Haavara FAQs: Jews for Sale? By Yehuda Bauer -- A Review

Jews For Sale? By Yehuda Bauer. Buy a copy at Amazon

From A to Z, Mr. Bauer painted Zionists in a much more favorable light than they deserve. Actually, the book is missing so much, plus it contains so many contradictions. Below, we highlight just a few of them:

1. How Zionists obstructed the Evian Conference, which is well documented even on Wikipedia,
2. Zionist fixation on Palestine as the only destination for European Jewish refugees, which American Jews attempted to investigate 40 years ago, and they got canceled. Google "Jan. 3rd, 1983 NYTimes.com: US Panel on Jews" for details,
3. Zionists' stances on the Nuremberg Race Laws and the Kristallnacht pogrom are widely known, especially how they behaved after the Kindertransport when Ben-Gurion wished death to ten thousand Jewish kids because they were saved by the British.
4. What was amazing was how he gave Zionists a free pass on their objections to similar schemes like Haavara, but to countries other than Palestine.
5. No criticism whatsoever of how Zionists objected Rublee-Schacht scheme, although they were executing a similar one simultaneously with the Nazis!
6. Note how Mr. Bauer provided zero details as to why Zionists objected to these schemes (plus what the Warburgs have suggested), especially when JDC (the Joint) attempted to save more Jews but to destinations other than Palestine.
7. What was stunning was how Mr. Bauer downplayed the effect of Haavara on the German economy. Yes, Haavara-based trade accounted for .5% of the total German exports, but he makes it to imply that if the boycott persisted, trade wouldn't have lost billions of RMs (i.e., negative). Nazi archives show how this terrified Nazis, which Mr. Bauer pointed out in the Nazis' chatter on page 19! Just to show you how the boycott terrified Nazis after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Nazis lost 12.5% of their exports in January 1939, which was over 100 million RM per month! This terrified the Nazis!
8. Ms. Porat and Mr. Bauer literally chewed on Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl's reputation and went out on a limb to discredit him (see Chapter 5). Mr. Bauer primarily used the fact that some of his evidence was based on his memories (especially related to Schwalb's letter, who was the Jewish Agency's representative in Geneva), not on primary documentation. YES, primary documents are essential for history's sake, but isn't that too much to ask from the Rabbi who jumped from a cattle train car while being shipped to Auschwitz? Not only Mr. Schwalb's letter was corroborated by Andrej Steiner (from the Working Group, see p. 77) who was cited by Mr. Bauer, but most importantly what was written by Schwaulb was typical of Zionists' opinions at the time especially once compared to Ben-Gurion's infamous hate speech, or Y. Gruenbaum (the head of the so-called Rescue Committee), whom Ms. Porat reported on his antisemitism during the war.
   
   To further discredit the Rabbi, Mr. Bauer defended the Jewish Agency by citing that it was JA who decided to pay half of the down payment ($100,000) allotted for the Europa Plan by early August 1943. On the other hand, Mr. Bauer forgot to say that when the JDC decided to reverse course and pay the ransom anyhow, only then did JA decide to chip in to save face. Meaning, when JA found the Europa Plan was becoming a fait accompli, only then did they decide to participate, and that was after 8 to 9 months of dithering!
9. On several occasions. Mr. Bauer repeated how Slovakian Jews got more than any other Jewish community in terms of aid during WWII. On the other hand, Yehuda failed to share what the allocated budget was for rescue during WWII, and how much of it was actually spent. Once you look at the details, you may fall off your chair. What was spent is a little over half of what was allocated, which was a fraction of what was already donated for rescue. Therefore, almost ZERO dollars came from Zionists' enterprises, which spent close to P£10 million during the war. But when $2 million (P£0.4 million) was asked (by the Working Group) to halt the deportation and extermination (aka, The Europa Plan), they all bulked and pondered where the money would come from (see last paragraph on p. 85) although the so-called Yishuv was awash with cash and profited a lot because of the war efforts who had almost P£45 million; equivalent of $180 million in their cash deposits (see Dina Porat, at page 88).
10. Historians like Yehuda Bauer argue that the Working Group was deceived, claiming the 1942 deportations stopped not because of the initial ransom, but due to internal Slovak politics, bribery of local officials, and Catholic Church intervention. However, this analysis misses the strategic picture. Himmler’s primary objective was never the ransom money itself --a 'paltry' sum for the Reich. His goal was to access the mythical 'World Jewish Power' he believed controlled the governments of America and Great Britain. Ironically, Rabbi Weissmandl understood perfectly that Himmler was chasing something far bigger than cash, a fact even Bauer concedes (see Jews For Sale?, p. 81).
    
    From Himmler’s perspective, the negotiations became a test of this power. When the Working Group --and their interlocutors at the JDC and Jewish Agency-- failed to deliver a small down payment in cash for eight to nine months, they inadvertently signaled to the SS that they were powerless. The rational move would have been to 'test' Himmler’s seriousness by paying immediately. Instead, the Jewish leadership dithered, and when they finally acted, they sent a wire transfer instead of the demanded cash. By respecting Allied banking laws rather than breaking them, they proved to Himmler they did not influence Washington, rendering them useless as a political bridge to the West. If you care, here is Beit-Zv's take on this point.
11. In Chapter 10, we were shocked to discover how Mr. Bauer talked disparagingly of the Bergson Group and the War Refugee Board. It was jaw-dropping how the chapter ended, praising Ben-Gurion's stance, showing how he did everything possible to save the Jews, even to countries other than Palestine, which is a lie. As we have proven earlier, JA's budget during WWII doesn't lie, which he completely ignored.
    
    For those who care for the details, this particular issue (of focusing only on Palestine as the destination for any rescue scheme) was tackled by America's Jewry in early 1983, and set up a commission to investigate this particular issue, but it was quickly nixed. YES, that was two decades before Mr. Bauer published his book!
12. Here is a rule of thumb that has never failed us: when the Jews mention Mufti Haj Amin in any argument, then it is safe to assume he was brought into the picture more like an alibi, actually, more like a distraction. Mr. Bauer kept blaming the Mufti for the case of the Bialystok Children, but when we looked into it, there were five successful separate rescue schemes (two of them he cited) where the destination was Palestine. Why was Mufti's veto decisive only in the case of the Bialystok Children but not the others? We addressed this subject in depth in another section.
13. In Chapter 11, Bauer completely exonerated Rezo Kastner (the head of the Hungarian Kapos) and painted him as helpless. The most striking was that he omitted a couple of important facts: A) It was the Jewish Agency that sent Kastner to defend Kurt Becher (Himmler's aide) at the Nuremberg Trials in 1947. Thus, Kastner didn't do it on his own; the Jewish Agency explicitly asked him to do that! To add more salt to the wound, Bauer spent half of the chapter demonizing Mr. Becher (later became one of the richest men in West Germany after the war), who was saved from the gallows by the Jewish Agency! Nothing was mentioned about the deal to recover some of Ali Baba's stolen treasure! B) Bauer omitted how Kastner, who SNITCHED on Moshe Krausz's scheme that saved almost 40,000 Jews. We have addressed that in another section if you care.
14. Finally, as Mr. Bauer was discussing Nazi plans of removing Europe's Jews to Madagascar in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he lamented how the Nazis ignored the fact that the African island had an indigenous population (p. 58). Of course, no such intellectual courtesy was extended to Palestine (the most important land bridge in human history) since it was empty. "Thank God" for the Jews who bloomed its Negev deserts!