Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac - British Obstruction in Rescue Attempts Summary: British refuse to aid Jewish children and other refugees, in order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA Keywords: Balfour,Downey,Long Archive/File: places/usa/conspiracy.004 Last-modified: 1993/06/23 Perl discusses the British White Paper, which was published on May 17, 1939, and which abrogated the British obligation to provide a Jewish homeland in Palestine (i.e. the Balfour Declaration). The paper did, however, provide for the immigration of 75,000 Jews between 1939 and 1944, although the British, as we shall see, did everything in their power to prevent this. "...Typical examples of this were the refusal to save thousands of children from the eminent danger of murder. In 1943, when the Germans wanted to exchange German civilians who had been interned by the British at the start of the war for 5,000 Jewish children in German controlled lands, the British refused that offer on the grounds that those children were not citizens of the British Empire. (Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 721) A year later, in 1944, the Joint Distribution Committee [a major Jewish welfare organization concerned with resettlement] persuaded the Swiss to accept 5,000 Jewish children from France against guarantees that these children would leave Switzerland at the end of the war. However, the British accomplices to the Holocaust refused to promise to grant those children entrance certificates to Palestine valid _after the war's end_ even though, according to the White Paper, 75,000 were admissible. [Long-Campbell talk January 11, 1944, 840.48, Refugees 5017 ASD] In the case of the children, the British could not even apply their standard argument that admission would involve security risks for the country because the Germans used such opportunities to smuggle spies in with the refugees. This argument, which made those still insisting on rescue action appear unpatriotic, was entirely fraudulent. We have pointed out before that for a German spy, there was hardly a place more likely to lead to discovery than in a group of Jewish refugees. Jews knew each other's ways and experiences, their customs and ways of reacting. They had mutual friends or acquaintances and were, as people in danger always are, suspicious themselves. Besides, in every country there were numerous natives who admired Hitler and who could provide much more information and were, for the Germans, incomparably more reliable than any Jew might have been. We are calling that security argument fraudulent because the Downies and Breckinridge Longs and others who regularly invoked it in order to scuttle rescue measures _knew_ that it was false. There was a point at which even the Foreign Office complained that the security argument was regularly resorted to by the Colonial Office as well as by the High Commissioner for Palestine, yet when they were requested to name a case in which German agents had been brought to the Middle East posing as illegal Jewish immigrants, not one such case could be produced. It was one thing by Britain to declare the gates of Palestine barred (except for the pittance of certificates which it was ready to issue while making certain that Palestine could not become a Jewish state), and it was quite another matter to keep the doors really so tightly blocked. People who see their relatives and friends perish and know that it is only a question of time before they will be next, do not ask whether it is 'illegal' to save one's life. This is true in any case but the more so if the one who proclaimed the law is viewed as an illegal occupier, a power that tries to steal the land which not only meant saving one's individual life, but also rescue for the persecuted, hunted, and massacred group to which one belongs. Fighting that 'illegal' escape to Palestine brought the plotters in the Colonial Office together with those in the Foreign Office, and they called for the armed forces to implement their cruel policy. In a House of Commons debate on July 20, 1939, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, had to admit that a 'Division of Destroyers' supported by five smaller launches was being employed to ascertain that those who had escaped Hitler did not escape the British capture as they approached Palestine. [PRO House of Commons Debates, July 20, 1939] Those who had fled the German destroyer and his cohorts were now hunted down by four destroyers of His Majesty's Royal Navy: HMS Hero (flagship), HMS Havock, HMS Henward, and HMS Hotspur. These were among Britain's newest and fastest fighting ships -- all four commissioned just two years earlier. At least one other destroyer, the Ivanhoe was also used in that lopsided warfare. Those conspiring in London to block the saving gate of Palestine really meant business. The ships had been authorized to open fire 'at or into any ship that was suspected of having illegal immigrants on board and that did not obey the warning to stand by. [Palestine Gazette, Extraordinary Issue, April 27, 1939] They had been authorized to shoot, and shoot they did. Thus it happened that on the very first day of World War II, on September 1, 1939, while German dive bombers rained death on Warsaw and a dozen other Polish cities, His Majesty's ship Lorna opened fire on a rickety overcrowded refugee ship, Tiger Hill, as she approached the Palestine Coast to unload her cargo of misery, 1417 survivors of man's inhumanity against man. She did not, could not, heed the order to turn back toward Germany. The encounter between HMS Lorna and the Tiger Hill ended with a victory for the Royal Navy. Killed in the encounter were Dr. Robert Schneider, a young man who had been a physician in Czechoslovakia before he had been deprived of human dignity and all possessions; and Zwi Binder, a young pioneer from Poland whose hopes to till the land peacefully in a Kibbutz died within sight of the land he had been longing for years to reach. The first two persons killed by British bullets during World War II were not Germans but Jewish escapees from the German hell." (Perl, 85-87) Work Cited Perl, William R. The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy of Genocide. New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989
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