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.
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| 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.
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