Posted to General on

The Half-Jewish Nazi Who Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

by Raphael Ahren – Ha’aretz

Thanks to the late Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Chabad Lubavitch is a well-known and powerful Hasidic movement, with 4,000 emissaries now stationed around the world. But few people know that the rebbe’s predecessor, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, owes his life to a half-Jewish Nazi officer acting under the direct order of the head of the Third Reich’s military intelligence agency.

The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe was hiding in war-torn Warsaw during the days after the German invasion in 1939. After locating the rabbi at the order of Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the so-called Abwehr, Maj. Ernst Bloch, whose father was Jewish but who had no particular love for Judaism or those who practiced the religion fervently, enabled him to escape to safety in Latvia.

“This operation came about as a result of back-channel diplomatic efforts by the Germans to try and convince the Americans not to enter the war with the British and French against Germany,” said Larry Price, whose documentary about this episode, “The Chabad Rebbe and the German Officer,” airs tonight. According to the Jerusalem-based journalist and filmmaker, the American Chabad community at the time was small in number, but influential enough to save their leader.

“Using their contacts, Chabad managed to get Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis involved,” the 66-year-old told Haaretz. “Brandeis contacted one of [U.S. President Theodore] Roosevelt’s right-hand men, Benjamin Cohen, who influenced Roosevelt to toss the Jewish people a bone. That bone was Rabbi Schneerson.”

On Roosevelt’s orders

At the time, those demanding that the U.S. government take on a stronger role regarding the fate of European Jewry did so despite “tremendous anti-Semitism in America,” Price said. “Roosevelt had to tread lightly and do something, so he thought that perhaps rescuing the rebbe would ameliorate the situation with the Jewish community. The Germans, for their part, thought perhaps they could keep a backdoor channel open with the Americans and prevent them from entering the war.”

Releasing one rabbi was a relatively low price to pay, he added. Price’s 56-minute documentary details the background of the Schneerson deal and how Bloch and his fellow Abwehr agents accompanied the rabbi and about 20 of his relatives and peers in the first-class cabin of a train from Warsaw to Berlin, using his acting skills to avoid being arrested by suspicious Nazi officers. In the German capital, Schneerson was given over to Latvian diplomats, who brought him to safety in Riga. About a year later he made his way to New York, where he died in 1950. He was succeeded the following year by his son-in-law, Menachem M. Schneerson.

Price, who was born in Chicago and immigrated to Israel in 1971, came across Schneerson’s story while working on his previous documentary film, “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,” which tells the story of some of the estimated 150,000 men of Jewish origin who served in the German army during World War II.

“I thought it was a conundrum: Why would the Germans want to send anybody to rescue an ultra-Orthodox Jew from the Germans? It’s a very unique story,” Price said.

Related Articles

10 Comments

  • Randi Myers

    “Using their contacts, Chabad managed to get Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis involved,” the 66-year-old told Haaretz. “Brandeis contacted one of [U.S. President Theodore] Roosevelt’s right-hand men, Benjamin Cohen, who influenced Roosevelt to toss the Jewish people a bone. That bone was Rabbi Schneerson.”
    Uhm… you have it a little wrong.. the President wasn’t Theodore Roosevelt.. it was Franklin Roosevelt… Theodore’s nephew…

  • ChanaRivka

    for the first time in many years, I want to watch TV. What station was this on, and at what time??? Please give more details.

  • Nobody

    Don’t know about the rest of the story, but the idea that America there was “tremendous anti-Semitism in America” is simple counter-factual. There are polls at the time showing American attitudes towards Jews, and they were by-and-large quite benign, certainly relative to what was going on in the rest of the “civilized” world at the time.

    Sure compared to America today it was much worse, but really compared to anywhere else in the world, even *today* there wasn’t such a thing. What there was at the time in America was a great anti-immigrant feeling (backlash from the previous high-absorption of immigrants), and strong isolationism – not wanting to absorb the world’s problems. We were a victim of that.

  • A bit of derech eretz please...

    The Frierdiker Rebbe does not “OWE” his life to any Natzi, I don’t think It’s nice to say that the Rebbe owes his life.

  • HIRSCH PEKKAR. [ C.H ].

    BH. HARBEI SHLUCHIM LAMOKOM< BCHOL EIS UBCHOL ZMAN< UBAKOL

  • To Nobody

    Polls, shmolls. Consider that one of the most popular radio personalities of the day was “Father” Charles Coughlin, a rabid anti-Semite who used his show to attack Jews. Consider that Henry Ford, one of the best-known businessmen of the era, used his newspaper to publish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other vicious anti-Jewish diatribes. Consider that Charles Lindbergh, a hero to millions of Americans because of his successful transatlantic flight of 1927, openly campaigned in favor of Nazi Germany.

    Finally, consider that the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 (at which various aspects of the global postwar financial system were arranged) had to be held there, because it was one of the only resorts in the USA that would allow Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury and a Jew, on the grounds.

    Now you tell me: does all of this indicate to you that “American attitudes towards Jews were quite benign”? Okay, they weren’t shoving Jews into gas chambers, but don’t pretend that the average American in the early ’40s was particularly well-disposed towards Jews.

  • Dovid

    What is half-Jewish? I thought that was a term reserved for use by Reform jews. You are either Jewish or not! Why perpetuate nonsense on a religious website?