Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART I THE MAKING OF THE MULTIPLE TRAP
- PART II THE RESCUE DEBATE, THE MACRO PICTURE, AND THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
- PART III THE SELF-DEFEATING MECHANISM OF THE RESCUE EFFORTS
- PART IV THE BRAND–GROSZ MISSIONS WITHIN THE LARGER PICTURE OF THE WAR AND THEIR RAMIFICATIONS
- 25 The Zionist Initiatives
- 26 Rescue, Allied Intelligence, and the SS
- 27 Hungarian Rescue Deals in the Eyes of the Allies
- 28 How the Missions Were Born
- 29 The Demise of a Rescue Mission
- 30 Open and Secret War Schemes and Realities
- 31 The WRB's Own Reports: OWI's Reservations
- PART V THE END OF THE FINAL SOLUTION: BACK TO HOSTAGE-TAKING TACTICS
- Epilogue: Self-Traps: The OSS and Kasztner at Nuremberg
- Notes on Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
30 - Open and Secret War Schemes and Realities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART I THE MAKING OF THE MULTIPLE TRAP
- PART II THE RESCUE DEBATE, THE MACRO PICTURE, AND THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
- PART III THE SELF-DEFEATING MECHANISM OF THE RESCUE EFFORTS
- PART IV THE BRAND–GROSZ MISSIONS WITHIN THE LARGER PICTURE OF THE WAR AND THEIR RAMIFICATIONS
- 25 The Zionist Initiatives
- 26 Rescue, Allied Intelligence, and the SS
- 27 Hungarian Rescue Deals in the Eyes of the Allies
- 28 How the Missions Were Born
- 29 The Demise of a Rescue Mission
- 30 Open and Secret War Schemes and Realities
- 31 The WRB's Own Reports: OWI's Reservations
- PART V THE END OF THE FINAL SOLUTION: BACK TO HOSTAGE-TAKING TACTICS
- Epilogue: Self-Traps: The OSS and Kasztner at Nuremberg
- Notes on Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Before and after their direct involvement with rescue problems as they presented themselves upon Brand's arrival, the Jewish Agency's Political Department under Moshe Shertok was involved in other activities related to rescue and the war effort and the old dream of establishing a “Jewish army” in the ranks of Allied forces. A “Jewish Brigade Group,” which Churchill finally authorized with Roosevelt's consent, was created not before September 1944, when several Jewish regiments in the British Army – plus more volunteers – were given the much desired status of a separate Jewish fighting unit deployed on the Italian front.
Since late in 1942, the Yishuv had maintained a channel open to British SOE and to the regional A Force under Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, working within the British Army's MI9 organization and not without trouble for him in London. Several members of the Hagana and the Zionist youth movements from Europe were trained as partisans to be dropped into occupied Europe.
Several among them, including women such as Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian-born Labor Zionist poet, were trained by the British for the mission not without inner conflicts, as some of them refused to accept British authority. The British themselves finally endorsed the idea, not without a typical remark made by Brigadier Iltyd Clayton, the Chief Political Officer in the British area HQ, that their departure would make these Zionist activists pursue their aims elsewhere rather than in Palestine. The “paratroopers” were dropped as regular British commandos in Yugoslavia and Rumania.
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- Information
- Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews , pp. 262 - 270Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004