The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places/usa/conspiracy.004

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac - British Obstruction in Rescue Attempts
Summary: British refuse to aid Jewish children and other refugees, in 
         order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Followup-To: alt.revisionism 
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Balfour,Downey,Long

Archive/File: places/usa/conspiracy.004
Last-modified: 1993/06/23

   Perl discusses the British White Paper, which was published on May
   17, 1939, and which abrogated the British obligation to provide a
   Jewish homeland in Palestine (i.e. the Balfour Declaration). 

   The paper did, however, provide for the immigration of 75,000 Jews
   between 1939 and 1944, although the British, as we shall see, did
   everything in their power to prevent this.

   "...Typical examples of this were the refusal to save thousands of
   children from the eminent danger of murder.  In 1943, when the
   Germans wanted to exchange German civilians who had been interned by
   the British at the start of the war for 5,000 Jewish children in
   German controlled lands, the British refused that offer on the
   grounds that those children were not citizens of the British Empire.
   (Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 721) A year later, in
   1944, the Joint Distribution Committee [a major Jewish welfare
   organization concerned with resettlement] persuaded the Swiss to
   accept 5,000 Jewish children from France against guarantees that
   these children would leave Switzerland at the end of the war.
   However, the British accomplices to the Holocaust refused to promise
   to grant those children entrance certificates to Palestine valid
   _after the war's end_ even though, according to the White Paper,
   75,000 were admissible.  [Long-Campbell talk January 11, 1944,
   840.48, Refugees 5017 ASD]

   In the case of the children, the British could not even apply their
   standard argument that admission would involve security risks for the
   country because the Germans used such opportunities to smuggle spies
   in with the refugees. This argument, which made those still insisting
   on rescue action appear unpatriotic, was entirely fraudulent. We have
   pointed out before that for a German spy, there was hardly a place
   more likely to lead to discovery than in a group of Jewish refugees.
   Jews knew each other's ways and experiences, their customs and ways
   of reacting. They had mutual friends or acquaintances and were, as
   people in danger always are, suspicious themselves. Besides, in every
   country there were numerous natives who admired Hitler and who could
   provide much more information and were, for the Germans, incomparably
   more reliable than any Jew might have been. We are calling that
   security argument fraudulent because the Downies and Breckinridge
   Longs and others who regularly invoked it in order to scuttle rescue
   measures _knew_ that it was false. There was a point at which even
   the Foreign Office complained that the security argument was
   regularly resorted to by the Colonial Office as well as by the High
   Commissioner for Palestine, yet when they were requested to name a
   case in which German agents had been brought to the Middle East
   posing as illegal Jewish immigrants, not one such case could be

   It was one thing by Britain to declare the gates of Palestine barred
   (except for the pittance of certificates which it was ready to issue
   while making certain that Palestine could not become a Jewish state),
   and it was quite another matter to keep the doors really so tightly
   blocked. People who see their relatives and friends perish and know
   that it is only a question of time before they will be next, do not
   ask whether it is 'illegal' to save one's life. This is true in any
   case but the more so if the one who proclaimed the law is viewed as
   an illegal occupier, a power that tries to steal the land which not
   only meant saving one's individual life, but also rescue for the
   persecuted, hunted, and massacred group to which one belongs.

   Fighting that 'illegal' escape to Palestine brought the plotters in
   the Colonial Office together with those in the Foreign Office, and
   they called for the armed forces to implement their cruel policy.  In
   a House of Commons debate on July 20, 1939, Mr.  Malcolm MacDonald,
   the Colonial Secretary, had to admit that a 'Division of Destroyers'
   supported by five smaller launches was being employed to ascertain
   that those who had escaped Hitler did not escape the British capture
   as they approached Palestine.  [PRO House of Commons Debates, July
   20, 1939] Those who had fled the German destroyer and his cohorts
   were now hunted down by four destroyers of His Majesty's Royal Navy:
   HMS Hero (flagship), HMS Havock, HMS Henward, and HMS Hotspur.  These
   were among Britain's newest and fastest fighting ships -- all four
   commissioned just two years earlier.  At least one other destroyer,
   the Ivanhoe was also used in that lopsided warfare.  Those conspiring
   in London to block the saving gate of Palestine really meant
   business.  The ships had been authorized to open fire 'at or into any
   ship that was suspected of having illegal immigrants on board and
   that did not obey the warning to stand by. [Palestine Gazette,
   Extraordinary Issue, April 27, 1939]

   They had been authorized to shoot, and shoot they did. Thus it
   happened that on the very first day of World War II, on September 1,
   1939, while German dive bombers rained death on Warsaw and a dozen
   other Polish cities, His Majesty's ship Lorna opened fire on a
   rickety overcrowded refugee ship, Tiger Hill, as she approached the
   Palestine Coast to unload her cargo of misery, 1417 survivors of
   man's inhumanity against man. She did not, could not, heed the order
   to turn back toward Germany. The encounter between HMS Lorna and the
   Tiger Hill ended with a victory for the Royal Navy. Killed in the
   encounter were Dr. Robert Schneider, a young man who had been a
   physician in Czechoslovakia before he had been deprived of human
   dignity and all possessions; and Zwi Binder, a young pioneer from
   Poland whose hopes to till the land peacefully in a Kibbutz died
   within sight of the land he had been longing for years to reach.

   The first two persons killed by British bullets during World War II
   were not Germans but Jewish escapees from the German hell." (Perl,

                              Work Cited

Genocide. New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989

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