“Death to Judas!” echoed from all sides in January 1895. On the parade ground of the military academy in Paris, representatives of all the regiments were lined up to expel Captain Dreyfus from the French army. Dreyfus walked between four soldiers with his head hanging. A general on horseback shouted, “Alfred Dreyfus, you are not worthy to bear arms! In the name of the French nation, we expel you from the army!”
Dreyfus was unjustly sentenced to exile for life on the Devil’s Islands for spying for Germany. The trial was also watched by Dr Theodor Herzl, a young journalist from the Neue Freie Presse newspaper in Vienna, who was convinced that there must be somewhere in the world “where Jews can have hook noses, black or red beards and crooked legs without being despised for it”. He believed that “down there”, by which he meant Palestine, “would be a wall of defence against Asia, a bulwark of civilisation against barbarism”. In his diary he wrote: “The Zionists must first of all make satisfactory provision for the lands of the Arab population. The natives there must be pushed off to neighbouring lands as soon as they have done the rough work of colonisation in the Jewish State.”
Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, where it was decided that the goal of Zionism was the earliest possible public and legally recognised home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Herzl travelled between Paris, London, Petrograd, Rome and Istanbul, trying to impress the rulers with his idea. In Istanbul, he offered money to the Sultan for his land in Palestine, but Abdul Hamid II prophetically told him: ‘The Jews had better save their billions. If my empire is one day divided, they may get Palestine for free.”
Thus the idea of a state of Palestine began to circulate among European Jews. But another event had already triggered the first wave of Jewish settlement in Palestine. In March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was blown to pieces by a bomb. A Jewish woman was among the assassins and this triggered a wave of pogroms against the Jewish community. At that time, the Jews of Eastern Europe realised that their compatriots in the West were successfully assimilating and that the Jews living in Russia had no hope.
At the height of the pogroms, a group of 25 students from Kharkiv decided to go to Palestine. After many adventures, they landed in Jaffa, got a job, bought a few hectares of land with the money they had saved and founded Rishon LeZion, the first settlement of Jewish pioneers in Palestine, in July 1882. Not far from Jaffa, they began to clear the land with hoes and ploughshares. They avoided conflict with the Arabs, their aim being peaceful agriculture.
The second great wave of immigration began in 1904, when a group of Zionist workers from Gomel in Ukraine were preparing to leave for Palestine. In 1903, there was a major anti-Jewish riot in Gomel. The attackers could not believe their eyes when, instead of Jews begging for mercy, they were confronted by armed men.
But the Promised Land was a real shock for the newcomers. Instead of a fertile landscape, they found a barren and miserable land. The settlements of the 40,000 or so Jews living there and scattered about were miserable and largely dependent on the financial support of Baron Rothschild and his family. The inhabitants complained of marauding gangs, which were little hindered by the Turkish police. Poale Zion, however, was convinced that just as without Jewish workers there would be no Jewish homeland, so it was the duty of the immigrants to defend themselves and their property.
In September 1907, ten men from the Gomel group met in a basement in Jaffa and vowed to defend the Jewish settlements with their lives. The secret organisation was called Bar Giora and its members immediately began to train in shooting. They found a small farm in Sejera, below Mount Tabor, and started to work the land. In the morning, when it was still dark, they would go out into the fields and work all day, and in the evening they would clean their weapons and stand guard. But they soon realised that such a small group no longer met their real needs, as the number of Jewish immigrants from Europe grew. A larger organisation had to be set up to protect Jews anywhere in Palestine.
This new organisation was called Hashomer – the Guard, and its members were called Shomrim. They were poorly armed, with only three rifles and a few bullets. Settling disputes with the Arabs and fighting with armed gangs were their daily business.
The spring festival of Passover was celebrated joyfully by the settlers of Sejera. Israel Korngold was on guard duty that day. He knew he had to be alert, because a week earlier the Arabs had attacked the village not far from its inhabitants. Suddenly, a shot rang out and Korngold reacted, firing and falling, fatally hit. This was the beginning of an armed conflict with the Arab neighbours. At this time, Hashomer had only 26 guards in the whole of Palestine. This was far too few to work effectively, and its members were scattered throughout Galilee and met more rarely.
Above all, it was necessary to transform Hashomer into an intelligence organisation. Land acquisition was an important part of its mission. For this reason, they established the first Israeli collective settlement, Degania, later called the Mother of the Kibbutzim. Armed Arab groups, however, increasingly stepped up their activities. Night after night, the members of Hashomer met and decided what to do. They secretly bought weapons in Beirut and Damascus and smuggled them into Palestine through clandestine routes. Meanwhile, the Turks, as the official masters of Palestine, did not know how to contain the lawlessness in the country.
Hashomer’s intelligence officers were engaged in another important task; preparing for the conquest of Jerusalem. It was quite clear that the Allies would win the war and that Turkey would be on the losing side and would have to withdraw from Palestine. In this mess, with no real master in place, the Jews were to take control of the city and hold it until the British troops arrived.
The fact that someone was eagerly collecting data on the city’s fortifications, weapons stockpiles and troop numbers caught the Turkish authorities’ attention, and in 1916 the Turks struck. The entire Hashomer leadership was arrested and expelled from Palestine. The Zionist Committee, as the representative before the Turkish authorities, was dissolved, all Hebrew signs and signposts were removed and Jews were forbidden to buy land and build houses. The increasing pressure from the Turkish authorities subsequently led to the expulsion of a third of the 90 000 Jews from Palestine. But this did not frighten the remaining Jews. They all wanted the Turkish troops to leave as soon as possible, so they bombarded the British with intelligence.
Self-protection, called Haganah
The Botanical Research Institute on the Seacoast was founded in 1910 and would have continued to work only on botany for a long time if it had not been for the swarms of locusts that arrived over Palestine in 1915. There were so many that as soon as the farmers chased one away, another flew into the same area. In his distress, the Turkish deputy, Jamal Pasha, appointed the head of the botanical institute, Aaronson, as a government agent to help control the locusts. Aaronson already had a well-organised intelligence network, called Nili, because his aim was to get the English to occupy Palestine. As a government agent, he was now able to travel throughout Palestine and gather intelligence.
Before the outbreak of World War I, seven young Arabs in Damascus set up a secret organisation, Al Fatat, with the aim of liberating Arab lands from the Turkish yoke. With Turkey’s entry into the war on Germany’s side, the British feared for their Suez Canal, as Turkish troops were already in its immediate vicinity. The British therefore had no choice but to look everywhere for allies, among Jews and Arabs alike, and to promise them the impossible.
Thus, with their consent, the Jewish Legion was formed, numbering 5000 volunteers, some of whom fought against the Turks already at Gallipoli. In 1916, the Arabs also began to rise up against the Turks, believing London and Paris that they would be able to establish a large Arab state after the Allies’ victory. Of course, nothing came of all this, and the Arabs were shamelessly deceived by the British and the French. Even the Jews began to wonder how it was possible that their protectors, the British, were not keeping their agreements with the Arabs. Will they perhaps stick more closely to their agreements with the Jews?
In London, they didn’t worry about it and continued to bargain with a country that was never theirs. So Arthur Balfour, the English Foreign Secretary, drew up a charter that cost him nothing, but promised much and could achieve much. In it, he gave the Jews a binding confirmation of the promises of territory that the English had first granted to the Arabs and then secretly shared with the French. “We look with understanding on the establishment of a national Jewish home in Palestine. But this must not undermine the civil or religious rights of the non-Jewish communities already existing in Palestine.” This is what the Balfour Declaration said.
On the first day of Hanukkah, 11 December 1917, the British invaded Jerusalem. Three battalions of the Jewish Legion, commanded by Vladimir Jabotinsky and Josef Trumpeldor, entered the city with them. Palestine became a British Mandate. In the early 1920s, Arab attacks on Jewish settlements began to multiply. In June of that year, the Jewish workers’ parties decided to set up a secret semi-military organisation in Kinereth, called the Haganah, which was to set up a wide-ranging illegal self-defence. Now it was no longer a matter of guarding the olive groves or patrolling the kibbutzim at night, but much more.
Jabotinsky took over the organisation of the Haganah and it soon grew into the best-trained underground army in the Middle East at that time. The first military formations of the Haganah were the working battalions of Josef Trumpeldor. They acted as construction units during the day, laying out roads in accordance with the Mandate’s plans, and in their spare time they were trained in weapons and marksmanship. In the summer of 1921, the Haganah held its first officer’s course, which took place on the dunes near Tel Aviv and in a gymnasium building in Herzliya. In May, three Haganah representatives travelled to Vienna and returned home with heavy suitcases containing dozens of revolvers concealed under a double bottom, and a secret weapons cache made in Kibbutz Kfar Gileadi.
By the mid-1920s, the situation seemed to have settled down, there were no more conflicts between Jews and Arabs, and the Haganah was reduced to a minimum. Even the British were reassured and sent most of their troops home, leaving only a token 250.
But in 1928, on the eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, peace was over. The uproar was caused by a canvas curtain that Jews had erected at the Wailing Wall to separate men from women during prayers. An ancient regulation forbade this, and the British police intervened at the Arab request. The furore died down, but then a month later a Jewish boy kicked a ball into the garden of an Arab neighbour. Deeply offended, the Arab owner of the garden simply stabbed the boy. The child’s burial was a demonstration of Jewish power, and the Arabs responded by burning down some Jewish shops. This time, the Haganah intervened and spared some Jewish settlements.
The man behind all this unrest was the young Mufti of Jerusalem, Hai Amin El Husseini. None of his co-religionists contributed so much to the implacable hatred of the Jews as he did. Now the Haganah has regained its prominence, as Jews realise the importance of its protection.
On the night of 30 July 1934, some 300 Polish Jews walked along the shore south of Haifa, arriving in Piraeus via Romania and then heading for Palestine on a rusted steamer that had previously carried slaves across the Indian Ocean. Their arrival marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Haganah. It was the beginning of mass illegal immigration to Palestine.
In 1936, the Arab uprising broke out, with Arabs demanding a halt to Jewish immigration. The British, realising that they were too few to quell the riots, authorised the creation of an auxiliary Jewish police force called the Notrim. This was a great camouflage for the Haganah, as it officially gave them access to arms. The Notrim units soon became motorised, had armoured cars, controlled traffic and protected workers on building sites. Iser Harel was also a member of Notrim.
In 1936, Sherut Yediot, the Haganah’s secret intelligence service, known as the Shai for short, was created. Harel was very valuable to the Shai, as he travelled widely and had a gift for observation. In his work, he was always in contact with his Arab neighbours, because he spoke their language. His military career began in Notrim and ended as head of Israeli intelligence. When in 1936 the British police equipped themselves with wireless transmitters, the Sha’ia officers were interested in each station, its mode of operation and the code used to transmit it. Israeli agents installed a receiver with a well-hidden antenna in the centre of Tel Aviv, and the Haganah was able to eavesdrop on all the conversations of the English.
Coincidentally, all telephone lines connecting the Middle East were routed through southern Palestine. The British were thus able to eavesdrop on all international conversations. These stations were run by British officers, but as there was a shortage of people trained for the job, some Jews were chosen as auxiliary officers. Among them were as many as five members of the Shai intelligence service.
Terrorist Stern and Irgun
The nerve centre from which all the actions were carried out and to which all the threads led was the Jewish Agency, as the political body of Zionism. Information of a general nature flowed into its Arab department, and news of Arab activity requiring immediate action was received by the Haganah leadership. The Shai’s Arab Department kept a file on each Arab settlement or town. Specially trained agents visited Arab settlements, gathered information and photographed the most important buildings. In this way, outdated information was brought up to date. The Arabs complained about the frequent visits of the Jewish auxiliary police, because they knew that Notrim was forbidden to enter purely Arab areas, but all these complaints inexplicably disappeared into the dusty drawers of the police.
On 7 December 1936, the Haganah called for volunteers for a mass labour action. People from all over Palestine came to the Kfar Hittin valley, equipped with shovels, picks and wheelbarrows. The Haganah began to implement its plan to build some fifty defensive outposts at the most important strategic points in Palestine. These were double-walled palisades filled with stones and rubble. In the centre of the fortifications was a defensive tower equipped with powerful searchlights powered by generators.
Wire barriers and minefields were laid around these outposts. Inside, the settlement was guarded during the day while other settlers were in the fields, and at night by kibbutz members. This allowed the settlers to work their fields without fear. Thus the Jews were able to partially settle northern and western Galilee and the Jordan Valley already at the time of the Arab revolt.
The fortified settlement of Hanita, close to the Lebanese border, was the scene of fierce fighting. The Haganah was convinced that a few Jewish settlements along the northern border would greatly strengthen the position of the Jews in Upper Galilee. The English protested, the Arabs were furious, but nothing helped, and Hanita was finished by March 1938. Four hundred members of the Haganah had to close the area for several months until it was repopulated. Of course, the Jewish auxiliary police also helped them, and one section of this police was commanded by Moshe Dajan.
The Jewish Agency at the time adopted a tactic of restraint towards the Arabs and was in favour of working – as far as possible – with the English. This tactic of relative passivity, however, led to sharp contradictions between the Palestinian Jews and the radical leadership of the Haganah. The dissatisfied parties gathered in their own faction, called Hagana B. Abraham Stern, the poet and revisionist, gathered around him a section of these malcontents, and the infamous Stern terrorist organisation was born.
Jabotinsky also gathered around him some other malcontents and in 1937 founded another terrorist-military organisation, the Irgun. Unlike the Haganah, which advocated a somewhat humane, if harsh, policy towards the Arabs, Stern and the Irgun swore by sheer brutality. They wanted to scare the Arabs into giving in. These two terrorist organisations also had political objectives; the settlement of at least 15 million Jews in Palestine.
It is strange that Duce, almost the only statesman in Europe, secretly admired the Jews: “The most important thing is that the Jews are not afraid. We all see their end coming. They must set up a Jewish state so that they can have a real state, not the improvised camp offered to them by the English. It is decisive that the Jews have confidence in their future and are not afraid of the idiot in Berlin.”
Duce also turned a blind eye when a naval school was secretly set up in Italy to train cadets for the Irgun. Then Jabotinsky went to Warsaw and proposed to the Foreign Ministry the evacuation of a million Polish Jews to Palestine. They listened attentively and, in principle – given the latent anti-Semitism that was spreading in Poland – agreed with him. The Polish army also took over the training of the Irgun. In Gronik, not far from Zakopane, the Irgun was provided with a sports training ground, where 25 Irgun members arrived with forged passports from Palestine. All of them were of Polish origin, trained in street fighting tactics and the use of explosives, and instructed by Polish officers.
The Haganah management has thought about it. As more and more members left their organisation and joined the Irgun or Stern, they decided to take a harder line towards the Arabs. Thus the Haganah Plugoth Sadeth was formed, led by the former Russian wrestler Yitzhak Sadek. He had his headquarters in Tel Aviv, along with a small unit of Arabic-speaking informers. The result was a flexible fighting force, designed for active rather than passive defence, which operated throughout Palestine. During the Arab uprising, it had already developed into a small army called the Hish. Its members were not permanently armed and were a kind of territorial militia, called up as needed.
In the first spring months of 1936, a tall, fair-haired man stepped off a train and onto the floor of the Warsaw roundabout. Until recently he had been an exporter of oranges, but now he had come to buy arms as a representative of the Haganah. The Haganah’s weapons were drawn from all over the world, and most of them were bought from the Arabs. But every serious military power wants to have uniform weapons, and Tannenbaum bought a small workshop near Warsaw to repair agricultural machinery. Brokers bought him weapons from Polish military warehouses, which he then hid under the farm machinery repair shop.
At night, when no one was around, he would remove the metal cladding of tractors and fill the empty parts with parts of various weapons. The metal cladding was then welded back on and in the morning the tractors were driven to a nearby freight station, from where they travelled to Haifa via Gdynia. In this way, the Haganah came into possession of 4 000 rifles, 300 machine guns and 20 000 hand grenades, and even four small RWD aircraft. Later, it trained future pilots in these sport aircraft.
The biggest change for Haganah was the arrival of a pale Englishman, Captain Ord Wingate of the Scottish Artillery. He had served five years in the Orient and knew the languages well. He was rugged, aloof and always biting onions. To curb terror, he proposed to his superiors the creation of three special units, to operate at night, made up of Englishmen and Jews. They were to be trained in knife fighting, grenade handling, setting ambushes and, of course, guarding the oil pipeline.
One of the most important targets of the Arab attacks was the Iraqi Petroleum Company’s oil pipeline, which terminated in Haifa and was considered vital by the British. It ran a metre underground and mostly through uninhabited and inaccessible territory. The Arab tactics were very simple. They dug a pit up to the pipeline, shot it with a few bullets and set fire to the leaking oil.
Wingate set up its headquarters at Kibbutz Ein-Harrod, and the successes of these special units were not accidental, as their operations were backed by intelligence that few knew about. The Shai put his best agents at his disposal, and much of his information came from the local population. Special detachments would set out in trucks, hide during the day, suddenly change direction at night, approach the place where they expected the Arabs to be and set up an ambush. The Haganah thus learned useful methods of warfare, as Wingate advised them to stop defending themselves behind fences and wire barriers and to attack the enemy by deceptive manoeuvres at night and in their settlements.
But in December 1938, the Special Forces were disbanded. Why, no one knows, but Wingate certainly returned to aviation.
The emergence of the Mossad
In 1937, the Haganah High Command met in Tel Aviv. A secret organisation was to be set up to take charge of illegal immigration. The organisation was called Mosad Lealivah Beth and soon became the most important department of the Jewish Intelligence Service. Those who frequented the nightclubs and bars of Jerusalem at that time could see that there were young men getting tanned who could be mistaken for world travellers who happened to stop in Palestine. They were specialists from the CID (Central Investigation Department), the special police department tasked with preventing illegal immigration.
They spoke fluent Hebrew and also travelled across Europe to uncover the secret channels through which the Mossad smuggled Jewish immigrants into Palestine. The immigrants usually travelled by boat and it was therefore impossible to completely conceal this mode of transport. Port authorities, shipping agents and customs could not be fooled. The ships on which they travelled were mostly old, poorly maintained and overcrowded.
Refugees were usually first put on boats, which were then transported to a ship anchored outside the harbour. Once on board, they were hidden in the hold. When the boats reached the Palestinian coast, the refugees were disembarked at night before British police patrol boats appeared on the horizon. One third of the immigrants were women, who had to enter into a marriage of convenience immediately after landing so that the British authorities could not deport them from Palestine. A whole coterie of Jews and Arabs alike were prepared to enter into such marriages and equally quick divorces at any hour for a certain compensation. The British, surprised by the large number of marriages and divorces, finally decreed that each Jew or Arab could marry only three times a year.
But it was during the Arab uprising that the Haganah and the Jewish Agency did something that had long been kept secret. They collaborated with the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of Hitler’s Germany, in a top secret and successful way, a collaboration that only ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. The Germans were trying to solve the problem of more than one million German Jews, and emigration would, in their view, have solved the problem for good.
In 1935, the Germans wrote in the Jewish desk of the SD under code II 112: “The time should not be too far distant when Palestine will take back all its sons lost for more than a millennium. May they be accompanied by our wishes that they may feel well in their own country.”
The SS’s von Mildenstein was tasked with helping the Zionist Association to implement this plan. He knew that it could only be implemented with the cooperation of the relevant Jewish circles in Palestine. One of von Mildenstein’s measures was to give a post to Adolf Eichmann, who also had Jewish relatives and a Jewish woman as a friend. Eichmann soon wrote a report which said, among other things: “All the parties and associations included in the Zionist World Organisation are coordinated by a military defence organisation of Jewish immigrants, which has a widespread espionage service. The name of this organisation is the Haganah.”
On February 26th 1937, the telephone rang at the Jewish desk II 112 in Berlin. Polkes answered and introduced himself as one of the Haganah commanders. He had come to Berlin and wanted to get in touch with the Germans. Eichmann took care of the guest. They went to a restaurant not far from the zoo. The food and drink were good and, over wine, they took up a matter that interested both of them. Polkes said that he wanted to speed up immigration to Palestine. He would be supported in this by certain individuals in the British Intelligence Service and the French Deuxieme Bureau, who were also prepared to work with Hitler’s Germany. He proposed that Germany should relax the regulations on the export of foreign currency from Germany for those Jews emigrating to Palestine. In return, the Haganah would support German interests in the Middle East.
The talks ended successfully, otherwise two German representatives of the Jewish Desk II 112 would not have travelled to Palestine in civilian clothes seven months later. One was Herbert Hagen, the head of the Jewish desk himself, and the other was Adolf Eichmann. The trip was approved by Heydrich himself, the head of the German Reich Security Service. After a week, the ship docked in front of Haifa, but a state of emergency had been declared in Palestine and all borders were hermetically sealed. The ship with the two Nazis sailed for Cairo, Polkes and his companions following it overland.
In the shadow of the Egyptian pyramids, Hagen finally noted that the Haganah was very happy with Germany’s radical Jewish policy, because it would increase the Jewish population in Palestine and soon there would be more Jews than Arabs. But things did not go much further than talks and agreement in principle. After the annexation of Austria to the Reich, Eichmann was transferred to Vienna in order to speed up the Jewish emigration there as much as possible. He did an excellent job.
One summer day in 1938, a carefully dressed man appeared outside the SD building in Berlin and told the doorman that he was Pino Ginzburg and that he wanted to see the Jewish Affairs Officer. He told the desk officer that he had come to reinforce the cooperation of the German SD security service with his organisation, which was dealing with illegal immigration to Palestine. The Haganah was disappointed by the position of the Zionist Association of Germany. Only a tiny fraction of German Jews were showing any desire to emigrate to Palestine, and if they were to leave, they would prefer to go to England or America. The German Jews did not know and did not believe what was in store for them and were only sobered by the events of Kristallnacht, when their synagogues were burnt, their shops looted and some lost their lives.
Heydrich quickly reached an agreement with Ginzburg and was prepared to send at least 400 German Jews to Palestine every week. He was even prepared to help with the transport problems Ginzburg was having and provided him with a German shipowner. But the first transport of 280 Jews was not ready until March 1938, and its official destination was Mexico, because the Germans were also afraid that the British would find out about the operation.
The group travelled through Yugoslavia, boarded a boat at Susak and transferred to another boat in Corfu, which landed on the Palestinian coast. Now the English were upset and had stepped up their surveillance of the Palestinian coast, and the ports of southern Europe were buzzing with Intelligence Service agents, recording exactly where each ship was going and with what passengers on board.
In Palestine, the British forbade the establishment of new settlements and threatened to leave the administration of Palestine to the Arabs. Further immigration was prevented by the Second World War, but tens of thousands of European Jews were nevertheless transported to Palestine one way or another. The outbreak of the war gave the Mossad additional worries and problems. Eichmann, who had been transferred to Austria, continued to allow the emigration of Jews until he started sending them to extermination camps under orders.
Committee for the Relief of the Jews of Wadah
In October 1939, 43 future Haganah officers trained near Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, claiming to be a sports association. Among these “sportsmen” was Moshe Dajan. One day, to their surprise, two English officers appeared in the building where they were staying and started to search the premises. They discovered hidden guns under the beds and wrote an angry report. This was a signal for Hagana to leave the place as soon as possible.
But just around the first bend, they were stopped by a Border Police patrol, arrested and taken to the Akko Fortress prison, where they were interrogated by British informers. They were sentenced to five to ten years’ imprisonment. But the luck of war did not favour the English at the beginning of World War II. The French were defeated and their troops in Syria and Lebanon joined the pro-German government in Vichy. So the British in Palestine were in a quandary, and the Germans were preparing to land in Libya. So who else was going to bother with 43 Jewish prisoners in the Akko Fortress. So, in February 1940, all 43 prisoners were given civilian clothes and certificates of release from prison, and they walked free.
Meanwhile, the Zionist leader, Dr Chaim Weizmann, was negotiating with the English for cooperation. The secret agreement allowed Haganah agents to receive military training at SOE training grounds near Cairo, whose task was to support and coordinate the resistance in the German hinterland. The Haganah hastily assembled its military divisions. These were nine well-trained troops, now called Palmah. Its members had no ranks, they opposed drill and strumpish posturing, they operated very conspiratorially under assumed names, and they were led by Yitzhak Sadek. The English needed every trained man who was prepared to fight the enemy and they gritted their teeth and admitted the existence of the Palmach.
One of the Palmah groups that worked with the English was led by Moshe Dajan. His group is alleged to have blown up bridges and access lines in Syria, which was under the control of the Vichy government. In the attack on the police station, Moshe Dayan took binoculars to find out where the enemy French soldiers were hiding. At that moment, the binoculars were struck by a bullet and shattered, and a piece of the binoculars was pushed into Dajan’s eye socket and remained there. This left Dajan without an eye, and he covered the void with the black bandage for which he had become so famous.
On a summer’s day, four men were slowly sipping coffee in a bustling Istanbul street. They were the Mossad’s most important outpost on the threshold of Europe. The Mossad had to withdraw from Paris and Vienna, its last outposts in Western Europe. They knew that the English had changed their attitude towards Jews who, for one reason or another, wanted to move to Palestine.
“You must not support or encourage Jews in occupied Europe, but if they do manage to get to Turkey, you must not deny them entry visas to move to Palestine.”
This is the instruction received from London by the British Ambassador to Turkey. It was this instruction that brought four Mossad men to Turkey; Levi Schwartz, Bar Gilad, Ehud Avriel and Teddy Kollek. Their mission was to help refugees from the Balkan countries, because the only route to Turkey in wartime was through the Balkans. But the operation was very complicated. First, the Jewish communities in the occupied lands had to be contacted through couriers, and then transport had to be organised to Turkey, and from there to Palestine.
In January 1943, the Vaadah Committee for the Relief of Jews was set up in Budapest to help Jews in Poland and Bohemia. Dozens of refugees arrived secretly in Hungary, where they hid and prepared for the long journey to Palestine. Joel Brand had to take care of this, and he set up a permanent courier service between Budapest and Istanbul. In doing so, he teamed up with an acquaintance of his, Springmann, a diamond merchant who had good connections with foreign diplomats in Budapest. Brand demanded a lot of money from the Mossad, because it was the only way to get properly forged documents and to pay smugglers to get refugees across the border.
At the Vichy government embassy, Springmann knew a man called Erich Popescu, himself Jewish, who travelled regularly between Budapest and Istanbul. He suggested that he buy diamonds in Istanbul and bring them to Budapest, where Springmann would sell them well. The diamond business was, of course, just a cover for something else, but Springmann gained Popesco’s trust. Before Popesco left in the autumn of 1943, Springmann slipped him a letter for the representatives of the Jewish Agency in Istanbul, asking him to collect the money for him there. A week later, Popesco returned with a wad of banknotes handed to him by the Mossad.
Springmann also visited one of the leaders of the Black Borse network in Budapest, Bandy Grosz. Grosz had good connections with Hungarian intelligence agents, but also a big problem. His Black Borzian network had been broken up, probably because he had a grudge against someone. He was sentenced to two years in prison, so he needed money to get out of it. Springmann offered him money, but only on condition that he would provide a reliable and regular connection to Istanbul.
So Grosz went to Istanbul and came back with Mossad money, from which he deducted 10% of his commission. Moreover, Grosz put the Vaadah in touch with agents of the German Abwehr, who in turn put the Haganah in touch with Jewish centres still existing in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in the Reich itself and in other occupied countries. Of course, money played a big role in this. In Budapest, the Haganah’s liaison with the Abwehr was Dr. Schmidt and the Viennese dentist Dr. Sedlaczek. The latter travelled to Krakow three times and brought back half a million marks which the Istanbul Mossad had sent there for the Jews.
On the night of 15 March 1944, an American Dakota circled between Vienna and Budapest, flying from Brindisi and managing to evade the German fighter net. It circled for some time, searching for its target. Although there were no lights to mark the spot, three US OSS agents jumped out of the plane. For a year before, the Hungarian government had been seeking contacts with the Allies, as no one among the Hungarians believed in a German victory anymore. Hungarian couriers travelled to and from Switzerland with letters and finally the Hungarians agreed to an unconditional surrender, asking the OSS to send a special mission to Budapest for more detailed arrangements. But the Germans already knew of this Hungarian intention and decided to overtake the Americans and invade Hungary first.
The German military occupation of Hungary began, and when the Americans parachuted to the ground, they found themselves surrounded by German troops. The paratroopers quickly landed in German captivity, along with a letter from President Roosevelt to the Hungarian leader, Admiral Horty. The Germans immediately disbanded the corrupt Hungarian Abwehr detachment working with the Haganah, but did not sever ties with the Haganah on Himmler’s orders. Himmler took special note of the name Joel Brand, who was hiding in Budapest with all the documentation. Finally, the whole thing was handed over to Adolf Eichmann, who was now in Budapest.
Then the SS themselves started bargaining, demanding two million US dollars to prevent the deportation of Budapest’s Jews. Of course, the German negotiators got ten percent of the commission. When the representatives of the Vaadah brought the last instalment of money, the Germans informed them that “the deportation was a done deal”. But on 25 April 1944, an Abwehr agent came to Joel Brand, whom the Germans knew very well where he was hiding, and said to him, “This is getting serious, Eichmann is calling you, you know who Eichmann is.” He was taken to the Majestic Hotel, where he was received in a room by Eichmann in a black uniform.
The lives of Jews behind the trucks
“I called you to propose a deal. I am ready to sell you a million Jews. You can take that million from Poland, the Czech Republic, Terezin or Auschwitz. Who do you want to save? Men fit to procreate, women fit to procreate, or someone else? But instead of money, you would rather take goods.”
At the second meeting, Eichmann, who had since returned from Berlin, said, “My offer is very favourable. For every 100 Jews, you provide me with a lorry, so 10,000 new lorries in all, with winter equipment. And I assure you that these trucks will not be used on the Western battlefield. We also need 200 tonnes of tea, 800 tonnes of coffee and two million bars of soap. First you take 100,000 Jews and hand over a thousand trucks to us, and then the deal will go ahead of itself.”
Brand flew to Turkey with the proposal, while Eichmann continued deporting Jews; it would only stop when the deal was confirmed and agreed. Himmler wanted to make contact with the Allies through this bargain, because he too saw how the war would end. The task of making these contacts fell to Bandi Grosz, who was working with Brand. Meanwhile, Eichmann continued the deportations of Hungarian Jews quietly, and by 5 June 1944 several trains with 410,223 Hungarian Jews had left for Auschwitz.
Despite their misgivings, the Vaadah accepted Eichmann’s proposal and on 19 June a German Ju 52 with Brand and Grosz landed at Istanbul airport. But a surprise awaited them at the airport. No one had their entry visa for Turkey and there was no representative of the Mossad or any other Zionist leader. The airport officials informed them that they would just have to take the same plane back to where they came from. Only after much persuasion and the payment of appropriate financial compensation were the entry visas suddenly found.
Negotiations begin at the Pera Hotel, where the Jewish Agency was based. Everyone involved knew that the Allies would not give the Germans military equipment in the middle of a war, but time had to be bought and negotiations had to be delayed in order to save at least a few Jewish lives. They decided that the American ambassador in Ankara should be informed. Brand and Grozs therefore took the train to Ankara, but were arrested by the Turkish police as soon as they arrived there, as they were not allowed to travel to Ankara as foreigners, but only to stay in Istanbul. After negotiations, their return to Istanbul was delayed for a few days, but they had to report to the police every day.
Brand did not even reach the US ambassador, as he was soon sent to a meeting in Aleppo, Syria, accompanied by a Haganah representative. As soon as the train stopped in Aleppo, an Englishman greeted him in English: “Mr Brand. This way, please.”
He soon found himself in an Arab villa, surrounded by British officers. Moshe Sharett, the supreme leader of the Shai and the Mossad, greeted him. After Brand had told him all about the talks with Eichmann, the English officers conferred, and Sharett put his hand on Brand’s shoulder and said, “I have something unpleasant to tell you. You are going to the South.” Brand realised he had been arrested and had a nervous breakdown. He was taken to a military prison in Cairo.
There, he was interrogated by British intelligence for several weeks and had to answer the same questions over and over again. “Do you really think the Allies are going to give the Germans military equipment in the middle of a war?” Finally, he was taken to an elegant house on the Nile and introduced to a tiny man, Ira Hirschmann, President Roosevelt’s envoy, but the talks with him did not bring any conclusions.
One day, while Brand was having a cold drink in an exclusive bar by the Nile, an Englishman approached him and started asking him about his conversations with Eichmann. Finally, he asked him, “And how many people did you talk to?” He replied, “About a million Jews.” The Englishman was astonished and said, “For God’s sake, where are we going to put a million Jews?”
Who the Englishman was never came out, but those words meant a death sentence for another Englishman. Grosz, meanwhile, was also already in Cairo, but in another military prison. At the beginning of September 1944, Brando was told that they were finished with him and that he would be sent to a military camp, where he would be completely free. He would be paid a salary and have the rank of a British lieutenant.
While Brand sat in Cairo, the bargaining between Vaadah and Eichmann continued. Eichmann was furious because Brand and Grozs had disappeared and no one knew where they were. Vaadach’s representatives claimed that everything was in place for a deal, but that Eichmann should release 300 Jews and transport them to neutral Portugal as proof of goodwill and the seriousness of the offer and willingness to cooperate.
Eichmann fiercely resisted. His rage did not please Himmler, as it threatened his plans, so someone else took over the negotiations with Waddah. On 30 June 1944, a “model transport” of 300 Jews was ready to leave. When they arrived in Portugal, Vaadah would pay $1,000 for each one. But things did not go well. At Hanover, a still furious Eichmann arbitrarily diverted the “model transport” to the Bergen-Belsen camp without informing anyone. The people in the transport were to remain there until Joel Brand turned up. Now Himmler stepped in between and forbade Eichmann to dispose of the “model transport” in any arbitrary way.
Vaadah proposed new negotiations in the Swiss border town of St. Margarethen. Negotiators held talks on the bridge dividing Switzerland from Germany during a heavy downpour, but made no progress. Himmler still insisted, as he did not want to break off contacts with the Allies. As a sign of goodwill, he decided to send across the border the last of the deportees from the transports that Eichmann was holding in Bergen-Belsen.
Shot in the Lord
In December 1944, Cairo was experiencing an extreme heat wave. Lord Moyne, British Minister for the Middle East and Churchill’s personal friend, got out of his car outside a beautiful villa on the Nile island of Geziri. Meanwhile, two young men, Ben Zouri and Hakim, members of the Stern terrorist group, were cycling near the villa. They had been tasked with liquidating Lord Moyne because he had allegedly said in a Cairo bar: “For God’s sake, where are we going to put a million Jews?”.
Through a liaison with Nadja Hess, who worked in the British Army Auxiliary, Hakim contacted NCO Galli from British Air Force Headquarters, who was the head of the Stern Group in Cairo. From him, the two young men learned what their mission was. The location of the assassination was to be the Lord’s villa, from where it would be possible to disappear quickly across a bridge into the winding streets of old Cairo.
The British suspected something was afoot, but they didn’t know what. A British intelligence officer was meeting with his source, a woman named Natalia. “She warned me that the Stern Group was preparing an attack, an assassination, with an Englishman as the victim and Jews as the killers. She didn’t know much about the attack itself because her organisation was not involved in it.”
The British authorities were immediately alerted and saw Lord Moyne as the only target, and the only one refusing any protection. “I’m not interested”, he replied when offered armed escorts. As Lord Moyne got out of the car, two men armed with revolvers rushed out of the bushes nearby. Hakim shot Lord Moyne three times and Ben Zour shot the driver, who tried to protect him but was fatally wounded. Lord Moyne, hit in the throat by one bullet and in the stomach by another, collapsed in the back seat of the car. A few hours later, he succumbed to his wounds in hospital.
The two assassins rode their bicycles over a bridge into the old part of the city, followed by a local policeman on a motorbike. He opened fire and Bez Zouri fell off his bike, Hakim stopped and came to his comrade’s aid. Passers-by, who had been watching the scene in silence until then, rushed at the two assassins and overpowered them. The Jewish press denied any involvement in the assassination, but three days later the assassins confessed to belonging to the Stern group. They were sentenced to death.
It was Winston Churchill himself who made sure that Joel Brand’s mission was not a complete failure. He, of course, rejected the idea of providing the enemy with military material to replace the Jews. “If the Russians found out about this, our alliance would be over.” But he complied with the Zionists’ second wish and in autumn 1944 gave permission for the creation of Jewish military groups with their own officers and their own flag.
On 27 April 1945, Dachau was liberated, preceded by Buchenwald on 11 April, Bergen-Belsen on 15 April, and then Mathausen and other camps. Some 50,000 Eastern European Jews came out alive from the German camps. Their fate was uncertain. Where would they go? Their homes had been demolished, they did not like Soviet rule, perhaps they would go to Palestine? But to move to Palestine required a reorganisation of the Mossad. Its main headquarters in Europe were now in Paris, and two new departments were set up: Briha (escape) to send Jews to ports of embarkation in southern Europe, and Ha-apala, whose main task was to accompany refugees to Palestine. But that is another story, no less complicated and dangerous.
