Part X
During the final months of 1939, the Jewish press continued its extensive coverage of the events surrounding the proposed Lublin reservation. The mass deportations of Jews from all parts of the Reich to the Lublin region were reported in the Jewish press including the Congress Bulletin and Der Tog, as well as The New York Times; The Nation, a journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis; and The New Republic, a liberal American magazine of commentary on politics and the arts.
These news outlets reported on the frightful sanitary and housing conditions; the appalling shortage of food; pneumonia, typhoid and dysentery, which had reached epidemic proportions; Jewish girls being taken from their homes to satisfy the lusts of Nazi soldiers; and the many suicides committed by those who had been driven to this act of desperation.
Many Jews sought asylum in other countries and requested help from Jews abroad. On November 5, 1939, the JTA reported that the Jewish residents of La Paz, Bolivia, received more than 300 cables from their relatives in Germany appealing for help to save them from being sent to the Lublin reservation.
On November 30, the JTA reported that the Paris office of the Joint Distribution Committee received a telegram from the Jewish community of Vienna “appealing urgently for $200,000 dollars to enable the emigration of several thousand Jews, many of whom” had American visas. They were faced with either immigrating to America or being deported to Lublin. “The very word ‘Lublin’ was synonymous with ‘inquisition’ to the Jews of Germany, and especially in Vienna,” reported the JTA. Very often men were threatened or thought themselves threatened with deportation “disappeared or committed suicide,” according to the London Times.
The absence of any protest or moral outrage at the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews in the Lublin reservation was the subject of considerable discussion in the Jewish press. Samuel Margoshes asked his readers, “Where is the world-shaking protest against the atrocities in Poland…? We have heard of no great meetings at which the Nazi atrocities received condemnation. It’s as if American public opinion had lost its soul together with its propensity to cry out in the face of wrong. And we, Jews of America, why are we keeping silent? Are we waiting for all the three and a half million Jews in Poland to be slaughtered like cattle? Are not the atrocities already perpetuated upon them heinous enough to move us to a public protest? The blood of our brethren is crying to us from the Polish earth; shall we remain silent? We cannot, we dare not.” Finally, he asked, “Where was the American Jewish Congress? Why wasn’t it leading the Jewish masses in protest and “denunciation of the Hitler atrocities?”
The Zionist Organization of America also charged American Jewry with complacency in the face of disaster. The Workmen’s Circle remarked that while the Yiddish press was “replete with stories of Jewish suffering,” there was little response: “The heart, even as the mind, becomes accustomed to things; and we are beginning to take these matters for granted.”
The American Jewish Congress thought it strange that during the first six years of confronting Nazi Germany, American Jewry openly confronted Germany through their demonstrations, protests and the anti-Nazi boycott. “But now when the deadly hand of Nazism has fallen most devastatingly upon us,” American Jewry “plays the part of neutrals.”
In attempting to understand the failure of American Jews to respond in a vigorous manner, a number of reasons were proffered. The American Jewish Congress suggested that perhaps American Jews were not up to the task history had thrust upon them. Though they had learned to contribute funds for relief, and depend on others for their defense, they were not prepared to advocate as a people when the “deadliest of their enemies perpetrated the most inhuman crimes of their kind.”
The American Jewish Congress added that American neutrality might have influenced their reticent response. Fear of transgressing the neutrality act could account for their silence. Yet, the American Jewish Congress did not believe speaking out against the Nazis would compromise America’s position.
After further consideration, Congress suggested on December 4, 1939, that maybe American Jews were not entirely at fault: “Before action can be taken, the situation itself must first be clearly comprehended. In this case, our minds fail to grasp the meaning of what is going on in Poland. Even the mind of the individual, searching for analogies and explanations in the past and present, fails to accept the facts as reality.
“Words like ‘savagery, atrocity, bestiality,’ which are constantly made use of in reference to the Hitler method of destroying the Jews, are actually no more than subterfuges for our inability to place the facts within the framework of own human experience. When we say ‘savage’ or ‘bestial’ we mean something that is beyond the boundary of our comprehension.”
Congress recognized that this explanation “may partly be the justification for our failure to act so far…it will not justify us in the eyes of the martyrs to whom we are the only branches of the Jewish people capable of action.”
B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee did not share these negative views. They were generally pleased with the way their organizations and those affiliated with them responded to the crisis. The November-December 1939 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record singled out the JDC for its “heroic and unparalleled relief efforts” on behalf of European Jewry.
The Island of Madagascar
When the Nisko plan failed after Hans Frank and his administration objected to having to manage the enclave, Yehuda Bauer wrote that the Nazis resurrected the idea of expelling millions of European Jews to Madagascar, the island nation off the southeast coast of Africa.
In “The Destruction the European Jews,” Raul Hilberg explained the Nazis had a simple strategy. France, after having been defeated by Germany in June 1940, would cede Madagascar to the Nazis in a peace treaty. The German navy would then choose bases on the island. The rest of Madagascar would be under the jurisdiction of a police governor, who would oversee the Jewish reservation, and report directly to Heinrich Himmler. Resettlement of the Jews would be funded from Jewish property they were forced to abandon.
The Nazis viewed this plan as being significantly more favorable than establishing a Jewish presence in Palestine, which they claimed belonged to the Moslems and Christians. Furthermore, the Jews in Madagascar could be detained as hostages to ensure the good behavior of their “racial comrades” in America.
For this scheme to proceed, there had to be a peace treaty with the French, which depended on the end of the war with England. Without the cessation of hostilities with England, no peace treaty could be signed, and with no peace treaty, there could be no Madagascar. By October-November 1940, the plan ended.
Offices of the Nazi Security Force, the Foreign Office and the Generalgouvernement profoundly hoped the plan to rid all the Jews under Nazi control would succeed, Hilberg pointed out. Even though the plan had practically disappeared into oblivion, it was mentioned for the last time in February 1941, in Hitler’s headquarters.
The Madagascar plan marked the final significant attempt to “solve the Jewish problem,” by emigration. At this point, Bauer said, the term “Final Solution,” still meant expulsion of millions of European Jews. Once the Nazis chose to attack the Soviet Union, the Final Solution became “synonymous with mass murder.”
By Alex Grobman, PhD
Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, has written three new books on Israel: “BDS: The Movement to Destroy Israel,” “Erosion: Undermining Israel Through Lies and Deception” and “Cultivating Canaan: Who Owns the Holy Land?” He also wrote “Nations United: How the UN Undermines Israel and the West.” He is a consultant to the America-Israel Friendship League, a member of the Council of Scholars for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and a member of the Academic Council of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
