“Unlikely Allies: The Shocking Nazi Mission to Rescue a Jewish Leader that Shook History”
Luckily, while the American government had little interest in helping European Jewry, the government of the Third Reich had a keen interest in maintaining good diplomatic relations with the United States and keeping them out of the war. Benjamin Cohen thus contacted diplomat Robert Pell, whom he knew to be friends with German diplomat Helmut Wohlthat, head of Germany’s four-year economic plan. As Cohen suspected, Pell confirmed that Wohlthat was willing to cooperate, seeing the rescue of Rebbe Schneerson as a small price to pay for continued good relations. Pell conveyed this message to Secretary of State Hull, who telegrammed Wohlthat at the U.S. consul in Berlin to approve the extraction of the Rebbe from occupied Poland.
There was just one problem: Poland was under military and not civilian administration. Wohlthat thus appealed to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr or German Army Intelligence Service. Secretly opposed to Nazi ideology, throughout the war Canaris committed numerous acts of internal sabotage and resistance against the regime, including passing vital intelligence to the Allies, helping 500 Jews escape the Netherlands in 1941, engineering the continued neutrality of Francoist Spain, and participating in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Canaris was eventually arrested on July 23, 1944, convicted of treason, and executed by hanging at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on April 9, 1945.
To rescue the Rebbe, Canaris selected Major Ernst Bloch, a highly decorated Abwehr operative. A veteran of the First World War, in the interwar period Bloch served in a commercial branch of military intelligence that spied on visiting businessmen. He was also half-jewish on his father’s side – what in the pseudoscientific Nazi racial hierarchy was known as a mischlinge or “half-breed.” Despite their precarious position within Nazi society, more than 60,000 half-jews (AKA mischlinge first grade) and 90,000 quarter-jews (mischlinge second grade) served in the armed forces of the Third Reich. These included high-ranking officials such as Field Marshal Erhard Milch, head of the Reich Air Ministry or RLM, and amusingly, certain individuals used by the Reich Propaganda Ministry as examples of “ideal Aryans”. However, many important mischlinge like Milch or Bloch were granted official “German Blood Certificates” confirming them to be true Aryans or simply had their Jewish heritage conveniently ignored.
Post Comment