The Bergson Group, America, and the Holocaust: A Previously Unpublished Interview with Hillel Kook / Peter Bergson.

Why did we respond the way we did? The question should be: why didn't the others. We responded as a human and as a Jew should.

Hillel Kook, 1973

Introduction

Hillel Kook, born in 1915 in Lithuania, moved with his family to Palestine when he was a child. Before he was twenty, he had become an active member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a nationalist Jewish armed underground that was strongly influenced by the militant Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky. During 1938 and 1939, Kook worked in Poland for the Irgun, organizing the emigration of Jews from Poland to Palestine, in violation of British restrictions on Jewish immigration there. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 halted his activities in Poland, and Kook, at Jabotinsky's suggestion, went to the United States, arriving in 1940. A few other Irgunists who had been working in Europe also moved to the United States, joining one member who was already there.(1)

Over the next several years, this group of ten men constituted a small, American-based wing of the Irgun. They did not conduct underground activities in the United States, however, and throughout the war they were almost completely isolated from the Irgun in Palestine. Kook, who was the leader, adopted the name of Peter H. Bergson while in the United States. Consequently, these men and the broader movements they initiated were referred to as the Bergson group or the Bergsonites.

In 1939, before Kook's arrival, the first tiny Irgun delegation to the United States had established an organization called American Friends of a Jewish Palestine. The original objectives were to raise money for arms for the Irgun and to help fund its program of moving Jews from Europe to Palestine. By mid-1940 the expanding war had stopped most Irgun activities in Europe and had severed the connections between Palestine and the group in the United States. Accordingly, Kook and his followers shifted the focus to plans to press for a Jewish army to fight in the war against Germany. In December 1941, with their ideas more fully crystallized, they replaced the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine with a new organization, the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.

The Committee for a Jewish Army sought to exert pressure on the American and British governments to permit the formation of an independent Jewish army, based in Palestine, which would fight side by side with the other Allied armies under the Allied command. Its ranks would include Palestinian Jews, stateless Jewish refugees from Axis Europe, and Jews from nonbelligerent nations. Jews from America, Britain, or other Allied countries were expected to join the forces of their own nations.

An independent Jewish army would enable Jews, the people most victimized by Hitler, to fight back in their own units, under their own flag and leadership. In late 1941 and for much of 1942, the threat of German North African forces to Suez and the nearby Palestine Jewish community underscored the appeal and the logic of the proposal. Such a Jewish army would be immediately valuable in holding the Middle East; it could also permit transfer of some Allied forces from that region to other fronts.(2)

The Committee for a Jewish Army, through its publicity efforts, especially full-page newspaper advertisements, through lobbying Congressmen and government officials, and through the support of many celebrities such as writers Ben Hecht and Pierre van Paassen, succeeded in attracting substantial support, Jewish and non-Jewish. In the process, it developed a very effective organization and many valuable contacts. Then, in late November 1942, when the news of Germany's systematic extermination of the European Jews became known, the Army Committee rapidly changed its course.

The new approach was evident within ten days, in a large advertisement the committee placed in the New York Times. It focused attention on the extermination reports and pressed for government rescue measures. From that point on, the Army Committee centered its efforts on building public pressure for rescue action and lobbying members of Congress and administration officials to create support for government rescue steps. Although the Jewish army goal remained, the rescue issue now held top priority.

The Bergson group's rescue campaign, including the striking pageant "We Will Never Die," continued for several months under the aegis of the Committee for a Jewish Army. But responding to the failed Bermuda Conference on Refugees of April 1943, the Army Committee convened another conference, aimed at doing what should have been done at Bermuda--bringing experts together to seek all possible ways to save European Jews. This Emergency Conference, held in New York City in July 1943, was supported by people of many different political views, including New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, labor leaders William Green and Philip Murray, journalists William Randolph Hearst and William Allen White, and former President Herbert Hoover. Out of the conference came the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The driving force in the new committee, as had been the case with the Army Committee, was the Bergson group.

The Emergency Committee intensified the earlier campaign of national publicity and redoubled the Army Committee's earlier lobbying efforts. In August and September of 1943, the frequency of the large newspaper advertisements was increased, while at the same time William Randolph Hearst ordered the thirty-four newspapers in his chain to print a series of editorials advocating the Emergency Committee's plans. In October, during the High Holydays, the Emergency Committee organized a pilgrimage of 400 Orthodox rabbis who marched in Washington to call for rescue. By early November, the Bergsonites' lobbying efforts in Congress had won powerful backing and the group made its most crucial move. A resolution was introduced in both houses of Congress calling on President Roosevelt to create a government rescue commission to act immediately to save the remaining Jews of Europe. Committee hearings were held on the Rescue Resolution, and overwhelming support built up in both houses, despite opposition from the State Department and the established American Zionist organizations.

In January 1944, as the Rescue Resolution was coming to a climax in Congress, a series of events involving the State Department and the Treasury Department was nearing a crisis point. Over the previous several months, in a sequence of developments unconnected to the activities of the Bergson organizations, Treasury Department officials had learned that the State Department not only had done virtually nothing for rescue but had even impeded the rescue efforts that some American Jewish organizations were attempting on their own. Treasury officials also discovered that the State Department had quietly cut the use of the immigration quotas to less than ten percent, had taken steps in early 1943 to stop the transmission of Holocaust information from Europe, and had delivered altered documentation to the Treasury Department in an effort to cover up the information cutoff. The Treasury officials conveyed these and other findings to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in a carefully documented eighteen-page report entitled "Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews."

Morgenthau carried the information to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt, recognizing that a nasty scandal was imminent and realizing that the State Department's record would be debated within days when the Rescue Resolution was slated to go to the floor of Congress, decided to head off the impending crisis. He accepted Morgenthau's recommendation that he establish a government rescue agency by executive order and charge it with doing all that was possible, consistent with the war effort, to save European Jews. The new agency, formed on January 22, 1944, was named the War Refugee Board.

The War Refugee Board represented a major change in the previously abysmal American policy. Despite the lateness of the hour and the very limited support actually given to it by President Roosevelt and his administration, the Board ultimately helped to save the lives of about 200,000 Jews and at least 20,000 non-Jews. The essential role of Hillel Kook and the rest of the Bergson group in bringing the War Refugee Board into existence was clearly acknowledged a few weeks later in private Treasury Department staff meetings. In the words of Henry Morgenthau, Jr.: "After all, the thing that made it possible to get the President really to act on this thing--we are talking here among ourselves--was ... the resolution ... to form this kind of a War Refugee Committee." And again, "You know about the Resolution in the House and in the Senate by which we forced the President to appoint a Committee."(3) The Emergency Committee worked closely with the War Refugee Board throughout the rest of the war. And it continued its efforts to publicize the European Jewish catastrophe and to press the government to take further steps for rescue.

Throughout their existence, the Committee for a Jewish Army and the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe encountered persistent opposition from American Jewish organizations. Even though the Bergsonites were ardent Zionists themselves, the established American Zionist groups were especially strong in their animosity. But the Zionists were not the only Jewish organizations to attack the Bergson group. Charges came from many sides: claims that the Bergsonites had no mandate or authorization from the Jewish public; that their actions were irresponsible and sensationalist; that they misused the large funds they collected; and that the strident tone of their actions and newspaper advertising invited increased anti-Semitism.

During 1944, the attacks increased, especially after mid-May when the Bergson group acquired a former embassy building in Washington and declared it the headquarters of the newly formed Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. The Hebrew Committee, made up of the small Bergsonite core group of Palestinian Jews and patterned on the French Committee of National Liberation, set itself up as the government-in-exile for the Jewish state (yet to be established) in Palestine. At the same time, the Bergsonites launched a partner organization, the American League for a Free Palestine, a mass-membership body for Americans, Jews and non-Jews, who wished to support the goals of the Hebrew Committee.

Frustrated by what they considered the ineffectiveness of the regular Zionist movement, the Bergson group had sought to form a new spearhead for Jewish nationalism. They had also hoped that the Hebrew Committee, like the French Committee, might open diplomatic …