One aspect of the Shoah has received little attention from Holocaust scholars: The obstruction by Britain of the most important avenue of escape available to the doomed Jews of Europe before and during World War II.

The Danube River, flowing from the middle of Europe to the Black Sea, was an international waterway that could be traversed by Jewish refugees without travel documents of any kind, provided that shipping was obtainable. For a price, it usually was.

Not counting a multitude of very small craft that remain mostly unaccounted for and were probably lost at sea, there were 34 "illegal" sea voyages originating in the Danube from the end of 1937 until the outbreak of the war; thereafter, there were another 28, the last of them in August 1944. Most were sponsored by Zionists groups, principally the Revisionists and the Mossad.

"Illegal immigration," as it was referred to, was a very desperate measure, fraught with dangers ranging from bandits and disease, to thirst and starvation, not to mention sinkings and drownings. It also involved running a blockade by the Royal Navy. The first battle casualties inflicted by the British at the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, were Jews killed and wounded by British marines who had stormed about the Mossad ship Tiger Hill, carrying 1,417 Jewish escapees from Europe.

British obstruction of rescue ranged from the official level -- pressures exerted on the governments of countries through which the Jews had to pass -- to an army of intelligence agents who pointed out the "fugitives" to RAF and Royal Navy reconnaissance and interdiction, even in international waters. It went so far as the confiscation of vessels and the imprisonment of crews to make ship rentals ever more expensive. Also, since the effect of British policy was to taint these operations with the stigma of criminality, not only did the costs soar -- with bribes that had to be paid -- but the terrible condition of the available vessels was beyond belief.

Questioned in the House of Commons, on July 26, 1940, about the size and number of British warships engaged in preventing Jewish refugees from reaching "the Jewish National Home," Minister Ramsay MacDonald replied: "One division of destroyers in addition to five launches." Asked whether a division of destroyers meant a flotilla, he refused to answer.

Among the tragedies that occurred before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, there were, in addition to the Tiger Hill, the following:

In March 1939, the Gepo II sank in the Mediterranean Sea and all 750 on board were rescued by another refugee vessel, the Katina.

The British fired on the Aghios Nilolos near the cost of Eretz Israel, also with 750 passengers. One person died.

The Sando was fired on by British coastal batteries and forced back into the Mediterranean with 235 passengers.

In June 1939, the Rim caught fire off Rhodes and all 800 on board were rescued by the Aghios Nikolaos IV.

In September 1940, the Pencho was shipwrecked during a storm in the Aegean Sea and its 514 were picked up by Italian warships that brought them to Rhodes.

In October 1940, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Milo, with a total of 3,651 passengers, were intercepted by the British and brought to Haifa for deportation to a prison camp on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Of the first contingent of 1,838 forced aboard the Patria, 254 drowned when the prison ship was scuttled in Haifa harbor.

In December 1940, the Salvador struck a reef and sank in the Sea of Marmara and 204 of its 327 passengers drowned. The survivors were picked up by the Darien, also a refugee ship.

However desperate the Jews were before the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, they were even more panic stricken afterward, as more than 6000,000 Jews were summarily massacred in the next few months in Lithuania, eastern Poland, Bukovina and Bessarabia, while the Iron Guard commenced, literally, butchering Jews in Bucharest.

A defenseless minority cringed amid hostile and murderous people, and with all the Jews of Poland already isolated in hellish ghettos, those Jews having any chance to escape, however slim, were ready to try. At the same time, in spite of the ongoing carnage of which they were aware, the British now set up radar stations to augment the warships and aircraft that they deployed against the floating coffins carrying the refugees.

While they blocked the escape of Hitler's victims, the British brazenly feigned ignorance of the extermination of the Jews, as did virtually everybody else including the United States. They all had many reliable sources of information. These included diplomats, businessmen, Christian clergy and International Red Cross personnel located in or near the sites of the ongoing massacres who transmitted reports to Switzerland, Sweden, the Vatican and other neutral listening posts to which the British and American governments had continuous access at all levels, not to speak of covert contacts through a variety of intelligence agencies.

More than 50 years later, it was finally learned that the British had cracked the German code and tracked the murders of the Jews in the summer of 1941 as they were being reported to Berlin in coded messages used by the German commanders of the SS and police units carrying out the "executions." This was established by Prof. Richard Breitman of American University in Washington (and other scholars) who had requested the declassification of 1.3 million wartime documents from the National Security Agency under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents that were subsequently released to the National Archives included 282 pages of SS radio intercepts.

Among the pathetic vessels packed with Jews who had the temerity to try to save themselves from the lime pits and the crematoria were:

The Struma, which sank with 767 refugees aboard after the crippled boat was forced back into the Black Sea by the Turkish authorities.

The Vitorul, lost at sea with 120 passengers.

The tiny Euxenia with 12 aboard, shipwrecked in the Aegean (like many other small craft).

The Mefkurie with 350 passengers, torpedoed in the Black Sea.

If there is one episode that encapsulates the totality of the catastrophe engulfing European Jewry, it is the fate of the 767 hapless refugees, most of them from Bessarabia and Bukovina, who arrived in Istanbul on December 15, 1941, aboard the Struma, a 180-ton ramshackle riverboat lacking power, fuel, food, water and other necessities.

Fleeing the rampaging butchers of Romania's Iron Guard, the passengers (among whom were 269 women and 103 children plus 20 physicians, 10 engineers, 15 lawyers and 30 business executives) had each paid for the chance to board the ancient cattle barge, salvaged from the Danube and, for the last time, outfitted with a used motor that proved defective. Its Greek owner, Yanaki Pandelis, had tried unsuccessfully for a year to interest the Mossad and the Revisionists in his decrepit vessel. Even the Germans, who had been requisitioning almost anything that would float to carry Romanian produce to the Reich, had rejected it. But as Shabtai Nadiv, who lost a younger brother on this vessel put it: "Those were desperate times. There were no other means of escape from hell.... Whole families pleaded to go on the Struma..."

The voyage from Constanza to Istanbul, normally a matter of fourteen hours, took the Struma four days, during which it drifted most of the time because of repeated engine failures. Instead of being welcomed with compassion and respect, given the circumstances of their flight (not to speak of the appalling conditions on the jam-packed barge with only one toilet), the refugees were forbidden to disembark and the Struma was turned into a floating prison, under rigorous quarantine, in the outer harbor. The only provisions they were allowed to receive, and then only once a week, was food donated by Istanbul's Jewish community.

Because the vessel was registered in Panama, which had jointed the United States as a belligerent after the attack on Pearl Harbor, its Bulgarian captain. G. T. Gorbatenko, made it clear to the Turks that it would be too perilous for the Struma to put to sea again in German-patrolled waters even if it could be rendered seaworthy, and he did not believe it could be.

The Turks understood that the choice before them was either to let the refugees disembark or to send them to what would most likely be a watery grave. At first they chose to do neither, but to look to Britain (which, after all, had the mandate for the Jewish National Home) to make the decision for them. Accordingly, the assistant secretary-general of the Turkish Foreign Ministry put it to the British ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen: Should the refugees to permitted to land and be put on trains bound for Haifa or should the vessel be forced back into the Black Sea?

The ambassador hemmed and hawed because he could not bring himself to tell the Turks to do what he knew his government wanted. Learning of this, an outraged Colonial Minister, Lord Moyne, had Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden see to it that KJnatchbull-Hugessen was clearly instructed to the let the Turks know that the Struma should be sent back where it came from. (Said Moyne: "The landing of 700 more immigrants....will have a deplorable effect (by) encouraging (many more) Jews to embark on (this) traffic..." Said his aide, E. B. Boyd: "Sir H. Knatchbull-Hugessen had a heaven-sent opportunity of getting the people sent back and failed to avail himself of it.")

What followed was a macabre game as the British, ever so slightly concerned about public opinion in the United States(1), indicated a willingness to admit some or perhaps all (it was not clear) Struma children into Palestine, but somehow, the British failed to communicate this information to the Turks until after the Struma refugees were dead.

On February 23, 1941, seventy days after arriving in Istanbul, the refugees were confronted by a force of 80 club-wielding Turkish policemen who attempted to raise the anchor and lash the Struma to tugboats that had pulled up alongside. Although the refugees fought desperately with the police, they could not prevail. So, without fuel or other provisions, the crippled vessel was towed through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. Although it prominently displayed large sheets emblazoned with "S.O.S.", while the refugees screamed for help from the deck, no one took notice. On the morning of February 24th, the Struma exploded and sank about five miles from the Turkish coast(2). The sole survivor, a young man who lost his entire family, was granted a certificate to Palestine about a month later. At that time, there were still thousands of unissued certificates under the infamous White Paper that was enforced in contravention of the mandate and without sanction from the League of Nations. (Article 9 of the Mandate required the mandatory power to facilitate Jewish immigration and this was termed a matter of "right and not sufferance" by Winston Churchill when he was colonial secretary.)

In the House of Commons, the government came in for considerable criticism. One M.P., D. L. Lipson, theorized: "Had the Struma carried Germans, Japanese or Italians, that is, citizens of enemy countries, they would not have been sentenced to death. They would have been taken ashore and at worst interned. The only reason the Struma's travelers died was because they were Jews."

In Ankara, the Turkish Prime Minister declared that "Turkey cannot be expected to serve as a refuge or a surrogate homeland for people who are unwanted everywhere else."

It was a long time ago, but some of us can recall that we then quoted Giuseppe Mazzini: "Without a country of your own you have neither name, voice, nor rights, nor admission as brothers in the fellowship of peoples. You are the bastards of humanity."

End Notes

(1) The British agreed to honour the expired Palestinian visas possessed by a few passengers and these were allowed to continue overland.

(2) In 1964, it was discovered that a torpedo from a Soviet submarine had been responsible.

See also "The Struma & The unmitigated policy of the British against Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's war against them" on the Eretz Yisroel website:
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/struma.html

David Krakow, a retired attorney, is a member of the Netzivut of American Betar and editor of its magazine Hadar. He is currently President of the Nordau Circle.

This was posted February 18, 2009 on the MidEast Truth Forum
http://mideasttruth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8963 Thanks are due Barbara Taverna for sending this in to Think-Israel.

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