example, said, "The mainsupport of the German forces in the police sector and beyond was the Dutchpolice. Without it, not 10 per cent of the German occupation tasks would havebeen fulfilled." Members of the Dutch police, along with thousands of DutchNazis, volunteered to serve in the Wehrmacht and formed the Thirty-fourthSS (Schutzstaffel) Volunteer Division, Landstorm Nederland. The same wastrue of the French. As many, if not more, collaborated as resisted. Until theAmericans, British, and Canadians landed at Normandy, the Germans hadlittle trouble occupying France with 3,000 to 4,000 of their own military policeofficers and the assistance of 100,000 cooperative French policemen and40,000 members of the French paramilitary Milice. As in the Netherlands,French volunteers, many drawn from the Milice, joined the German army,forming the Thirty-third Waffen SS Division, Charlemagne.

If the ghettos and camps are not the correct places to look for effectiveJewish resistance, where then? My own family's story, in particular the differentpaths to survival taken by my mother and father, may offer an answer aswell as an illustration of the limits and possibilities of resistance. One nighttoward the end of 1941, my mother's stot (town)was entered by Germans andtheir Ukrainian auxiliaries, who began rounding up Jews, beating and shootingmany of them on the spot and collecting the others for what was euphemisticallyknown as "resettlement." Some Jews ran while others hid, but fewresisted. My mother hid in an empty barrel, and through sheer blind luck, noone looked into that particular refuge. She survived, but she may have beenthe only survivor of that particular night's Aktion (campaign to assemble anddeport Jews). She saw her own mother taken away and never saw her again.Should she and the others have resisted? How exactly could a scattering ofunarmed civilians resist troops armed with automatic weapons and only toohappy to kill them, then and there?

My father, on the other hand, resisted strenuously, but the context wasquite different. After escaping from a German labor camp in 1940, he fledeast and managed to reach the Soviet army. He was promptly conscripted andtrained to serve in an artillery regiment. When large numbers of Katyushas,the famous Soviet rocket artillery, began to be deployed in 1942 and 1943, hewas assigned to fire salvos of rockets at the Germans. These Soviet rockets,developed as it happens by Jewish engineers, were very effective against Germaninfantry. In response to Hilberg's comment regarding the insignificanceof armed Jewish resistance, one might say that salvos of hundreds of deadlyrockets developed by Jews and fired by a Jew represented an exceedingly robustform of armed Jewish resistance. Even Arendt would have had no reasonto feel ashamed. The Germans feared the Katyushas, so they would have beencompelled to agree if they had known who was shooting at them.

The moral of the story is that rather than look for armed resistance amongunarmed civilians and express scorn at Jews for failing to do what could notbe done, we should look for resistance where it was possible to resist. If wepursue this path, we come to a very different conclusion about the Jews andtheir efforts during the war.

The fact of the matter is that the Jews resisted very vigorously and quite effectivelythrough four vehicles. The first was the Soviet army. Jews constituteda significant percentage of the fighting strength of the Soviet army, includingboth its combat and political officers, and, on a per capita basis, won moremedals and decorations than members of any other ethnic group in the USR.More importantly, as we shall see, Jewish engineers supervised the evacuationand reconstruction of Soviet military industry in 1941 and designed and builtmany of the weapons upon which the Soviet army depended during the war.These included the T-34 medium tank, generally seen as the best tank of thewar, the La-5 fighter plane, the Katyusha rocket launcher, and others. Theseweapons allowed the Soviets to survive the disasters of 1941 and, in fouryears, to drive the Wehrmacht back to Berlin.

Second, the Jews resisted through their influence in the United States.During the 1930s, most Americans were isolationist, anti-British, or pro-German.This included significant numbers of German, Italian, Irish, andScandinavian Americans. America's white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)elite, though, was pro-British, while the Jews were anti-German. With theencouragement of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and British intelligence,the Jews and WASPs forged an alliance that worked to bring aboutshifts in American public opinion, to discredit isolationist groups, and to giveRoosevelt the political backing he sought for rearmament, the introduction ofuniversal military training, and critical lend-lease aid to Britain and the USR.

During the war itself, Jewish soldiers fought in every branch of the U.S.military. On the home front, Jews played a major role in maintaining popularmorale, selling bonds, and organizing the economics of the war effort. Atthe same time, Jewish scientists worked to build the atom bomb, a weaponthat became America's ace in the hole and eventually ended the war. Hitlerhad declared that the war would be a war of extermination (Vernichtung).He presumably had the Jews and other Untermenschen (subhumans) inmind, but had the Germans fought on just a few months longer, or had theJewish scientists of the Manhattan Project completed their work just a fewmonths sooner, the war would certainly have brought Vernichtung—for theGermans.

Third, Jews in the Soviet Union, United States, and Great Britain werevery important in the realm of intelligence and espionage. The Soviet Union'smajor—and very effective—spy rings, including the Red Orchestra, were ledby Jews who, in some instances, had been schooled in the arts of espionageby Soviet intelligence services before the war. In the United States, Jews wereamong the leading figures in the realm of cryptanalysis. In fact, the term"cryptanalysis" was coined by America's foremost cryptanalyst, WilliamFriedman. Friedman's heavily Jewish group at the U.S. Army's Signals IntelligenceService (predecessor of today's National Security Agency) pioneeredmodern code breaking and designed the U.S. military's SIGABA cipher machine,whose encryptions were never broken during the machine's period ofservice, which ended in the 1950s.

Jews were also involved in the British cryptanalysis effort. In Britain,however, Jews were more important in the area of covert operations. In particular,the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) recruited a sizeablegroup of foreign-born Jews whose linguistic and cultural skills would helpthem operate in the German-occupied countries of Europe. These individualsbecame important actors in British covert operations in Europe. There were,of course, Jews in regular British and Commonwealth forces, including thefamous Jewish Brigade, and many fought bravely. The number of Jews inBritain, Australia, and so forth was, however, minuscule, so their number inthe military was necessarily very small as well.

Finally, Jews played important roles in several of the major European anti-Naziresistance movements. When Americans think of resistance to the Nazis,they tend to think of the French and, perhaps, the Norwegians and Danes.The Norwegians helped the British SOE destroy the German heavy waterplant at Vemork, and both the Norwegians and the Danes heroically smuggledlarge fractions of their small Jewish communities to safety in Sweden.Generally, though, these two movements posed little threat to the Germans.

The French, for their part, with the exception of the Jews and the CommunistParty, did not resist very vigorously until after D-day. Asked at Nurembergabout the impact of French resistance on German military production,Reich armaments minister Albert Speer quipped that he wasn't aware thatthere had been any French resistance. In both Western and Eastern Europe,however, Jews helped to lead resistance groups whose acts of sabotage andattacks on the always-fragile German supply lines to the east did hinder theGermans and help the Allies. This includes the Polish, Greek, and Yugoslavresistance movements and the most important of the World War II resistancemovements, the partisans of the Soviet Union.

In these four ways the Jews not only resisted but played a major role in thedefeat of Nazi Germany. Could the Allies have won without the help of theJews? Perhaps. Did they win without the help of the Jews? No.

In 1945, Hitler was dead, the Germans had been defeated, and the Allieswere victorious, but it cannot exactly be said that the Jews had won. Morethan 6 million Jews were dead. The several hundred thousand Jewish survivorsin displaced person's camps were unwelcome almost everywhere, whileformer Nazis were given asylum in the United States and Canada and providedwith humanitarian assistance by the Vatican and the Red Cross. In theSoviet Union, Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign, halted temporarily by the war,resumed with a vengeance. In the United States, Jews, who had been amongthe first to warn of the Nazi threat in the 1930s, were accused of "prematureanti-Fascism" by various anti-Communist crusaders in the postwar period.

When he launched his postwar campaign against the Jews, even Stalinusually had the good grace to eschew outright anti-Semitism in favor ofcampaigns against "cosmopolitans" and the like. As the memory of the warand the Holocaust faded, however, as if to confirm Marx's well-known commentthat history repeats itself—das eine Mal als Tragodie, das andere Mal alsFarce (the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce)—a more overt anti-Semitism,containing more than an element of farce, reemerged in WesternEurope in the odd form of liberal anti-Zionism. This time the question ofJewish resistance in Europe was moot, since there were hardly any Jews left.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How the Jews Defeated Hitler by BENJAMIN GINSBERG. Copyright © 2013 Benjamin Ginsberg. Excerpted by permission of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1442222387
• ISBN 13: 9781442222380
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 234
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile