The First Holocaust

Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War One

by Don Heddesheimer

Chapter 6
The Trail Continues

Glowing reports of activities in the Soviet-Joint agricultural colonies continued into the early thirties. In 1931, The New York Times reported:[185]

"The economic transformation of Jewish life in Soviet Russia is not far short of a marvel. Discarding all estimates about the future, one cannot overlook the remarkable fact brought out at the session of the Council of Nationalities held in Moscow in the middle of January that at the beginning of this year 46.7 percent of the Jewish population in Soviet Russia were wage earners, a percentage which no other nationality in Soviet Russia has yet reached; also that 43% of this new Jewish proletariat were connected with heavy industry; that the former preponderance of Jews in the needle and the leather trades has changed to a preponderance in the metallurgical industries; that the number of Jews working in the Soviet metal industries now exceeds the number in all other trades. […] The number of Jewish men without rights because they engage in trading has been reduced to such a minimum that it no longer counts. […] a nation of, literally, shopkeepers and traders is in front of our eyes being transformed into a people of land and industrial workers."

Yehuda Bauer reports in My Brother's Keeper that a 'Joint' leader had discussed the contemporaneous ruthless extermination of the Kulaks with colleagues and Jewish leaders in Russia but notes that there were few Kulaks among the colonists and it would therefore affect them very little.[186] Agro-Joint reacted to the Soviet forced collectivization drive by intervening with local Soviet government and Communist party officials to modify legal restrictions so that the Agro-Joint colonies came out of the collectivization drive relatively well.[187]

Jewish Workers and Farmers in the Crimea and Ukraine is a book about the activities of the Soviet Agro-Joint colonies that was written by a long-time American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee activist and Agro-Joint Assistant Treasurer, Evelyn Morrissey. It chronicles a month-long visit to the Soviet Union and tour of these agricultural colonies in 1935. The Agro-Joint project inside the Soviet Union made fellow travelers (persons who espouse the cause of the Communist Party without being a member) out of some 'Joint' officials. Treated like royalty, Morrissey's party did not have to wait in line to see the embalmed body of Lenin. She spent her first night at the State Opera Theater, then made the rounds of Moscow's museums and the just opened opulent Lazar Kaganovich Moscow subway system. She was told that Red Square was not named after the Communists, but was so named because of the public executions that took place there during ancient times. "Was it Ivan the Terrible whose blood-spilling gave it its name?" Morrissey wondered. She saw churches that were still open and churches that were now museums or clubs for workers. She saw the house where Stalin was living. She toured Leningrad, Odessa, and Kiev.

Then Morrissey's party went off to visit the Agro-Joint colonies. In one Kolkhoz they were told that 1934 was a good crop year for them, but that 1935 would be even better.[188] (Remember, over 7 million Ukrainians had died in an artificial famine during 1933-1934.[189]) She reported seeing prisoners working in the fields in the Crimean steppes living under fairly good conditions. She wrote that "undesirables, counter-revolutionaries, and class enemies in Russia" are denied internal passports, which means that as escaped convicts they could not secure employment. These passports had to be renewed every three to five years, she explained, and only workers and those who accept the Soviet system receive passports. The book goes on:[190]

"This, it is explained, provides a careful check on the Soviet citizen. We have read much of forced and prison labor conditions and its horrors, but here in these golden fields of sunflowers we cannot visualize what it means."

Morrissey also reported that the "Soviet Government has not merely actively cooperated in the work, but has taken the lead officially, recognizing the solution of the Jewish question as a State problem." She noted the Government's ongoing campaign against anti-Semitism, that spreading anti-Semitic propaganda was a criminal offense, punishable by internal exile and imprisonment:

"Jews as a nationality, she said, enjoy actual and absolute equality in civil, political, and other rights with the rest of the population. In the Agro-Joint colonies Jews enjoy cultural autonomy; Yiddish is spoken in the schools and courts, thus transmitting Jewish national tradition to the younger generation through Jewish communal life, the study of Jewish literature, etc."

A 'Joint' publication written by Joseph Hyman and published in 1939[191] reported that Agro-Joint projects included farm settlements, industrialization, and other activities for both rural and urban Jews:[192]

"At certain stages of development in all the Agro-Joint projects, the work was taken in hand by local government agencies, fitted into the general structure of economic and social life of the country, and continued on a larger scale at the expense of the Government."

This publication claimed that the land settlement work settled 250,000 people in the Ukraine and Crimea and that "by 1937 the collectives had become strong enough to take new members into the colonies without outside help, and to provide large funds for general improvements, electrification of villages, irrigation, water supply and other projects." Agro-Joint operated three hundred loan societies which were absorbed by the Government Bank in 1937 "which enabled them to continue working on a scale larger than any social welfare organization would have been able to provide."

This same 1939 'Joint' publication also mentioned operating other successful trade and farm schools, sometimes in cooperation with other Jewish organizations such as ORT[193] and the Soviet Government. It reported organizing 63 medical societies that successfully fought "tuberculosis, trachoma, favus and other diseases ravaging the impoverished Jewish population." This showed a capability of moving large groups of people around deep within the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. It reported that Agro-Joint wound up its activities in 1937-1938 "when it was found that Russian Jews no longer required the assistance of outside organizations."[194]

According to The JDC Story, which was published in 1953 by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, there were 215 Agro-Joint colonies containing 100,000 persons operating in the Crimea and Ukraine by 1936:[195]

"In less than a decade and a half, the work of Agro-Joint helped to transform a large section of Russian Jewry from a downtrodden, almost helpless ghetto population into self-reliant and productive workers of the field and factory. […] Without the full cooperation of the Russian Government, these tasks could not have been accomplished, according to this 1953 'Joint' source. But finally in 1938, JDC was asked to wind up its activities in Russia, since according to the authorities, the government was now in a position to provide for its citizens without calling upon outside aid."

In My Brother's Keeper, Yehuda Bauer called the results of this colonization effort "unclear" and said that the full story of what happened to Agro-Joint can't be told until the Agro-Joint files in Russia are found and opened to scholarly inspection.[196]

But the Soviet agricultural colonies were always overshadowed by the colonies in Palestine. After all, the 'Joint' had been founded in 1914 to help colonists in Palestine. Many fundraisers, especially in Wise's American Jewish Congress, felt that the Soviet colonies were at best a distraction to the Zionist goal. Palestine was the most consistent cause in the Joint Distribution Committee's fund raising campaigns from 1914 through the 1920s and 1930s, as it is today — for Israel.

As previously mentioned, what was then called Palestine was a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire at the time that hostilities first broke out in 1914 between the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turks on one hand and Great Britain, France, and czarist Russia on the other hand. The United States entered the war in 1917. Also in 1917, there was the Balfour Declaration and Great Britain conquered Palestine including Jerusalem. After the cessation of hostilities, Great Britain was awarded the mandate of Palestine at the Paris Peace conference.

Rabbi Wise reminisced about a meeting he had with Lord Balfour in December of 1918. Wise wrote:[197]

"We [Wise and Balfour] met again at the dinner tendered by Lord Rothschild to King Feisel and the world-famed Colonel T. E. Lawrence. Feisel looked every inch an Eastern potentate and spoke in Arabic. Lawrence translated the speech in simple, musical English, a simple enough task, seeing that he had probably written the Arabic version for his majesty."

Soon after Britain obtained this League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, Winston Churchill became Colonial Secretary in British Prime Minister Lloyd George's cabinet. He seemed to believe that the Jews coming to Palestine would be advantageous for the Arabs dwelling in Palestine. As mentioned in a previous chapter, Churchill told a Moslem delegation in Jerusalem that Palestine would be "a" not "the" national home of the Jews. Speaking in the British House of Commons on July 4, 1922, Churchill asked rhetorically:[198]

"Are we to keep our pledge to the Zionists made in 1917? […] Pledges and promises were made during the war, and they were made, not only on the merits, though I think the merits were considerable. They were made because it was considered they would be of value to us in our struggle to win the war. It was considered that the support which the Jews could give us all over the world, and particularly in the United States, and also in Russia, would be a definite palpable advantage."

The Churchill White Paper of June 1922, while he was Secretary of State for the Colonies, concluded that the apprehensions, "so far as the Arabs are concerned, are partly based upon exaggerated interpretations of the meaning of the [Balfour] Declaration favoring the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. […] Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English."[199] Perhaps Churchill thought that the Jews coming to Palestine would become good Palestinians, as they had become good Englishmen, good Germans, and good Frenchmen.

Many of the leaders of that period did not see Palestine developing into a Jewish state. Max Warburg viewed Palestine as a possible sanctuary to restore the spirit, a cultural gift to mankind.[200] Along those lines, Felix Warburg largely financed the creation of an Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. Lord Balfour presided over the founding ceremonies at the opening of Hebrew University on April 1, 1925. Chaim Weizmann became the first President and Albert Einstein chairman of the Academic Council.[201] In 1925, Felix Warburg joined with Louis Marshall in setting up the Palestine Economic Corporation, with Felix as honorary chairman, to channel investment money into commercial and agricultural projects in Palestine. Felix's fantasies about a classless society, purged of human frailty, with farmers and artisans settling there, was suggestive of the Jewish Agro-Joint colonies in Russia.[202] This idea did not originate with Warburg, of course, much of the same idea is seen in Theodor Herzl's writings, especially his novel Old New Land.[203]

The indigenous Palestinians were not happy about these changes, although the British and the Zionists tried to convince world opinion that they were. On August 23, 1929, there was an Arab uprising against the Jewish population in Palestine. Five days after this Arab uprising, a mass meeting was held at Madison Square Garden, New York City, raising two and a half million dollars and creating an emergency relief fund for Jewish victims of the Arab uprising, which began to be distributed in September 1929. Propaganda efforts were made to show how Jewish immigration to Palestine brought prosperity to the Arabs residing there. A survey was completed that showed that Jewish enterprises had both quadrupled the value of Arab property and increased the purchasing power of the Arabs. According to this survey, classes affected adversely by the Jews included Arab employers who exploited their fellow natives through cheap labor and land owners who exploited their lessees.[204] The survey echoed the opinions of the Palestinian character Reschid Bey out of Herzl's best known novel, Old New Land, who had exclaimed that everyone has gained from Jewish expansion, the landowners from higher land prices, the peasants from regular employment and welfare benefits.

Herzl's popular utopian fantasy novel Old New Land was written in 1899 and set in the future (1923). In this novel, a Christian says:[205]

"You're queer fellows, you Moslems. Don't you regard these Jews as intruders?"

"You speak strangely, Christian," responded the fictional Moslem character named Reschid. "Would you think of someone as a robber, who does not take anything from you, but brings you something instead? The Jews have enriched us. Why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us as brothers, why should we not love them? […] You must excuse my saying so, but we did not learn tolerance in the Occident. We Moslems have always had better relations with the Jews than you Christians."

This could have been wishful thinking for some, but to many others the concerns of the Arabs that were already living in Palestine were simply a matter of indifference.

The 'Joint' organized the Palestine Economic Corporation in 1926, which through various subsidiaries, such as the Central Bank of Cooperative Institutions and the Loan Bank, Ltd., and the Palestine Mortgage and Credit Bank, offered credit to farmers, artisans, small merchants, and manufacturers. The Palestine Water Company and the Bayside Land Corporation were established, and they also had investments in Palestine Potash, Ltd., Palestine Hotels, Palestine Foundries, and Metal Works, Agricultural Mortgage Company, and the Palestine Electric Corporation.[206]

Steven S. Wise said this about Zionism and the problems in Palestine in 1931:[207]

"Only two kinds of beings believe that Zionism aims at power and the use of violence. First, those unworthy Arab leaders who are incapable of believing that faith in the weapons of love and peace can be real, and the equally unworthy Jewish leaders who believe only the worst about their own people who, with all facts of and passion for an outmoded nineteenth century philosophy insist that the recrudescence of Jewish life in Palestine means force, violence and war. As if there were to be the abrogation of every Jewish ideal of the centuries by Jews who stand out even among their own as idealists!"

There was a general feeling after the end of World War One that something big was about to happen. Many of the hopes and perhaps wishful thinking of that period are neatly summarized in an article from the New York Times of August 28, 1922, which also refers to the return of Jerusalem, predicting that it will be the world peace capital:

"SAYS JEWS OF WORLD WILL BACK LEAGUE

Dr. Sokolow Tells Zionist Congress Jerusalem Will Be International Peace Capital.

ARAB ENTENTE PREDICTED

Dr. Weizmann Convinced Palestine Cannot Be Rebuilt Without Cooperation of Arab People.

CALSBAD, Aug. 27 (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) — 'The League of Nations is a Jewish idea and Jerusalem some day will become the capital of the world's peace,' declared Dr. Nahum Sokolow, Chairman of the Zionist Executive Committee, at a special meeting of the Zionist Conference today.

'The League has recognized our rights to our ancient home,' Dr. Sokolow continued. 'We Jews throughout the world will make the League's struggle our own and will not rest until there is ultimate victory.' […]

It was decided at the meeting to send messages of congratulation to Max Nordau, one of Herzl's first followers, the Earl of Balfour and Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the last named being the founder of the first Jewish colony in Palestine.

[…] George Halpern, Treasurer of the Zionist World Organization, contended that the Zionists should concentrate on colonization and immigration rather than on cultural activities. […]"

Dr. Sokolow was the author of History of Zionism, published in 1919, and very influential in defining both the scope and the naiveté of the movement at the time. Theodor Herzl was the founder of the Zionist movement and was remarkable as a religious leader who was personally not religious. Max Nordau was considered by many to be Herzl's spiritual heir, and Chaim Weizmann was the charismatic former English chemistry professor who actually led the Zionist movement at the time. Felix Warburg's niece, Lola Hahn Warburg, was Weizmann's lover.

In the 1920s, Theodor Herzl's spiritual heir Max Nordau was claiming that Jews were being slaughtered on the Polish-Russian border and that 600,000 pogrom-afflicted Jews should immediately be transferred to Palestine along with their assets. Nordau reportedly predicted that a third of these Jews would starve to death, a third would emigrate, and that the remaining third would quickly and finally achieve the Jewish State.[208]

According to Nahum Sokolow's History of Zionism, a seminal and encyclopedic study first published in 1919, the anti-Zionist Mendelssohnian school argued:[209]

"The progress of modern civilization had come to be regarded as a sort of 'Messiah' for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem."

This history relates how the public sympathy engendered by fifteenth century massacres of Jews in Poland and Inquisition stories of Jews being burned alive in Spain led to the readmission of the Jews into England.[210] Sokolow writes this about World War One:[211]

"Now among all the battlefields and graveyards of the war, there is not one to be compared with the battlefield of the Jewish 'Ghetto' in Eastern Europe. Millions of Jews have waded through seas of blood and tears. Towns and villages have been dyed with their blood. The Jews have sacrificed their trade, their fortunes and themselves. The flower of their manhood has been lost or mutilated. The sources of life have been cut off, every link of the chain of existence has been broken."

Similarly, concerning Theodor Herzl, the non-religious founder of the Zionist movement., Sokolow wrote:[212]

"Herzl had written his first pamphlet under the influence of the Dreyfus affair. That cry of 20 years ago thunders in unison with the cries of mothers, wives, orphans, from underneath the pyres and ruins which in their brutal reality leave the worst imaginings of a Jeremiah far behind. The dead arise from their graves, covered with blood, trampled in the dust, with the fiery name of God, the shaddae on their pale foreheads, and they demand to be heard."

As we can see, the imagery of a massive garish imitation of the crucifixion has been present in the literature for a long time.

Another book also published in 1919, The Jew Pays. A narrative of the Consequences of the War to the Jews of Eastern Europe, and of the Manner in which Americans have Attempted to Meet Them, provides a spiritual explanation for these charity drives:[213]

"The very speech of ancient Israel in all its eloquent and touching modulations had been somehow prophetically fashioned for this supreme hour. The trained organizer, equipped with a knowledge of the Jewish soul, could turn to the sacred books and find therein texts without number for his purpose. One quarter of the content of the Bible is a record of Jewish struggle and sorrow, and fairly teems with gems in the literature of exhortation and appeals to compassion. Half the Jewish fasts and feasts are redolent of exile and oppression and the threat of national extermination."

Population statistics published during this period do not support the claims that there was a holocaust of Jewish people during World War One. Quite the contrary, from 1900 to 1920, according to standard reference books, the world's Jewish population more than doubled. One reference book, the World Almanac of 1900, gave a Jewish population of 7,186,000 including 3.4 million in Russia and 1.7 million in the Austrian Empire. The World Almanac of 1920 put the Jewish population at about 15 million including 10.9 million in Europe and 3.5 million in North and Central America.

During this same 20-year period, from 1900 to 1920, the total world population increased twenty five percent from roughly 1.2 billion in 1900 to roughly 1.6 billion in 1920. The world's Christian population increased from 477 million in 1900 to 576 million, and the world's Moslem population increased from 176 million in 1900 to 227 million in 1920.[214]

Why do statistics show the population of the world and of the rest of the world's religions increasing by twenty to twenty five percent from 1900 to 1920 and the world's Jewish population increasing by over 100% in those same twenty years? This same period where, according to the promoters of the First World War era holocaust fund raising drives, there was massive starvation, pogroms, and persecution. It is incongruous, to say the least. The total world population increased by twenty five percent from 1900 to 1920. If the Jewish population of the world really only increased by twenty to twenty five percent from 1900 to 1920, that would explain the missing five and a half million at the end of World War Two. Of course it's not that simple. The main point here is that during the first part of the twentieth century, the world's Jewish population was increasing much more rapidly than the surrounding populations. This is according to the standard reference books published during that time period.

Additionally, according to Arno Mayer, there was a remarkable growth in England during that period:[215]

"In the mid 1880s England had only 65,000 Jews, of whom 46,000 lived in London. Three quarters of them were engaged in trade, commerce, and the professions, and most of them were well established and relatively well off. But then during the next 30 years, up until 1914, the Jewish population increased nearly five fold, to reach 300,000."

It is also generally accepted that about one third of all eastern European Jews left their countries of origin for the United States between 1881 and 1914.[216] The United States census of 1890 reported a population of 130,000 Jews, yet by 1920, the Jewish population of North and Central America was about 3,530,000.[217] These American figures appear to be in the ballpark of reality. There were no restrictions on immigration to the United States during much of that period, and up to three million Jews came from countries in eastern Europe, where there was war and political instability. What's hard to believe is the claim that the populations of the eastern European Jewish communities that had sent so many of their young men off to war and so many of their families to America and Great Britain, also increased in population from 1900 to 1920. In comparing the figures, remember there was no modern Poland, no Czechoslovakia, and no Yugoslavia before 1918.

Working backward, in 1885 the bulletin of the Geographical Society of Marseilles calculated the total number of Jews in the world at 6,877,602 including 300,000 in America and 5,407,603 in Europe. Of the 1885 European statistics, the most interesting is Russia which is listed at 2,552,145. (another 70,000 were listed as living in Asiatic Russia and 14,000 in Turkestan and Afghanistan.) France is listed with 70,000.

Of course there was no Poland in 1885, because it was split between the Austrian Empire (1,648,708), the German Empire (561,512) and Russia (2,552,145).[218]

Conklin's Handy Manual of Useful Information and World's Atlas, published in 1888, put the world's Jewish population then at 7 million.[219]

At least 6,000,000 was the estimate accepted at the Jewish Young Men's Club in Glasgow, England, in 1889. They went on to say:[220]

"It is distressing to hear that, with the exception of half a million, they are all in a state of political bondage."

Lets recapitulate all of this and see how it fits into the big picture. After World War One, up to six million European Jews are saved from extermination because of the intervention of people of all faiths. This is just twenty years before these same people are all but exterminated in a secret campaign without written orders and no budget because no one cared. In 1920 and 1926, we have rallies and campaigns all over the United States in drives for up to six million starving European Jews, who are called the worst sufferers in what is now called World War One and its aftermath. They had organizations with offices and agents all over Europe receiving money raised in the United States and elsewhere by organizations that have continually existed since World War One, and exist even today.

All of these fund raising groups have operated continuously up to the present day and are still operating. They have raised money continuously since the end of World War One. The Joint Distribution Committee for the relief of Jewish war sufferers is still thriving. As this is being written, they have a very active, tame, dignified, web site. Also as of this writing, the 'Joint' is funded primarily through the national United Jewish Communities (UJC), which is supported by campaigns conducted by Jewish federated and non-federated communities throughout the U.S. Not much has changed there. There is alleged to be a big warehouse full of old Joint Distribution Committee records in Brooklyn, New York.

The Warburg family has a museum in Great Britain that was the pet project of Aby Warburg, the oldest brother of Felix and Max Warburg. At the time of this writing, they have a much-enlarged site on the World Wide Web. They have a history web site with the name "The Institute for Historical Research". Just go to a good search engine like Google and type in I.H.R. Then look for a British address.

The World Jewish Congress was formed by the American Jewish Congress in 1936, "uniting Jewish communities around the world," according to their web site. The American Jewish Congress is today headquartered at the Stephen Wise Congress House at East 84th Street in New York City. Their national staff is headed by an executive director. They maintain 15 regional offices in the United States, a permanent representative in Washington, D.C., and an Israeli office in Jerusalem. President Clinton spoke at a World Jewish Congress dinner in New York on September 11, 2000, in honor of World Jewish Congress President Edgar M. Bronfman. Bronfman was the chairman of Seagram's, which was recently swallowed up by Vivendi Universal, a French entertainment and water conglomerate. Bronfman became a media mogul and as of this writing is a Vivendi vice chairman.

The American organizations promoting the charity drives after World War One were also going full blast before and during World War Two. That is another story that needs to be explored from a revisionist perspective sometime in the future.

Notes

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