Thursday, May 7, 2015
The End of World War II in Europe: Wartime Letters from Chaim Herzog to Family and Friends
This May we mark the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War in Europe. Last year we published a post on a letter sent in May 1945 by Israel's future president, Lieutenant Chaim (Vivian) Herzog, to his parents, while serving as an intelligence officer in the British army. Here we bring you more of Herzog's wartime letters in English which were collected for the commemorative volume issued by the Archives.
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| Chaim Herzog and his brother Yaakov with their father in Germany, June 1946 Israel State Archives |
In the summer of 1938 Herzog, born in Belfast when his father, Rabbi Isaac (Yitzhak) Herzog, was serving as chief rabbi of Ireland, went to England to study law. When World War II broke out in 1939 he was not conscripted, but after qualifying as a barrister in 1942 he joined the British Army. You can read the letter he sent to his parents and brother Yaacov here. He signed it "Vivian", the name by which he was known in the Army, as Chaim was hard to pronounce.
In June 1944 the allied armies invaded Normandy. Herzog too was sent to France and searched for members of his family who had managed to survive the Holocaust. He wrote to his parents about a visit to them in Paris in November 1944and about his attempts to obtain news of his cousin Annette Goldberg, who died in Auschwitz. In December 1944 he took part in the Allied invasion of Germany and in April 1945 he wrote to his parents from Brussels about celebrating – or rather not celebrating – the Pesach holiday in occupied Germany. Soon afterwards Herzog wrote to his family on "the morning of the first day of peace in Europe" (May 8) after the surrender of the German forces in the Weser-Elbe peninsula.
After the German surrender Herzog joined the British military government, and on 1 January 1946 he wrote to his old friend Yehoshua (Justus) Justman that he had managed to find Justman's relative Ruth, who had survived. In another letter from September 1946 he described celebrating the New Year in the Belsen D.P. campwhich had now become the centre of Jewish life in the British occupied zone. He complained that the German style rabbi sent over from England had failed to rise to the occasion - "Rosh Hashanah before Musaph in a shattered community", and gave a dry sermon, adding in Yiddish "A German [Jew] remains a German."
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| Chaim Herzog and his mother, Rabbanit Sarah Herzog, in Palestine, 1945 Photograph: David Eldan, Government Press Office Collection |
Chaim Herzog reached the rank of major, and the experience and knowledge acquired during his service helped him when he became the head of intelligence in the new Israeli army in 1948, and served again in the post in 1959-1961.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Secret British WWII Intelligence Files in Mandatory Palestine
68 years ago, on September 2, 1945, World War II ended with Japan's surrender. The surrender ceremony took place on the deck of the Battleship Missouri as shown in this clip. (Here's another film of the event in color, but with no sound.)
The fighting in the Far East did not quite hold the attention of the population in British Mandatory Palestine during World War II, however. The German threat, in the figure of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Africa Corps in 1941-42, was more severe, as was the news of the Holocaust in Europe. The vast majority of the volunteers for the British army from the Jewish community in Palestine served during the war in the Mediterranean zone of operations. (Citizens of Mandate territories were not obligated to join the British Army, unlike the citizens of British colonies, and those who volunteered for service were limited to the Mediterranean zone.) But some served in the Far East. This Ha'aretz article mentions two Israel-born soldiers who fell while serving in the Australian Army and two others who were captured in Indonesia during their service in the Royal Air Force. One of them, Abraham Kissin, wrote a book about his experiences in Japanese captivity -- "Captive by the Soldiers of the Mikado," which was published in Hebrew in 1970.
The Israel State Archives possesses, among the documents of the Chief Secretary of the Government of Palestine (Record Group 2), an intelligence document of the British Intelligence Corps in India entitled Who's Who in Japan, 1945. The document is an alphabetical list of high ranking officials and military men in Japan. The list is organized by region (China, Korea, Home Islands etc.). The document also details the various governments in Japan from 1930 onwards.
How did the document come into the possession of the Palestine Government? One can only guess. But it's a very interesting document. According to the opening remarks on its cover, it was regularly updated with information flowing into the Intelligence Center. An example: in the penultimate review from May 1944, there is a mention of the name Kuribayashi, Tadamichi - former commander of the Tokyo Division. In the following document from June 1945, his name no longer appears as he was the commander of the Iwo Jima Island and was killed in May 1945. Kuribayashi was presented as a heroic figure in Clint Eastwood's impressive film, "Letters From Iwo Jima." (The actor who played the character was Ken Watanabe.)
The fighting in the Far East did not quite hold the attention of the population in British Mandatory Palestine during World War II, however. The German threat, in the figure of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Africa Corps in 1941-42, was more severe, as was the news of the Holocaust in Europe. The vast majority of the volunteers for the British army from the Jewish community in Palestine served during the war in the Mediterranean zone of operations. (Citizens of Mandate territories were not obligated to join the British Army, unlike the citizens of British colonies, and those who volunteered for service were limited to the Mediterranean zone.) But some served in the Far East. This Ha'aretz article mentions two Israel-born soldiers who fell while serving in the Australian Army and two others who were captured in Indonesia during their service in the Royal Air Force. One of them, Abraham Kissin, wrote a book about his experiences in Japanese captivity -- "Captive by the Soldiers of the Mikado," which was published in Hebrew in 1970.
 |
| The cover of Kissin's book |
How did the document come into the possession of the Palestine Government? One can only guess. But it's a very interesting document. According to the opening remarks on its cover, it was regularly updated with information flowing into the Intelligence Center. An example: in the penultimate review from May 1944, there is a mention of the name Kuribayashi, Tadamichi - former commander of the Tokyo Division. In the following document from June 1945, his name no longer appears as he was the commander of the Iwo Jima Island and was killed in May 1945. Kuribayashi was presented as a heroic figure in Clint Eastwood's impressive film, "Letters From Iwo Jima." (The actor who played the character was Ken Watanabe.)
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Of Cossacks and Jews: A Curious Letter to Israel's President
We have previously posted content drawn from the diverse and rich archives of the second Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Another item, no less interesting, is the following picture, a reproduction of a larger one entitled "Betrayal of Cossacks at Lienz".
The picture shows British soldiers (Scots, per the Tam o 'Shanter caps) beating a group of civilians as well as unarmed uniformed men, and forcing them to get on the trucks. In the foreground on the left, we can see a poster with the writing: "Better death here than being sent to the SSSR".
This is a picture of an event that took place in Austria on May 28, 1945, just over two weeks after the end of World War II in Europe, in which the British army expelled 32,000 Cossacks of Soviet origin into the hands of the Soviet authorities. The expulsion was carried out as part of the agreements signed between the Allies (mainly the US and the UK) and the Soviet Union at the Tehran (November 1943) the Yalta Conferences (February 1945), in which it was agreed to return all Soviet citizens who were deported by the Nazis to areas under Soviet control. Cossack leaders, Generals Krasnov, Shukro and others, as well as the German General von Panwitz (who aided the Cossacks in the German Army units), were executed and thousands of Cossacks were deported to Siberian labor camps.
The uniqueness of this picture is its address – it was sent to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of Israel. The senders of the picture, according to the assessment of a worker in the archive (who translated the caption beneath the photo from Russian), may have thought they would receive a sympathetic hearing in the state of Israel, an anti-communist country.
This was an odd choice, to say the least. What shared history exists between Jews and Cossacks is a bloody one filled with persistent hatred. One must remember the systematic murder of the Jews of Ukraine and Poland during the Bohdan Khmelnitsky rebellion (1648-9), in which Cossacks massacred more than 300,000 Jews. This event and many other riots, in which Cossacks murdered and abused the Jewish population in Russia, cemented the image of the Cossack as evil and bloodthirsty in the historical memory of the Jewish people. Indeed, Ben-Zvi himself had organized self-defense units in Poltava, his hometown in Russia, in preparation for possible pogroms - pogroms in which the Cossacks were frequent participants.
During World War I and the Russian Civil War, Cossacks stood out for their brutality towards the Jews. Note that in the picture, we can see in the first row three Cossacks wearing German Wehrmacht uniforms. This is because the Cossacks expelled from Lienz to the Soviets were members of the 15th Cossack Corps – a Wehrmacht Unit (although some sources identify them as an SS unit). The 15th Corps was notorious for the atrocities it committed against civilian populations in Yugoslavia and northern Italy. Here you can find more details about Russian Nazi collaborators, from a site dealing with the German armed forces during World War II, including the Cossack units.
On the other hand, the Cossack also had romantic associations in the Jewish imagination. In his book Cossack and Bedouin, historian Prof. Israel Bartal describes a widespread perception among immigrants of the Second Aliyah of the Cossack as a free man, defending his land and protecting it from assailants. As Bartal writes, "The local Israeli fighting for his country was 'translated' into the consciousness of the olim from Eastern Europe to the most feared enemy the Jewish collective memory knew since the terrible slaughter of 1648-1649. This enemy, whose essence was the polar opposite of the traditional Jewish society, was the role model for the lives of the young immigrants!" (Israel Bartal, Cossack and Bedouin. Am Oved publishers 2007, p. 77 – my translation). There are also many songs, translated from Russian, on the heroism of the Cossacks - "On the Banks of the Dnieper ", "On the Steppes of the Don (river)", and others. There is even a Hasidic dance, based on a Cossack dance - Kazak of Chabad.
It doesn't seem those who sent the above picture to President Ben-Zvi were answered. In 1958, just a little more than a decade after the Holocaust, there was probably no place for dialogue between Jews and Cossacks. Today, however, there are signs of Cossacks attempting to find a common language with the Jews in Russia.
The picture shows British soldiers (Scots, per the Tam o 'Shanter caps) beating a group of civilians as well as unarmed uniformed men, and forcing them to get on the trucks. In the foreground on the left, we can see a poster with the writing: "Better death here than being sent to the SSSR".
This is a picture of an event that took place in Austria on May 28, 1945, just over two weeks after the end of World War II in Europe, in which the British army expelled 32,000 Cossacks of Soviet origin into the hands of the Soviet authorities. The expulsion was carried out as part of the agreements signed between the Allies (mainly the US and the UK) and the Soviet Union at the Tehran (November 1943) the Yalta Conferences (February 1945), in which it was agreed to return all Soviet citizens who were deported by the Nazis to areas under Soviet control. Cossack leaders, Generals Krasnov, Shukro and others, as well as the German General von Panwitz (who aided the Cossacks in the German Army units), were executed and thousands of Cossacks were deported to Siberian labor camps.
The uniqueness of this picture is its address – it was sent to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of Israel. The senders of the picture, according to the assessment of a worker in the archive (who translated the caption beneath the photo from Russian), may have thought they would receive a sympathetic hearing in the state of Israel, an anti-communist country.
This was an odd choice, to say the least. What shared history exists between Jews and Cossacks is a bloody one filled with persistent hatred. One must remember the systematic murder of the Jews of Ukraine and Poland during the Bohdan Khmelnitsky rebellion (1648-9), in which Cossacks massacred more than 300,000 Jews. This event and many other riots, in which Cossacks murdered and abused the Jewish population in Russia, cemented the image of the Cossack as evil and bloodthirsty in the historical memory of the Jewish people. Indeed, Ben-Zvi himself had organized self-defense units in Poltava, his hometown in Russia, in preparation for possible pogroms - pogroms in which the Cossacks were frequent participants.
During World War I and the Russian Civil War, Cossacks stood out for their brutality towards the Jews. Note that in the picture, we can see in the first row three Cossacks wearing German Wehrmacht uniforms. This is because the Cossacks expelled from Lienz to the Soviets were members of the 15th Cossack Corps – a Wehrmacht Unit (although some sources identify them as an SS unit). The 15th Corps was notorious for the atrocities it committed against civilian populations in Yugoslavia and northern Italy. Here you can find more details about Russian Nazi collaborators, from a site dealing with the German armed forces during World War II, including the Cossack units.
On the other hand, the Cossack also had romantic associations in the Jewish imagination. In his book Cossack and Bedouin, historian Prof. Israel Bartal describes a widespread perception among immigrants of the Second Aliyah of the Cossack as a free man, defending his land and protecting it from assailants. As Bartal writes, "The local Israeli fighting for his country was 'translated' into the consciousness of the olim from Eastern Europe to the most feared enemy the Jewish collective memory knew since the terrible slaughter of 1648-1649. This enemy, whose essence was the polar opposite of the traditional Jewish society, was the role model for the lives of the young immigrants!" (Israel Bartal, Cossack and Bedouin. Am Oved publishers 2007, p. 77 – my translation). There are also many songs, translated from Russian, on the heroism of the Cossacks - "On the Banks of the Dnieper ", "On the Steppes of the Don (river)", and others. There is even a Hasidic dance, based on a Cossack dance - Kazak of Chabad.
It doesn't seem those who sent the above picture to President Ben-Zvi were answered. In 1958, just a little more than a decade after the Holocaust, there was probably no place for dialogue between Jews and Cossacks. Today, however, there are signs of Cossacks attempting to find a common language with the Jews in Russia.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
The End of World War II in Europe: Wartime Letters from Chaim Herzog to Family and Friends
This May we mark the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War in Europe. Last year we published a post on a letter sent in May 1945 by Israel's future president, Lieutenant Chaim (Vivian) Herzog, to his parents, while serving as an intelligence officer in the British army. Here we bring you more of Herzog's wartime letters in English which were collected for the commemorative volume issued by the Archives.
|
| Chaim Herzog and his brother Yaakov with their father in Germany, June 1946 Israel State Archives |
In the summer of 1938 Herzog, born in Belfast when his father, Rabbi Isaac (Yitzhak) Herzog, was serving as chief rabbi of Ireland, went to England to study law. When World War II broke out in 1939 he was not conscripted, but after qualifying as a barrister in 1942 he joined the British Army. You can read the letter he sent to his parents and brother Yaacov here. He signed it "Vivian", the name by which he was known in the Army, as Chaim was hard to pronounce.
In June 1944 the allied armies invaded Normandy. Herzog too was sent to France and searched for members of his family who had managed to survive the Holocaust. He wrote to his parents about a visit to them in Paris in November 1944and about his attempts to obtain news of his cousin Annette Goldberg, who died in Auschwitz. In December 1944 he took part in the Allied invasion of Germany and in April 1945 he wrote to his parents from Brussels about celebrating – or rather not celebrating – the Pesach holiday in occupied Germany. Soon afterwards Herzog wrote to his family on "the morning of the first day of peace in Europe" (May 8) after the surrender of the German forces in the Weser-Elbe peninsula.
After the German surrender Herzog joined the British military government, and on 1 January 1946 he wrote to his old friend Yehoshua (Justus) Justman that he had managed to find Justman's relative Ruth, who had survived. In another letter from September 1946 he described celebrating the New Year in the Belsen D.P. campwhich had now become the centre of Jewish life in the British occupied zone. He complained that the German style rabbi sent over from England had failed to rise to the occasion - "Rosh Hashanah before Musaph in a shattered community", and gave a dry sermon, adding in Yiddish "A German [Jew] remains a German."
|
| Chaim Herzog and his mother, Rabbanit Sarah Herzog, in Palestine, 1945 Photograph: David Eldan, Government Press Office Collection |
Chaim Herzog reached the rank of major, and the experience and knowledge acquired during his service helped him when he became the head of intelligence in the new Israeli army in 1948, and served again in the post in 1959-1961.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
King David Hotel bombing - 67 years later, still a controversial issue
67 years ago, on July 22, 1946, the Irgun blew up the luxurious King David Hotelin Jerusalem. Housed at the Hotel was the Chief Secretariat of the British Mandate government (essentially, its prime minister).
The bombing was part of the operations of the "Jewish Resistance Movement" – the alliance of the paramilitary organizations Haganah, Irgun (National Military Organization) and Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) in the British Mandate of Palestine. The movement was established in October 1945 by the Jewish Agency, and existed between the years 1945 and 1946, coordinating attacks against the British authority. The King David bombing cost the lives of 91 people (British, Jews, Arabs and other nationalities) and was the cause of the breakup of the Jewish Resistance movement.
There is a long-simmering controversy over whether warning was given to the British before the bombing. The British always denied that such warning was provided--especially Sir John Shaw, the Chief Secretary, who was blamed for ignoring the warning--while the Irgun, and especially Irgun member Adina Hai-Nisan, insisted that it was. Hai-Nisan claimed she called the hotel switchboard 30 minutes before the explosion. During the early 80's, Israeli television produced the much acclaimed documentary "The Pillar of Fire" cataloging the history of Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel. In chapter 16, Adina Nissan told her story opposite Sir John Shaw (12:30-17:30, Hebrew, no subtitles).
Here are some relatively unknown facts about the King David Hotel Bombing:
1) In 2011, Dr. Eldad Harouvi published his doctorate thesis in a book calledPalestine Investigated: The Story of the Palestine CID, 1920-1948 (Hebrew only).
Haruvi, the director of the Palmach House Archive, studied the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) documents in the Hagana Archive in Tel Aviv as part of his doctoral thesis. This collection is actually a copy of the original CID archive, which was transferred to Egypt in May 1948. The Hagana's intelligence service, known as the SHAI (Information Service in Hebrew acronym) managed to photocopy it several days before it was shipped out of Israel. The copy was kept by the ISA (Israel's Security Agency, known by the Hebrew acronym SHABAK) until 1991, when it was transferred to the Hagana archive.
In his book, Harouvi reveals some interesting facts: First, the CID had intelligence showing the Hotel as a possible target for attack by the Irgun in December 1945 – 6 months prior to the attack. The CID asked to raise security in the hotel, including putting armed soldiers at the 'Regence' restaurant at the entrance of the hotel. The Chief Secretary refused to consider these suggestions, with the justification that there were not many places for recreation and fun in Palestine, and he did not want to foreclose another. He continued to refuse to take action (or even to pass on the information to the High Commissioner of Palestine) when the CID approached him again with newer information on the attack plan (the CID had the plan of attack, but did not know exactly when it would be carried out).
Second, another fact that is not common knowledge is that the Irgun carried out a diversion bombing minutes after the bombs were planted in the King David Hotel, in which a wagon with explosives was blown outside shops next to the hotel. The CID's assessment was that this second bombing (which broke windows, but did not hurt anyone) was intended to cause panic and encourage evacuation of the building. One of the CID officers Harouvi interviewed for his book flatly blames Shaw for the death of so many, since he could have evacuated the building on time (pages 293-297).
2) One of the people killed in the bombing was Jeffrey Walsh, the Economic Adviser of the British government in Palestine. Walsh, one of the most senior officials killed, left a large number of files and documents that were scanned and may be viewed on the Israel State Archives web site. The record contains material on different aspects of the economy in British Mandate Palestine during the Second World War. Walsh was also Controller of Food, a wartime assignment. In 1940, the British Palestine government formed the War Supply Board--a civilian command and control body for handling economic and supply problems during the War. The British believed that they would be unable to regularly supply the Middle East (that is – their colonies and lands under their rule) during wartime, and formed different control bodies for non-military supply. The headquarters for these bodies were based in Cairo. East Africa, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, and the Indian Subcontinent all had boards dealing with food, medical supply, industry (light & heavy), etc. Walsh, who headed these efforts in Mandatory Palestine, was buried in the Mt. Zion graveyard together with the other British individuals killed in the blast.
One of the files of the Food Controller contains a study on Palestine's food problems. It is entitled Tantalus, probably after the mythological figure denied food and drink by the gods. Inside this dry, bureaucratic document, someone decided to lighten up and integrate cartoons with quotations from the study. One of them shows a lion and an African warrior, and is perhaps meant to be a little joke on Walsh – a former official in the Tanganyika colonial government. Here are two other cartoons – oneconnected to the War and another one showing the American Wild West.
3. Another British casualty of the bombing was Brigadier Peter Lockwood Smith-Dorrien, head of the Commerce and Industry Department. While his name does not ring a bell these days, it was very familiar in Britain, as he was the son of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, one of the more controversial British generals during the First World War. General Smith-Dorrien had a long and colorful career in the British Army, including being one of the 50 British survivors of the Battle of Isandlwana--where the Zulus repelled a British invasion into their lands (Monty Python used it as the basis for one of their skits in the Meaning of Life)--and the war in Sudan at the end of the 19th century and in the Boer War (1899-1902). Peter Smith-Dorrien commanded a regiment during the failed British mission in Greece in 1941, and managed to evade capture by escaping to Crete on a boat with British and New Zealand soldiers, as described here. His elder brother was killed in Italy in 1944. All of the Smith-Dorriens served in the "Sherwood Foresters" regiment, named after Robin Hood and his merry men.
4. The bombing caused great damage to the Mandate government's archive, especially the Chief Secretariat's archive (the British didn't have a central archive, only departmental archives). Here is a cover of a file with a comment on it: "Original lost on 22.7.46." The British tried to reconstruct the files lost or recovered from the debris (some, I believe, still contain dust from the destruction of the building!).The bombing of the King David Hotel is one of the reasons for the absence of many British files from the Israel State Archives collections. The other reasons include planned destruction by the British before leaving Palestine in May 1948; partial destruction during the bombing campaign by Jewish underground movements (especially immigration files); partial destruction during Israel's War of Independence; and some ruin due to neglect. (We believe that the Egyptians may hold part of the Gaza district files, while the Jordanians hold files from the Samaria & Jerusalem districts, as well as other files from different departments.) In one file that did survive, we can find the Jerusalem sub-district coroner's summary on the cause of death of those killed in the King David Hotel bombing.
 |
| The King David Hotel after the bombing (Wikipedia) |
There is a long-simmering controversy over whether warning was given to the British before the bombing. The British always denied that such warning was provided--especially Sir John Shaw, the Chief Secretary, who was blamed for ignoring the warning--while the Irgun, and especially Irgun member Adina Hai-Nisan, insisted that it was. Hai-Nisan claimed she called the hotel switchboard 30 minutes before the explosion. During the early 80's, Israeli television produced the much acclaimed documentary "The Pillar of Fire" cataloging the history of Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel. In chapter 16, Adina Nissan told her story opposite Sir John Shaw (12:30-17:30, Hebrew, no subtitles).
Here are some relatively unknown facts about the King David Hotel Bombing:
1) In 2011, Dr. Eldad Harouvi published his doctorate thesis in a book calledPalestine Investigated: The Story of the Palestine CID, 1920-1948 (Hebrew only).
Haruvi, the director of the Palmach House Archive, studied the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) documents in the Hagana Archive in Tel Aviv as part of his doctoral thesis. This collection is actually a copy of the original CID archive, which was transferred to Egypt in May 1948. The Hagana's intelligence service, known as the SHAI (Information Service in Hebrew acronym) managed to photocopy it several days before it was shipped out of Israel. The copy was kept by the ISA (Israel's Security Agency, known by the Hebrew acronym SHABAK) until 1991, when it was transferred to the Hagana archive.
In his book, Harouvi reveals some interesting facts: First, the CID had intelligence showing the Hotel as a possible target for attack by the Irgun in December 1945 – 6 months prior to the attack. The CID asked to raise security in the hotel, including putting armed soldiers at the 'Regence' restaurant at the entrance of the hotel. The Chief Secretary refused to consider these suggestions, with the justification that there were not many places for recreation and fun in Palestine, and he did not want to foreclose another. He continued to refuse to take action (or even to pass on the information to the High Commissioner of Palestine) when the CID approached him again with newer information on the attack plan (the CID had the plan of attack, but did not know exactly when it would be carried out).
Second, another fact that is not common knowledge is that the Irgun carried out a diversion bombing minutes after the bombs were planted in the King David Hotel, in which a wagon with explosives was blown outside shops next to the hotel. The CID's assessment was that this second bombing (which broke windows, but did not hurt anyone) was intended to cause panic and encourage evacuation of the building. One of the CID officers Harouvi interviewed for his book flatly blames Shaw for the death of so many, since he could have evacuated the building on time (pages 293-297).
2) One of the people killed in the bombing was Jeffrey Walsh, the Economic Adviser of the British government in Palestine. Walsh, one of the most senior officials killed, left a large number of files and documents that were scanned and may be viewed on the Israel State Archives web site. The record contains material on different aspects of the economy in British Mandate Palestine during the Second World War. Walsh was also Controller of Food, a wartime assignment. In 1940, the British Palestine government formed the War Supply Board--a civilian command and control body for handling economic and supply problems during the War. The British believed that they would be unable to regularly supply the Middle East (that is – their colonies and lands under their rule) during wartime, and formed different control bodies for non-military supply. The headquarters for these bodies were based in Cairo. East Africa, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, and the Indian Subcontinent all had boards dealing with food, medical supply, industry (light & heavy), etc. Walsh, who headed these efforts in Mandatory Palestine, was buried in the Mt. Zion graveyard together with the other British individuals killed in the blast.
 |
| Jeffrey Walsh, Economic Adviser and Food Controller |
3. Another British casualty of the bombing was Brigadier Peter Lockwood Smith-Dorrien, head of the Commerce and Industry Department. While his name does not ring a bell these days, it was very familiar in Britain, as he was the son of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, one of the more controversial British generals during the First World War. General Smith-Dorrien had a long and colorful career in the British Army, including being one of the 50 British survivors of the Battle of Isandlwana--where the Zulus repelled a British invasion into their lands (Monty Python used it as the basis for one of their skits in the Meaning of Life)--and the war in Sudan at the end of the 19th century and in the Boer War (1899-1902). Peter Smith-Dorrien commanded a regiment during the failed British mission in Greece in 1941, and managed to evade capture by escaping to Crete on a boat with British and New Zealand soldiers, as described here. His elder brother was killed in Italy in 1944. All of the Smith-Dorriens served in the "Sherwood Foresters" regiment, named after Robin Hood and his merry men.
4. The bombing caused great damage to the Mandate government's archive, especially the Chief Secretariat's archive (the British didn't have a central archive, only departmental archives). Here is a cover of a file with a comment on it: "Original lost on 22.7.46." The British tried to reconstruct the files lost or recovered from the debris (some, I believe, still contain dust from the destruction of the building!).The bombing of the King David Hotel is one of the reasons for the absence of many British files from the Israel State Archives collections. The other reasons include planned destruction by the British before leaving Palestine in May 1948; partial destruction during the bombing campaign by Jewish underground movements (especially immigration files); partial destruction during Israel's War of Independence; and some ruin due to neglect. (We believe that the Egyptians may hold part of the Gaza district files, while the Jordanians hold files from the Samaria & Jerusalem districts, as well as other files from different departments.) In one file that did survive, we can find the Jerusalem sub-district coroner's summary on the cause of death of those killed in the King David Hotel bombing.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
A Palestinian German Wishes to Return Home
OK, let's start with the embarrassing part: I can't say where today's document comes from. The first lecture in Archives 101 is about the extreme importance of provenance, and about always registering the file number of every document. In spite of which, I can't name the provenance of today's document. I found it in a pile of stuff someone once collected from various record groups to use in some internal discussion about something; once the discussion had happend the documents were set aside until someone else showed me this one as a curiosity. Which means I can't even prove it's authentic, though I have no doubt.
It's a letter written by Ernst Appinger on the 15th of December 1946. Appinger was a German POW being held in Velika Gorica, then in Yugoslavia and now in Croatia. Expecting soon to be discharged, he wrote to the "Chief Immigration Officer" in Jerusalem:
In any case, no matter how tidy the historical narratives we sometimes tell ourselves, the reality is always messier.
It's a letter written by Ernst Appinger on the 15th of December 1946. Appinger was a German POW being held in Velika Gorica, then in Yugoslavia and now in Croatia. Expecting soon to be discharged, he wrote to the "Chief Immigration Officer" in Jerusalem:
I was born in Haifa Palestine on the 1st of January 1910 and lived there till the 30th of August 1939, when I was forced by the German Counsul to leave my home. My parents were born in Palestine too. We were never members of a political party or organization.I have no idea what answer Appinger recieved, but it's highly unlikely the British authorities allowed him back. Clearly, he was a descendant of the Templar Society, a group of Germans who emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in the 1860s and 1870s, and settled outside Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem. (Yes, outside. Today the homes they built are all near the centers of town, but that was then). They came for religious reasons, and indeed the first two generations most likely were not affiliated with any political parties; the third, into which Appinger was born, had a tendency to join the Nazi party, but of course that doesn't tell us anything about Appinger himself. At the beginning of WWII, most of them were detained as enemy aliens by the British authorities and eventually deported, although a few may have hung on for another few years. The State of Israel, which hadn't existed at the time of the deportations, eventually paid restitution for their property. RG 67 in the ISA contains the documentation of the German consulate, which dealt with the consular matters of these far-flung German citizens.
I hope to be dismissed soon and don't know where to go. May I go back to Palestine? Were the Germans of Palestine expropriated? May I become a Palestine citizen? I thank you in advance for your kind informations [sic] and hope that there is a way for me to go back to my home, Palestine.
In any case, no matter how tidy the historical narratives we sometimes tell ourselves, the reality is always messier.
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