I learned about the existence of Ben Hecht's book about ten years ago from the article "The Kastner Case Lives and Wins" by Israeli journalist Victoria Vekselman. The material astounded me, revealing little-known facts about Jewish leaders' collaboration with the British government and the Third Reich in the process of exterminating European Jews during World War II. Wexelman cited Hecht's book "Perfidy", which only heightened my interest.
For many years I tried to find this book to verify the authenticity of the facts stated in the article. And only in June 2023 I was lucky enough to find it on the website Archive.org.
After reading the book, I realized its exceptional significance. The idea of the Holocaust of European Jewry, which is formed from the facts presented in it, differs from the generally accepted one today. Perhaps it is precisely because of its inconvenient truth that the book has never been translated into Russian, although 62 years have passed since its publication.
Ben Hecht worked on the book from 1955 to 1961. His research was based on the records of a trial that took place in Jerusalem in 1953-1955. In this trial, the Israeli government tried Malkiel Greenwald, who accused government official Rudolf Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis.
I decided to translate the book into Russian for two main reasons:
1. It is unacceptable for such sensational material to remain unknown to the Russian-speaking reader.
2. The problems raised by the author concerning Jews and Israel remain relevant today.
SUMMARY OF THE BOOK
During the Second World War, official Jewish leaders representing the Jewish Agency, the socialist Mapai Party (whose functionaries held key positions in the Agency), and the World Zionist Organization collaborated with the British colonial administration to prevent Jewish refugees from Nazism from seeking refuge in Palestine. The mass influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe would inevitably lead to the establishment of a Jewish state, a prospect that the British administration sought to avoid at all costs.
During the British Mandate (1921-1948), the Jewish Agency, which served as the government of the Jewish community in Palestine, effectively became a division of the British colonial administration. The Agency's Central Office and its president were located in London, and the London Executive committee of the Agency interacted with the British Colonial Office and the Foreign Office.
In fulfilling the task set by the British colonial authorities to prevent mass Jewish repatriation to Palestine, the leaders of the Jewish Agency in 1944 entered into an agreement with the leadership of the Third Reich. The purpose of the agreement was to assist in organizing the deportation of 800 thousand Jews located in Hungary to Nazi concentration camps. For the Nazis, such cooperation was advantageous, as it allowed them to avoid the resistance and public outcry that accompanied the deportation of Polish Jews to concentration camps in 1943. As a result of this collaboration, during the summer of 1944 almost all Hungarian Jews were sent to death camps.
The executor of the will of the Jewish leaders was Rudolf Kastner, a member of the Mapai party and an employee of the Hungarian branch of the Jewish Agency. The Nazis made an agreement with him: Kastner had to convince the Jews that they were not going to be killed, but only resettled in comfortable settlements.
The Jews were to gather with their families and a small amount of luggage at designated locations, from where they would be taken away by train. The Jews were under no circumstances to resist or attempt to escape. In return, the Nazis would allow Kastner to save several hundred people at his discretion. Kastner kept his end of the bargain, and the Nazis kept their promise. (Chapters: 37-38, 39-40, 41-42, 54)
During the trial in Jerusalem, to the horror of Ben-Gurion's government, other shocking facts of collaboration emerged:
1. Jewish leaders organized the so-called "Conspiracy of Silence", helping the Nazis in the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in the occupied territories. They prohibited the publication of information about the genocide coming from Europe from local Jewish communities and employees of the "Jewish Agency". Any information about the extermination of Jews was carefully suppressed, and those who tried to spread it were discredited. (Chapters: 35-36, 47, 56)
2. To provide themselves with an alibi against future accusations of inaction, the leaders of the Jewish Agency and Mapai Party sent three young paratroopers, including Hannah Szenes, to Nazi-occupied Hungary. Upon arrival, they were ordered to contact Rudolf Kastner.
However, at the same time, the leaders informed the Nazis about the paratroopers' mission and ordered Kastner to hand them over to the enemy. As a result, Hannah Szenes was arrested immediately after crossing the Hungarian border, and Kastner handed over two of her comrades to the Nazis.
Later, Golda Meir, one of the leaders of Mapai, shed "crocodile tears" in her memoirs about the tragic fate of Hannah Szenes. (Chapters: 43-44)
3. Jewish leaders thwart unique deal to save 800,000 Hungarian Jews. In May 1944, Adolf Eichmann, the main organizer of the Holocaust, offered them an exchange: if the conditions were met, he would free all the Jews of Hungary. In return, the Nazis demanded a thousand tons of tea, a thousand tons of coffee, and ten thousand trucks.
However, Jewish leaders decided to thwart this deal by handing over to the British the emissary of the Jewish Agency who brought Eichmann's proposal from Budapest. The British kept him in custody for four months, during which time all the Jews in Hungary were sent to concentration camps. (Chapters: 62-63, 64-65, 66-67, 68)
The author of the book also found out that in February 1943, the Romanian government offered the US and British governments to save 70 thousand Jews from Transnistria, agreeing to pay $50 for each. However, the Jewish Agency in London rejected the proposal, and the American Jewish Congress said that raising funds for this purpose was not justified.
The US State Department decided not to release the information after coming under pressure from Jewish groups, Deputy Secretary of State Adolf Berle said. (Chapter 56)
After the war, Jewish leaders slandered the deceived and betrayed Jews of Europe, claiming that these people, like sheep, went to the slaughter without complaint.
Another blasphemous act was the signing of the "Reparations Agreement" between West Germany and Israel in 1952, according to which reparations were paid not to the victims of Nazism, but to the state of Israel. The particular cynicism of this agreement was that it was signed by Ben-Gurion's government, which consisted of Mapai leaders who had previously helped the Nazis exterminate the Jews of Europe. German reparations saved the Mapai Party's inefficient socialist economy from collapse and helped extend its rule until 1977.
At the end of the trial in Jerusalem, the presiding judge, Benjamin Halevi, in his verdict accused Rudolf Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis. The appeal of the Ben-Gurion government was rejected by the Supreme Court.
Judge Halevy's verdict meant that a new trial was necessary, in which the defendants were to be Rudolf Kastner himself and the leaders of the Mapai party, led by Ben-Gurion, who were in power in the Israeli government.
Kastner knew too much about the involvement of Mapai and Jewish Agency leaders in the extermination of Jews, and this sealed his fate. The Mapai party leaders gave the order to the Shin Bet counterintelligence agency under their control to liquidate Kastner. Kastner's murder saved Ben-Gurion and his clique from trial and punishment.
NAMES OF JEWISH LEADERS WHO HELPED THE NAZIS EXTERMINATE THE JEWS OF EUROPE
The highest level of official Jewish leadership in the 1930s and 1940s was represented by four people:
• Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) - President of the World Zionist Organization (1920-46) and the President of the Jewish Agency (1929-46). Coming from the Pinsk ghetto, Weizmann, thanks to the support of the British ruling class, became a gentleman, receiving British citizenship, a successful career and access to the upper classes. In gratitude, he became a loyal conductor of the British colonial administration's policies.
• David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) - head of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency (1935-48) and the leader of the Mapai Party. The Marxist Mapai Party was a member of the Socialist International, the ideological successor to the First International founded by Karl Marx in London in 1863.
• Moshe Sharett (1894-1965) - head of the political department of the Jewish Agency (1931-48) and the second leader of the Mapai party.
• Stephen Wise (1874-1949) - chairman of the executive committee of the World Jewish Congress (1936). The congress represented the interests of Jews in the Diaspora. Wise was an influential leader of Reform Judaism in the United States. Reform clergy, who call themselves "rabbis", are still waging a war against the state of Israel, which they call "the struggle for democracy".
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948
• Chaim Weizmann became the country's first president (1949-51);
• David Ben-Gurion became the first prime minister (1948-53 and 1955-63);
• Moshe Sharett became Israel's second prime minister (1953-55).
The Israeli government clique, tainted by collaboration with the Nazis, included the following Mapai party leaders:
David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Golda Meir, Eliezer Kaplan, Levi Eshkol, Berl Katznelson, Dov Yosef, Zalman Shazar, David Remez, Pinchas Lavon, Behor-Shalom Shitrit, Yitzhak Greenboim.
The names of these and other Mapai party leaders can be found in the lists of the first 17 governments of the State of Israel.
THE MAPAI PARTY YESTERDAY AND TODAY
In 1968, Mapai merged with two other left-wing parties to form the social democratic Labor Party "Avoda", which, like Mapai, became a member of the Socialist International, whose headquarters are in London.
Since the early 1970s, when the popularity of the Avoda began to decline, its leaders began to create numerous twin parties, including Ratz (1973-1997), Shinui (1977-2006), Dash (1976-1978), Third Way (1996), Kadima (2005-2015), Haatzmaut (2011), Hatnua (2012-2019), Yesh Atid (2012), Hosen Le Israel (2018), and Democratic Party (2019).
Israel's left-wing parties form a bloc known as the "left camp ". Today, this camp is led by the ideological and genetic descendants of the first leaders of the Mapai party, who were tainted by collaboration with the Nazis. The bitter irony is that the main constituency of the "left camp" is Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors and relatives were exterminated by the Nazis.
During 47 years of continuous rule in Palestine and Israel, the Mapai party leadership built a corporate state in which its party nomenclature controlled virtually all spheres of the economy and public life. Similar models of government existed in fascist Italy, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
In 1977, a coup occurred during the parliamentary elections in Israel. For the first time, the Labor Party found itself in opposition, losing to its ideological opponent, the conservative Likud Party led by Menachem Begin. However, the parliamentary coup did not lead to the destruction of the corporate state. It was only in the 1990s and 2000s, with the emergence of a high-tech sector independent of the state and thanks to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to break up state monopolies, that the unlimited power of the Mapai corporate state began to weaken.
The modern Mapai party actually acts as a shadow government, uniting corporate and family clans, as well as political forces of the "left camp" defending their interests. [1, 2, 3] Its representatives occupy key positions in ministries, the Supreme Court, the prosecutor's office, the police, the special services, the General Staff of the army, banks, trade unions and the media. As a result, regardless of the outcome of the parliamentary elections, real power in the country remains concentrated in the hands of this influential force.
BEN-GURION'S CRIME AGAINST HISTORY
Among the many scandals associated with Ben-Gurion's name, described in Chapter 59 and Note 172, a special place is occupied by the so-called "Affair of Israel Beer" (1951-61) - a man with a vague and dubious biography, whom Ben-Gurion appointed to the post of official military historian of Israel.
Beer was awarded this honor for his version of the history of the State of Israel, in which Ben-Gurion is presented not as a high-ranking official of the British colonial administration who did everything possible to prevent the creation of the State of Israel, but as a hero leading the struggle to liberate Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) from British colonialism.
In fact, the liberation of Eretz Israel in 1948 was the result of the selfless struggle of the right-wing underground organizations Irgun and Lehi. Even Winston Churchill acknowledged the merits of these partisans in the late 1940s, stating: "It was the Irgun that made the English quit Palestine. They did it by raising so much hell that we had to put eighty thousand soldiers into Palestine to cope with the situation. The military costs were too high for our economy. And it was the Irgun that ran them up." (Chapter 15)
However, Beer, in his falsified history, elevated Ben-Gurion to the status of a hero, attributing to him all the achievements of the Irgun and Lehi fighters - the very ones Ben-Gurion persecuted, tortured and killed. (Chapter 14, Operation Season, The Altalena Shooting)
Beer's appointment as official military historian gave him access to secret government documents. Despite counterintelligence warnings, Ben-Gurion refused to remove him from his post until Beer was exposed as a Soviet spy.
But despite the exposure, Beer's falsified version of the history of the State of Israel is still taught in schools and universities.
THE ISRAELI LEFT'S WAR AGAINST THE STATE OF ISRAEL
After Israel's victories over the Arab armies in 1967 and 1973, the anti-Israeli forces, led by Britain and the Soviet Union, concluded that it was impossible to defeat Israel militarily. They then chose a different tactic: strangling Israel under the guise of the so-called "peace process".
Britain assigned a key role in implementing this tactic to the Socialist International, which it controlled and which included the Israeli left-wing parties Avoda and Meretz. A special mission in this project was to be carried out by the leader of the Israeli left, Shimon Peres, who was elected vice-president of the Socialist International in 1978.
The Soviet Union, for its part, focused its efforts on legitimizing the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader Yasser Arafat, preparing the latter for the role of a full participant in future peace negotiations.
The third link in this coalition was the Israeli left, which launched a campaign to transform public consciousness. They sought to convince the population that peace was possible only through negotiations with terrorists and unilateral concessions.
It took the left two decades to raise a generation of Israelis who were educated in the spirit of pacifism and a willingness to make unilateral concessions. The left's rise to power in 1992 marked the beginning of the "peace process" imposed on society, the consequences of which Israel still feels.
On September 13, 1993, representatives of the Israeli left and Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, a document that became a tragic turning point in the history of Israel. The Norwegian Labor Party, one of the most anti-Israeli forces within the Socialist International, played a significant role in the preparation of these agreements.
As part of the Accords, the left brought Yasser Arafat and his 50,000-strong army of terrorists from Tunisia to Israel, and created for him the Palestinian Authority as a prototype of a future Palestinian state.
Once inside Israel, Arafat began doing what he did best: terror. During the so-called "Oslo War", in the first five years after the signing of the accords, the number of Israelis killed by Arafat's terrorists exceeded the figures for the previous fifteen years. In total, in the fifteen years since the signing of the Oslo Accords, 1,450 Israelis have been killed - which, converted to population, is equivalent to about 33,000 deaths in Russia or 67,000 in the United States.
For his services in undermining the security of the State of Israel, Shimon Peres was generously rewarded by forces hostile to the Jewish state:
• in 1994, Peres, along with Yasser Arafat, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
• in 1999, Peres was elected Honorary President of the Socialist International;
• in 2008, Queen Elizabeth II made Peres an Honorary Knight of the Grand Cross;
• in 2010, the Russian Foreign Ministry awarded him the title of Honorary Doctor of MGIMO;
• in 2012, he was awarded the title of Honorary Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences;
• in the same year 2012, US President Barack Obama awarded Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Not content with the terrorist "Oslo War" that had been unleashed, the Israeli left initiated a unilateral withdrawal of the IDF from southern Lebanon in 2000, which led to the creation of a terrorist enclave of Hezbollah on the northern border. The consequences were rocket attacks on northern Israel and two full-scale wars.
The result of the long-standing "peace initiative" of the leftists is a semi-ring of terror that has engulfed the state of Israel. In the north is Hezbollah, in the south is Hamas, in the east is Fatah and underground Hamas cells. In terms of security, the country has rolled back to a situation reminiscent of 1949.
Thus, the Israeli left's crimes against the Jewish people did not end with their shameful collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust. After losing the elections in 1977, they did not learn from this - on the contrary, they returned to their pernicious tendency to ally with those who dream of wiping the Jewish people off the face of the earth. If before their partners were the Nazis, today they are the jihadists - enemies more ruthless and cruel.
EXPLANATIONS OF SOME TERMS
The words "Palestine" and "the people of Palestine" used in the book refer not to Arabs but to Jews. This was the generally accepted meaning of these terms before the Six-Day War of 1967. The transformation of Arabs into "Palestinians" was the result of the work of the KGB and the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union, which at that time was actively engaged in the creation of "liberation movements". The official Israeli media, controlled by the socialist party Mapai, enthusiastically picked up this innovation of the Soviet "comrades".
By the word "Zionism" the author of the book means its socialist variety, represented by the Mapai party under the leadership of Ben-Gurion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOK
Ben Hecht (1894-1964) - American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. The author of 35 books and scripts for popular films and plays. Those familiar with the golden age of Hollywood can appreciate the brilliant list of films for which Hecht wrote scripts:
• Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), The Paradine Case (1947), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951) - directed by Alfred Hitchcock;
• Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) - directed by Otto Preminger;
• and also: Gone with the Wind (1939), It's a Wonderful World (1939), Wuthering Heights (1939), Angels Over Broadway (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Tales of Manhattan (1942), Gilda (1946), Cry of the City (1948), Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956), Cleopatra (1963).
The author of the book is a well-known figure in world culture, and his sensational work is an important contribution to both Jewish and human history.