“Unlikely Allies: The Shocking Nazi Mission to Rescue a Jewish Leader that Shook History”
The Red Cross duly dispatched a messenger to Warsaw with a telegram guaranteeing safe passage to Riga for Schneerson and his family and instructing the Rebbe to immediately turn himself in to the Gestapo. The messenger eventually succeeded in locating Schneerson, who had been hiding out in the Warsaw Ghetto under miserable conditions and was in failing health. Reluctantly, Schneerson contacted Major Bloch, who soon arrived at the Rebbe’s hideout. As Schneerson’s grandson Shemaryahu Gurary later recalled:
“It was so overwhelming. As soon as we got to the door they rushed right in. There was primarily one guy, and he used every dialect of German that you could think of. During the time the soldiers were there my grandfather was calm and composed on the outside. He was a sick man and it got to him after a while. He was a very strong personality, but not very strong physically. He was exhausted.”
But Schneerson was far from safe. The Schutzstaffel or SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, intensely distrusted Admiral Canaris and the Abwehr, and sought out any excuse to discredit and dismantle the organization. Bloch thus faced the daunting task of smuggling Rebbe Schneerson and his entourage out of Warsaw without under the noses of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD – the SS Security Service run by the notorious Reinhard Heydrich. This was made especially difficult by the fact that Schneerson and his entourage refused to shave their beards or remove their traditional clothing. Bloch thus decided to take his 19 charges to Berlin to throw the SD off the scent, passing them off as political prisoners. As Shemaryahu Guary remembered:
Post Comment