Books
Lubavitcher
Lubavitcher
BOOK REVIEW
Review by NORMAN LEBRECHT
Sat 22 Jan 2005
RESCUED FROM THE REICH
BY BRYAN MARK RIGG
Yale, £18
JUST WHEN YOU thought the Second World War had no more secrets, along
comes a book that blows a crater in the ramparts of received opinion.
The American military historian Bryan Mark Rigg has breached the walls
once before in Hitler's Jewish Soldiers (Kansas, 2002), which showed
that hundreds of German servicemen had at least one Jewish grandparent
and were therefore, by Nazi definition, social outcasts who would have
been destined for the death camps. They donned uniform to save their
lives, often with the connivance of senior officers. Such regimented
flouting of the Nuremberg Laws suggests a wider moral ambivalence than
previously suspected within the Wehrmacht.
Out of Rigg's researches now comes a story of such unlikeliness that
I kept rubbing my eyes with incredulity. When the Germans invaded
Poland in 1939, some 3.3 million Jews were trapped. Among them was
Joseph Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, hereditary leader of a
Hassidic sect whose political influence greatly outweighed its modest
membership.
Schneersohn, 56, had been jailed in the Soviet Union for preaching
religion and expelled. He migrated to Latvia, extending his educational
activities to Poland. Disabled by MS, heart disease and a stroke, he
could barely walk. The outbreak of war found him in the country resort
of Otwock, 30 miles south of Warsaw. He dispatched six followers to
Riga to seek help and proceeded to Warsaw. When the city fell, he went
into hiding.
The Latvians beseeched their Lubavitch brethren in America to extricate
the Rebbe, who had once been a guest of President Hoover at the White
House. The State Department was unsympathetic but an official was found
who had links with a member of Hermann Goering's team in Berlin.
Helmut Wohlthat, an avid Nazi, had organised the "aryanisation" of
Jewish businesses in Germany in 1938, but he believed it was in
Germany's interest to keep America neutral, if necessary by such
gestures as the gift of a fugitive Jewish leader.
Wohlthat called Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, maverick head of the Abwehr
military intelligence, who kept several men of Jewish origin on his
staff. Canaris nominated Major Ernst Bloch to search for and rescue the
Rebbe from the ruins of Warsaw. Bloch, son of a Jewish doctor, had been
disfigured by a bayonet thrust at Ypres and decorated with two Iron
Crosses. An economics expert, he was so useful to German foreign
intelligence that Hitler signed a certificate declaring him a
pure-blooded German. In the Third Reich, you couldn't get more kosher
than that.
Bloch recruited two more half-Jews and a Polish speaker and set out for
Warsaw. It took him weeks to penetrate the Jewish community and meet
the Rebbe. When he was finally granted audience, the Rebbe demanded
safe passage for 12 followers and his entire library. Bloch explained
that they would be lucky to get the humans past SS roadblocks.
He somehow horse-carted the Rebbe's party out of the city and onto a
train to Berlin, from where they were transferred to Riga. After a
delay for the Rebbe's mother to undergo an operation, they left
Latvia by ship two days before the Soviet invasion and reached American
safety in what Lubavitchers were taught to regard as a heaven-sent
miracle.
Bloch, sacked by the Gestapo in 1944, died in the defence of Berlin.
Canaris was murdered. Lubavitch keeps shtoom on the details of its
Rebbe's escape. Rigg unearthed two unorthodox sources of information
- the sons of Ernst Bloch and a survivor of the power struggle that
followed Schneersohn's death in 1950.
Two sons-in-law fought for the Rebbe's crown. Menachem Mendel
Schneersohn was the winner. His rival, Samarius Gourary, left the
movement but his dying son gave Rigg the full story. Menachem Mendel
Schneersohn achieved world renown, ordering Israeli politicians to
resist territorial concessions and encouraging supporters to acclaim
him as the Messiah. Lubavitch, based in Brooklyn, is now politically
the most influential of all Jewish organisations. Had the sixth Rebbe
died in Poland, the movement would not have survived.
The only lacuna one regrets in this extraordinary book is the absence
of a record of the whispered conversations between Bloch, the
half-Jewish Nazi, and the crippled, other-worldly Rebbe. It's the
stuff that immortal plays are made of.
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