Post by pieter on Mar 30, 2021 11:02:09 GMT -7
Folks,
For me this is an interesting element in Polish-Jewish history, Polish-Roman Catholic and Polish Jewish relations, and the fact that contacts between Polish Roman-Catholic high ranking officers and Polish Jewish officers in the Pre-War Polish army made this cooperation and training of Betar and Irgun and Haganah members possible inside Poland. This training is important in the perspective of the later Polish Jewish Resistance inside Poland during the war during the the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943), the later Warsaw Uprising (1 August – 2 October 1944), the activities of the Irgun, Betar, Lehi (militant group, also called the Stern Gang), Haganah and Palmach against the British rulers in Mandatory Palestine and the later 1947–1949 Palestine war, known in Israel as the War of Independence (Hebrew: מלחמת העצמאות, Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut) and in Arabic as the Nakba (lit. Catastrophe, Arabic: النكبة, al-Nakba). This war was fought in the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate. Also the terrorism of the rightwing Irgun and Lehi Revisionist Zionist Jewish para military groups against Arabs, British civilian authorities, the British police and army and moderate Jewish public servants of the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine was partly made possible due to this Polish training and arms deliveries to these extreme Zionist groups in the late Thirties.
Cheers,
Pieter
Military support from Poland to Zionists in Poland
Polish army 1930s
During the interwar period, as part of its policy of supporting a Jewish state in Palestine in order to facilitate mass Jewish emigration from its territory, the Second Polish Republic provided military training and weapons to Zionist paramilitary groups, including Haganah. Envoys from Haganah headed by Yehuda Arazi received dozens of shipments with military supplies, including 2750 Mauser rifles, 225 RKM machine guns, 10,000 hand grenades, two million bullets for rifles and machine guns, and a large number of pistols with ammunition. The British exerted heavy pressure on the Polish government to stop these deliveries. One of the last purchases of Arazi were two airplanes and two gliders. When he fled Poland to France, around 500 rifles were abandoned in a Warsaw warehouse. Members of the Haganah were also trained in a military camp in Rembertow along with Betar members between the years 1931 and 1937; it is estimated that training courses at the camp were attended by around 8,000 to 10,000 participants during their existence.
Betar
Military drill of rightwing Betar members in September 1938 in Warsaw
In 1934, Poland was home to 40,000 of the righgtwing Revisionist Zionist Betar's 70,000 members. Routine Betar activities in Warsaw included military drilling, instruction in Hebrew, and encouragement to learn English. Militia groups organized by Betar Poland helped to defend against attacks by the anti-Semitic ONR (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, the National Radical Camp). The interwar Polish government helped Betar with military training. Some members admired the Polish nationalist camp and imitated some of its aspects.
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Betar aided the widespread immigration of Jews to Palestine in violation of the British Mandate's immigration quotas, which had not been increased despite the surge of refugees from the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews. In total, Betar was responsible for the entrance of over 40,000 Jews into Palestine under such restrictions.
Group of young Betarim in Zambrow, Poland in the 1930s
Żydowski Związek Wojskowy
During the Holocaust, Betar members revolted numerous times against the Nazis in occupied Europe. The largest of these revolts was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943), in which an armed underground organization fought, formed by Betar and the Revisionist Zionist organization Hatzoar and known as the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (ŻZW) (Jewish Military Union). Despite its political origins, the ŻZW accepted members without regard to political affiliation, and had contacts established before the war with elements of the Polish military. Because of differences over objectives and strategy, the ŻZW was unable to form a common front with the mainstream ghetto fighters of the more leftwing leaning Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization), which was made of the leftist Zionist youth groups, such as Hashomer Hatzair, Dror and the Jewish socialist General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland (Ogólno-Żydowski Związek Robotniczy "Bund" w Polsce). Therefor the ŻZW (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy) fought independently under the military leadership of Paweł Frenkiel and the political leadership of Dawid Wdowiński.
Paweł Frenkiel (sometimes also Frenkel, Hebrew: פאוול פרנקל; 1920–1943) was a Polish Army officer and a Jewish youth leader in Warsaw and one of the senior commanders of the Jewish Military Union, or the ŻZW. One of the most important leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish resistance in the months preceding April 1943 (the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).
Dawid (David) Wdowiński (1895–1970) was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology in the Second Polish Republic. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he became a political leader of the Jewish resistance organization called Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union, ŻZW) active before and during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Dawid (David) Wdowiński (1895–1970) was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology in the Second Polish Republic. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he became a political leader of the Jewish resistance organization called Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union, ŻZW) active before and during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943).
After the war, Wdowiński settled in the United States. Meanwhile, eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising were filtered through testimonies of former members of the left-leaning ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; the Jewish Combat Organization). These accounts (also adopted by the postwar Polish Communist state) diminished both the roles and the importance of the ŻZW and Wdowiński, because the ŻZW was a rightwing Polish Jewish military organisation with close ties to the Polish army and the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK). One such writer, Israel Gutman, was an activist in Hashomer Hatzair (The Young Guard, a Socialist-Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement). Guttman's perspective continued in authoritative citations of Barbara Engelking and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, who described Wdowiński as a senior activist in the Polish branch of Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization; i.e. the "revisionist leader in the ghetto [who, in his memoir] attributes himself in command of the fighting organisation of this political movement." Another ŻOB fighter (Icchak Cukierman) wrote, "The Revisionists had seceded from the World Zionist Organization; and before the war, all socialist movements, including the Zionists, saw them as the Jewish ebodiminent of Fascism." Wdowiński candidly noted the pro-Soviet political orientation of the leftist Jews following the Soviet invasion of Poland: "The second, the confused political orientation, was largely because many Jewish leaders were reared in the spirit of the Russian Revolution, and they thought they could translate the ideas of the class struggle into Zionist terms." (Comment Pieter: "Until today you see the hatred of the rightwing to far right Revisionist Zionists in Israel, the USA and Europe against leftwing Labour Social Democratic, leftwing Socialist, Marxist and Commmunist jews. These rightwing Revisionist Zionists are followers of rightwing Revisionist Zionist leaders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880 - 1940), Menachem Begin (1913 – 1992) (Begin himself was terribly tortured by the Sovjet NKVD in the Lukiškės Prison in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1940 and later he spend nearly one year in the Pechora labor camps in Komi Republic, the northern part of European Russia, where he stayed from 1 June 1941 until May 1942 in the Much later in life, Begin recorded and reflected upon his experiences in the interrogations and life in the camp in his memoir White Nights. Maybe Begin was such a tough leader due to his Stalinist experiences in Poland and the SovjetUnion? Stalin also survived the Czarist Gulag and became a tough leader as well.)
In 1961, Dawid Wdowiński served as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The situation with the historical record led Wdowiński, in 1963, to publish his own memoir, And We Are Not Saved, in which he writes about his involvement with the ŻZW and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943). Wdowiński was fiercely opposed to Jewish collaboration with Nazi Germany inside the ghettos, or any post-war reconciliation with them. This theme pervades his memoirs as well as his correspondence.
Żydowski Związek Wojskowy commemorative poster
Irgun
Irgun emblem. The map shows both Mandatory Palestine and the Emirate of Transjordan, which the Irgun claimed in its entirety for a future Jewish state. The acronym "Etzel" is written above the map, and "raq kach" ("only thus") is written below.
The rightwing Revisionist Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun ("The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel") also established itself in Europe during the Thirties. The Irgun built underground cells that participated in organizing migration to Palestine. The cells were made up almost entirely of Betar members, and their primary activity was military training in preparation for emigration to Palestine. Ties formed with the Polish authorities brought about courses in which Irgun commanders were trained by Polish officers in advanced military issues such as guerrilla warfare, tactics and laying land mines. Avraham (Yair) Stern was notable among the cell organizers in Europe.
Avraham Stern (Hebrew: אברהם שטרן, Avraham Shtern), alias Yair (Hebrew: יאיר; December 23, 1907 – February 12, 1942) was one of the leaders of the Jewish paramilitary organization Irgun. In September 1940, he founded a breakaway militant Zionist group named Lehi, called the "Stern Gang" by the British authorities and by the mainstream in the Yishuv Jewish establishment.
Irgun poster of their geopolitical aim of a Greater Israel
In 1937 the Polish authorities began to deliver large amounts of weapons to the underground. According to Irgun activists Poland supplied the organization with 25,000 rifles, and additional material and weapons, by summer 1939 the Warsaw warehouses of Irgun held 5,000 rifles and 1,000 machine guns. The training and support by Poland would allow the organization to mobilize 30,000-40,000 men The transfer of handguns, rifles, explosives and ammunition stopped with the outbreak of World War II. Another field in which the Irgun operated was the training of pilots, so they could serve in the Air Force in the future war for independence, in the flight school in Lod.
Members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization in the Land of Israel) are armed with rifles, revolvers and automatic weapons as they take position on the rooftop of a Jewish house in case of Arab attack on the Jaffa – Tel Aviv border in the Manshiah Jewish quarter in Tel Aviv, Israel, on December 27, 1947.
For me this is an interesting element in Polish-Jewish history, Polish-Roman Catholic and Polish Jewish relations, and the fact that contacts between Polish Roman-Catholic high ranking officers and Polish Jewish officers in the Pre-War Polish army made this cooperation and training of Betar and Irgun and Haganah members possible inside Poland. This training is important in the perspective of the later Polish Jewish Resistance inside Poland during the war during the the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943), the later Warsaw Uprising (1 August – 2 October 1944), the activities of the Irgun, Betar, Lehi (militant group, also called the Stern Gang), Haganah and Palmach against the British rulers in Mandatory Palestine and the later 1947–1949 Palestine war, known in Israel as the War of Independence (Hebrew: מלחמת העצמאות, Milkhemet Ha'Atzma'ut) and in Arabic as the Nakba (lit. Catastrophe, Arabic: النكبة, al-Nakba). This war was fought in the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate. Also the terrorism of the rightwing Irgun and Lehi Revisionist Zionist Jewish para military groups against Arabs, British civilian authorities, the British police and army and moderate Jewish public servants of the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine was partly made possible due to this Polish training and arms deliveries to these extreme Zionist groups in the late Thirties.
Cheers,
Pieter
Military support from Poland to Zionists in Poland
Polish army 1930s
During the interwar period, as part of its policy of supporting a Jewish state in Palestine in order to facilitate mass Jewish emigration from its territory, the Second Polish Republic provided military training and weapons to Zionist paramilitary groups, including Haganah. Envoys from Haganah headed by Yehuda Arazi received dozens of shipments with military supplies, including 2750 Mauser rifles, 225 RKM machine guns, 10,000 hand grenades, two million bullets for rifles and machine guns, and a large number of pistols with ammunition. The British exerted heavy pressure on the Polish government to stop these deliveries. One of the last purchases of Arazi were two airplanes and two gliders. When he fled Poland to France, around 500 rifles were abandoned in a Warsaw warehouse. Members of the Haganah were also trained in a military camp in Rembertow along with Betar members between the years 1931 and 1937; it is estimated that training courses at the camp were attended by around 8,000 to 10,000 participants during their existence.
Betar
Military drill of rightwing Betar members in September 1938 in Warsaw
In 1934, Poland was home to 40,000 of the righgtwing Revisionist Zionist Betar's 70,000 members. Routine Betar activities in Warsaw included military drilling, instruction in Hebrew, and encouragement to learn English. Militia groups organized by Betar Poland helped to defend against attacks by the anti-Semitic ONR (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, the National Radical Camp). The interwar Polish government helped Betar with military training. Some members admired the Polish nationalist camp and imitated some of its aspects.
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Betar aided the widespread immigration of Jews to Palestine in violation of the British Mandate's immigration quotas, which had not been increased despite the surge of refugees from the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews. In total, Betar was responsible for the entrance of over 40,000 Jews into Palestine under such restrictions.
Group of young Betarim in Zambrow, Poland in the 1930s
Żydowski Związek Wojskowy
During the Holocaust, Betar members revolted numerous times against the Nazis in occupied Europe. The largest of these revolts was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943), in which an armed underground organization fought, formed by Betar and the Revisionist Zionist organization Hatzoar and known as the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (ŻZW) (Jewish Military Union). Despite its political origins, the ŻZW accepted members without regard to political affiliation, and had contacts established before the war with elements of the Polish military. Because of differences over objectives and strategy, the ŻZW was unable to form a common front with the mainstream ghetto fighters of the more leftwing leaning Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization), which was made of the leftist Zionist youth groups, such as Hashomer Hatzair, Dror and the Jewish socialist General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland (Ogólno-Żydowski Związek Robotniczy "Bund" w Polsce). Therefor the ŻZW (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy) fought independently under the military leadership of Paweł Frenkiel and the political leadership of Dawid Wdowiński.
Paweł Frenkiel (sometimes also Frenkel, Hebrew: פאוול פרנקל; 1920–1943) was a Polish Army officer and a Jewish youth leader in Warsaw and one of the senior commanders of the Jewish Military Union, or the ŻZW. One of the most important leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish resistance in the months preceding April 1943 (the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).
Dawid (David) Wdowiński (1895–1970) was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology in the Second Polish Republic. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he became a political leader of the Jewish resistance organization called Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union, ŻZW) active before and during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Dawid (David) Wdowiński (1895–1970) was a psychiatrist and doctor of neurology in the Second Polish Republic. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, he became a political leader of the Jewish resistance organization called Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (Jewish Military Union, ŻZW) active before and during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943).
After the war, Wdowiński settled in the United States. Meanwhile, eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising were filtered through testimonies of former members of the left-leaning ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; the Jewish Combat Organization). These accounts (also adopted by the postwar Polish Communist state) diminished both the roles and the importance of the ŻZW and Wdowiński, because the ŻZW was a rightwing Polish Jewish military organisation with close ties to the Polish army and the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK). One such writer, Israel Gutman, was an activist in Hashomer Hatzair (The Young Guard, a Socialist-Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement). Guttman's perspective continued in authoritative citations of Barbara Engelking and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, who described Wdowiński as a senior activist in the Polish branch of Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization; i.e. the "revisionist leader in the ghetto [who, in his memoir] attributes himself in command of the fighting organisation of this political movement." Another ŻOB fighter (Icchak Cukierman) wrote, "The Revisionists had seceded from the World Zionist Organization; and before the war, all socialist movements, including the Zionists, saw them as the Jewish ebodiminent of Fascism." Wdowiński candidly noted the pro-Soviet political orientation of the leftist Jews following the Soviet invasion of Poland: "The second, the confused political orientation, was largely because many Jewish leaders were reared in the spirit of the Russian Revolution, and they thought they could translate the ideas of the class struggle into Zionist terms." (Comment Pieter: "Until today you see the hatred of the rightwing to far right Revisionist Zionists in Israel, the USA and Europe against leftwing Labour Social Democratic, leftwing Socialist, Marxist and Commmunist jews. These rightwing Revisionist Zionists are followers of rightwing Revisionist Zionist leaders like Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880 - 1940), Menachem Begin (1913 – 1992) (Begin himself was terribly tortured by the Sovjet NKVD in the Lukiškės Prison in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1940 and later he spend nearly one year in the Pechora labor camps in Komi Republic, the northern part of European Russia, where he stayed from 1 June 1941 until May 1942 in the Much later in life, Begin recorded and reflected upon his experiences in the interrogations and life in the camp in his memoir White Nights. Maybe Begin was such a tough leader due to his Stalinist experiences in Poland and the SovjetUnion? Stalin also survived the Czarist Gulag and became a tough leader as well.)
In 1961, Dawid Wdowiński served as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The situation with the historical record led Wdowiński, in 1963, to publish his own memoir, And We Are Not Saved, in which he writes about his involvement with the ŻZW and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943). Wdowiński was fiercely opposed to Jewish collaboration with Nazi Germany inside the ghettos, or any post-war reconciliation with them. This theme pervades his memoirs as well as his correspondence.
Żydowski Związek Wojskowy commemorative poster
Irgun
Irgun emblem. The map shows both Mandatory Palestine and the Emirate of Transjordan, which the Irgun claimed in its entirety for a future Jewish state. The acronym "Etzel" is written above the map, and "raq kach" ("only thus") is written below.
The rightwing Revisionist Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun ("The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel") also established itself in Europe during the Thirties. The Irgun built underground cells that participated in organizing migration to Palestine. The cells were made up almost entirely of Betar members, and their primary activity was military training in preparation for emigration to Palestine. Ties formed with the Polish authorities brought about courses in which Irgun commanders were trained by Polish officers in advanced military issues such as guerrilla warfare, tactics and laying land mines. Avraham (Yair) Stern was notable among the cell organizers in Europe.
Avraham Stern (Hebrew: אברהם שטרן, Avraham Shtern), alias Yair (Hebrew: יאיר; December 23, 1907 – February 12, 1942) was one of the leaders of the Jewish paramilitary organization Irgun. In September 1940, he founded a breakaway militant Zionist group named Lehi, called the "Stern Gang" by the British authorities and by the mainstream in the Yishuv Jewish establishment.
Irgun poster of their geopolitical aim of a Greater Israel
In 1937 the Polish authorities began to deliver large amounts of weapons to the underground. According to Irgun activists Poland supplied the organization with 25,000 rifles, and additional material and weapons, by summer 1939 the Warsaw warehouses of Irgun held 5,000 rifles and 1,000 machine guns. The training and support by Poland would allow the organization to mobilize 30,000-40,000 men The transfer of handguns, rifles, explosives and ammunition stopped with the outbreak of World War II. Another field in which the Irgun operated was the training of pilots, so they could serve in the Air Force in the future war for independence, in the flight school in Lod.
Members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization in the Land of Israel) are armed with rifles, revolvers and automatic weapons as they take position on the rooftop of a Jewish house in case of Arab attack on the Jaffa – Tel Aviv border in the Manshiah Jewish quarter in Tel Aviv, Israel, on December 27, 1947.