Seven Decades Of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret

Yaroslav Stetsko, an OUN leader during World War II, meets George H.W. Bush.

An interview with Russ Bellant, author of “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party.”

As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the US, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ Bellant in his book Old Nazis, The New Right And The Republican Party(South End Press, 1991). Bellant’s exposure of Nazi leaders from German allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from the Ukraine, which is why he was the logical choice to turn to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi and fascist elements amongst the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukranians aren’t Nazis or fascists—all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their true natures in the shadows…or even behind the momentary glare of the spotlight.

Your book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party exposed the deep involvement in the Republican Party of Nazi elements from Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukrainian, dating back to World War II and even before. As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded in the last few weeks there have been scattered mentions of a fascist or neo-fascist element, but somehow that never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. I can’t think of anyone better to shed light on what’s not being said about that element. The danger of Russian belligerence is increasingly obvious, but this unexamined fascist element poses dangers of its own. What can you tell us about this element and those dangers?

The element has a long history, of a long record that speaks for itself, when that record is actually known and elaborated on. The key organization in the coup that took place here recently was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN], or a specific branch of it known as the Banderas [OUN-B]. They’re the group behind the Svoboda party, which got a number of key positions in the new interim regime. The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s began a campaign of assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn’t agree with them.

As World War II approached, they made an alliance with the Nazi powers, they formed several military formations, so that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they had several battalions that went into the main city at the time, where their base was, Lvov, or Lwow, it has a variety of spellings [also 'Lviv']. They went in, and there’s a documented history of them participating in the identification and rounding up Jews in that city, and assisting in executing several thousand citizens almost immediately. There were also involved in liquidating Polish group populations in other parts of Ukraine during the war.

Without getting deeply involved in that whole history, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to this day defend their wartime role, they were backers of forming the 14th Waffen SS Division, which was the all-Ukrainian division that became an armed element on behalf of the Germans, and under overall German control. They helped encourage its formation, and after the war, right at the end of the war, it was called the First Ukrainian division and they still glorify that history of that SS division, and they have a veterans organization, that obviously doesn’t have too many of members left but they formed a veterans division of that.

If you look insignia being worn in Kiev in the street demonstrations and marches to the SS division insignia still being worn. In fact I was looking at photographs last night of it and there was a whole formation marching, not with 14th Division, but with the Second Division, it was a large division that did major battle around the Ukraine, and these marchers were wearing the insignia on the armbands of the Second Division.

So this is a very clear record, and the OUN, even in its postwar publications has called for ethno-genetically pure Ukrainian territory, which of course is simply calling for purging Jews, and Poles, and Russians from what they consider Ukrainian territory. Also, current leaders of Svoboda have made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks that call for getting rid of Muscovite Jews and so forth. They use this very coarse threatening language that anybody knowing the history of World War II would tremble at. If they were living here, it would seem like they would start worrying about it.

Obviously these people don’t hold monopoly power in Ukraine, but they stepped up and the United States has been behind the Svoboda party and these Ukrainian nationalists. In fact the US connections to them go back to World War II and the United States has had a long-standing tie to the OUN, through the intelligence agencies, initially military intelligence, and later the CIA.

Your book discusses a central figure in the OUN, Yaroslav Stetsko, who was politically active for decades here in America. What can you tell us about his history?

Yaroslav Stetsko was the number two leader of the OUN during World War II and thereafter. In 1959, Stefan Bandera, who was head of the OUN, was killed and that’s when Stetsko assumed the leadership. Stetsko in 1941 was the guy who actually marched into Lvov with the German army June 30, 1941 and the OUN issued a proclamation at that time under his name praising and calling for glory to the German leader Adolf Hitler and how they’re going to march arm in arm for the Ukraine and so forth. After the war, he was part of the key leadership that got picked up by the Americans.

There’s a number of accounts I’ve seen, at least three credible up reports, on how they were in the displaced person camp, the Allied forces set up displaced persons camp and picked up tens of thousands of these former allies of Hitler from countries all over the East, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania – there weren’t Polish collaborators I think most people know the Germans heavily persecuted and murdered millions of Polish residents – but Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and so forth, Belorussia. They had them in these camps they built and organized them, where the Ukrainians were assassinating their Ukrainian nationalist rival so that they would be the undisputed leaders of Ukrainian nationalist movement, so they would get the sponsorship of the United States to continue their political operation, and they were successful in that regard. So when Bandera was out of the picture, Stetsko became the undisputed leader of Ukrainian nationalists.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 under German sponsorship organized a multinational force to fight on behalf of the retreating German army. After the battle of Stalingrad in ’43 the Germans felt a heightened need to get more allies, and so the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and others with military formations in place to assist came together and formed the united front called the Committee of Subjugated Nations and again worked on behalf of of the German military. In 1946, they renamed it the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, ABN. Stetsko was the leader of that until he died in 1986.

I mention this in part because the OUN tries to say well during the war we fought the Germans and the communists. The fact of the matter is that they were the leadership of this whole multinational alliance on behalf of the German the last two years of the war and in the war thereafter. All the postwar leaders of the unrepentant Nazi allies were all under the leadership of Yaroslav Stetsko.

What happened when Stetsko, and others like him from other German allied forces came to the United States?

In the United States, when they came, his groups organized ‘captive nations’ committees, they became, supposedly, the representatives of people who are being oppressed in Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, by the Soviet. But they were, in fact, being given an uncritical blank check to represent the voices of all these nations that were part of the Warsaw Pact when in fact they represented the most extreme elements of each of the national communities.

The Captive Nations Committee in Washington DC for instance was run by the person who headed the Ukrainian organization of nationalists, that was true in a number of places. In my hometown area near Detroit as well, they played a major role. In the early 50s, when they were resettled in the United States, there was at least 10,000 of them that were resettled, when you look at all the nationalities. They became politically active through the Republican national committee, because it was really the Eisenhower administration that made the policy decision in the early 1950s, and brought them in. They set up these campaign organizations, every four years they would mobilize for the Republican candidate, whoever it would be, and some of them like Richard Nixon, in 1960, actually had close direct ties to some of the leaders like the Romanian Iron Guard, and some of these other groups.

When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he made a promise to these leaders that they would if he won the presidency he would make them the ethnic outreach arm of the Republican National Committee on a permanent basis, so they wouldn’t be a quadrennial presence, but a continuing presence in the Republican Party. And he made that promise through a guy named Laszlo Pasztor, who served five years in prison after World War II for crimes against humanity. He was prosecuted in 1946 by non-Communist government that actually had control of Hungary at the time. There was a period from ’45 to ’48 when the Hungarian Communist Party didn’t run Hungary. They were the ones who prosecuted him. He had served as a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi party and Berlin; he served in the Berlin embassy of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. This is the guy that got picked to organize all the ethnic groups, and the only people that got brought in were the Nazi collaborators.

They didn’t have a Russian affiliate because they hated all Russians of all political stripes. There were no African Americans or Jewish affiliates either. It was just composed of these elements, and for a while they had a German affiliate but some exposure of the Nazi character of the German affiliate caused it to be quietly removed, but other [Nazi] elements were retained.

Your book was researched and published in the 1980s. What was happening by that point in time, after these groups had been established for more than a decade?

I went to their meetings in the 1980s, and they put out material that really make clear who they were there 1984, one of their 1984 booklets praised the pro-Nazi Ustashi regime in Croatia, and these Ustashi killed an estimated 750,000 people and burned them alive in their own camp in Croatia. And here they are praising the founding of this regime, and acknowledging that it was associated with the Nazis, and it was signed by the chairman of the Republican National Committee. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It was just crazy.

I interviewed the Kossack guy, he showed me his pension from service in the SS in World War II, and how he was affiliated with free Nazi groups in the United States, and he was just very unrepentant. These are the umbrellas that were called ‘Captive Nations Committees’ by these people that Stetsko was over, and was part of, too. The Reagan White House brought him in, and promoted him as a major leader and did a big dinner—[UN Ambassador] Jeane Kirkpatrick was part of it, George Bush as Vice President, of course Reagan—and Stetsko was held up as a great leader., And proclamations were issued on his behalf.

When Bush was running for president in 1988, Bush Senior, he came to these basically one of the leading locations of the Ukrainian nationalists in North America, which is in just outside of Detroit, a suburb of Detroit to their cultural center, and one of their foremost leaders in the world is headquartered out of their, at the time, he got Bush to come there and they denounced the OSI and Bush just shook his head, he wouldn’t say anything about it.

The OSI was the Offices of Special Investigations, it was investigating the presence of Nazi war criminals in the United States, and deporting those that were found to have lied on their history when they applied to come into the United States after the war. They had deported a number of people from all over the United States. They had a lot of open investigations, and all these émigré Nazis were trying to bring all the political pressure they could to stop these investigations, including the Ukrainian nationalists ones.

So they denounced them, the OSI investigations, in front of Bush, Bush nodded his head, but he wouldn’t say anything because he didn’t want to sound like he was sympathetic to the Nazi war criminals, but at the same time he didn’t want to offend his hosts by disputing the issue with them. So, the issue of World War II was still being played out over four decades later, in the politics of the presidency, and unfortunately Bush and Reagan continued to be on the side that we tried to defeat in World War II.

What was the response when your book came out, with all this information? How was the information received, and what was the political reaction?

Prior to the book’s publication, Washington Jewish Week had done a story about some of the ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign and their history, like denying the Holocaust, or being involved with these émigré Nazi groups. They named a couple of them that weren’t part of the Heritage Groups Council, but they were part of the Bush campaign.

Then when I published the book, it brought out a lot more names, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe did stories on them. It got to the point where when reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer would call them about one of their ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign the standard response was he’s no longer part of the campaign, and they’d say that almost as soon as the name would get mentioned. So that they would call that person, and I’ll give the example of Florian Galdau, he was, he ran the Rumanian Iron Guard in New York City. He had wartime record. [Romanian Archbishop Valerian] Trifa himself was implicated in the mass killing of Jews in Bucharest in 1941, I believe. Galdau’s record is clear, because when Trifa was prosecuted he was one of the people targeted by the Office of Special Investigations, and he was forced into deportation in the 1980s, but in those records, they identify Florian Galdau is one of his operatives, so his history is known, except apparently to the Bush campaign.

So when he was identified by the Philadelphia Inquirer, they immediately said he wasn’t part of it, so the Philadelphia Inquirer called Florian Galdau, and he said, “No, I’m part of it. They never said anything to me. As far as I know I’m still part of the campaign.” And that was the pattern.

The Republican National Committee said after the election that they were going to put a blue ribbon committee together and do an investigation of the charges in my book. I was never contacted, nobody affiliated with the book project, the publisher wasn’t contacted none, none of the sources I worked with was contacted. And after about a year, with nobody raising any issues or questions about it they just folded it up and they said well we have not had the resources to investigate this matter.

I did publish an op-ed in the New York Times about two weeks after the election was over, and I think that was the last time anybody said anything publicly about it that got any kind of forum. I think they were allowed to just die and wither away, that is those leaders. The Republican idea was probably to bring in another generation of people who were born in the United States as these émigré’s died off, but they never did anything about this history that Richard Nixon had bequeathed them with. The Reagan White House had really made deep political commitments and alliances with them, they didn’t want to look like they turned their back on them; and Bush wanted them for his reelection campaign, so he wasn’t going to turn his back on them either.

If you want an anecdote, I know that 60 Minutes was working on a piece that Bradley’s team was working on, and Nancy Reagan herself called the executive producer and said that we would really like it if you would wouldn’t do this story, and they killed it. Because, basically, it’s not just about Nazis and the Republican national committee were Nazis in the White House, it inevitably raises the question of who are they how did they get here, who sponsored them and it goes back to the intelligence agencies at that point. And some people don’t like treading there, if it’s tied to an intelligence agency, they prefer to just stay away from the subject. So, some people at 60 Minutes were frustrated by it, but that’s what happened. I think that they were able to effectively kill the story when people tried to cover it. They were able to persuade news managers to not delve into it too much.

What’s happened since you wrote your book, and most of the World War II generation died off? What have the OUN and its allies been up to since then that we should be aware of?

Once the OUN got sponsored by the American security establishment intelligence agencies, they were embedded in a variety of ways in Europe as well, like Radio Free Europe which is headquartered in Munich. A lot of these groups, in the ABN were headquartered in Munich under the sponsorship of Radio Free Europe. From there they ran various kinds of operations where they were trying to do work inside the Warsaw Pact countries. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a number of them moved back into the Ukraine as well as the other respective countries, and began setting up operations there, and organizing political parties. They reconstituted the veterans group of the Waffen SS, they held marches in the 1990s in the Ukraine, and organized political parties, in alliance with the United States, and became part of what was called the Orange Revolution in 2004, when they won the election there.

The prime minister was closely allied with them. They worked with the new government to get veterans benefits for the Ukrainian SS division veterans, and they started establishing the statues and memorials and museums for Stepan Bandera, who was the leader of the OUN, and who I should say was despised by other Ukrainian nationalists because of their methods, because they were extreme and violent toward other rival Ukrainian nationalist groups as well. So Bandera wasn’t a universal hero, but this group was so influential, in part because of its US connections, that if you go online and you Google ‘Lviv’ and the word ‘Bandera’ you’ll see monuments and statues and large posters and banners of Bandera’s likeness and large monuments permanent erected monuments on behalf of Bandera so they made this guy like he’s the George Washington of the Ukraine.

That government was in power until 2010, when there was another election, and a new regime was elected with a lot of support from the East. Ukrainian nationalist groupings around the Orange Revolution were sharply divided against each other, and there was rampant corruption, and people voted them out. The United States was very aggressive in trying to keep the nationalists in power, but they lost the election. The United States was spending money through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was pumping money into various Ukrainian organizations, and they were doing the same thing in Russia and many other countries around the world as well. We’re talking about many millions of dollars a year to affect the politics of these countries.

When the occupations came in Independence Square in Kiev late last year, you can see Svoboda’s supporters and you can hear their leaders in the parliament making blatant anti-semitic remarks. The leader of the Svoboda party went to Germany to protest the prosecution of John Demjanjuk, who was the Ukrainian who was settled in the United States, who was implicated as a concentration camp guard in the killing of innocent people. The German courts found him guilty and Svoboda leadership went to Germany to complain about convicting this guy. The reason they said they didn’t want any Ukrainian tainted with it because they live a lie that no Ukrainian had anything to do with the German Nazi regime, when history betrays them, and their own affiliations betray them. But they don’t like that being out there publicly, so they always protest their innocence of any Ukrainian being charged with anything, regardless of what the evidence is.

Your book was an important revelation but was not alone. Your book notes that Jack Anderson reported on the pro-Nazi backgrounds of some of the ethnic advisors as far back as 1971, yet when your report came out almost two decades later, everyone responded with shock, surprise, and even denial. What lessons should we draw from this history of buried history? And how should it influence our thinking about the unfolding crisis in the Ukraine?

I don’t believe it’s ever too late to become familiarized and educated about the history of this phenomenon both the wartime history and our postwar collaboration with these folks. There were a number of exposés written about the émigré Nazis. There was a 1979 book called Wanted and it did a number of case stories of these people being brought in to the United States, including the Trifa story. Christopher Simpson did a book called Blowbackthat discussed the policy decisions, it’s an incredible book. He’s a professor at American University and he did years of research through the Freedom of Information Act and archives, and got the policy documents under which the decisions were made to bring these folks together, and not just into the United States but to deploy them around the world.

Like my book, it didn’t get the attention it deserved. The New York Times book reviewer was negative toward the book. There are people that really don’t want to touch this stuff. There’s a lot of people who don’t want it touched. I think it’s really important for people who believe in openness and transparency and democratic values, who don’t want to see hate groups come back to power in other parts of the world to know what happened.

There’s not very many Americans that really even know that the Waffen SS was a multinational force. That’s been kind of kept out of the received history. Otherwise people would know that there were Ukrainian Nazis, Hungarian Nazis, Latvian Nazis, and they were all involved in the mass murder of their fellow citizens, if they were Jewish, or even if they were co-nationalists that were on the other side of the issue of the war. They were just mass murderers, across Eastern Europe. And that history, those facts aren’t even well-known. A lot of people didn’t even know this phenomenon even existed.

I think all Americans have a responsibility to know what their government is doing in the foreign policy in Europe as well as elsewhere around the world, as well as Latin America as well as Africa. Since our policy was to uphold apartheid in South Africa why weren’t Americans challenging that more? They began challenging that in the 80s, but the apartheid regime was run by the Nazi party. They were allied with Germany in World War II, they were the Nationalist party and they took power in 1948 and the United States backed that for decades. We backed the death squads in Latin America, even though they massacred tens of thousands of people – 30,000 people in Chile alone. Americans aren’t being attentive to what their government is doing abroad, even though it’s been doing done with their tax dollars and in their name, and I think we just have a general responsibility.

I went to these meetings, I went to these conferences, I went over a period of years. I met with them directly, most of the people I wrote about, I met with them personally or in group meetings. People can’t afford to do that on their own, timewise, but there’s enough literature out there they can read and pursue it, they will get enough enough of a handle to get what the real picture is, to demand change. I’m not totally partisan in this, but I think the Republican Party was extreme on this, but the Democrats folded and didn’t challenge this when they knew it was going on.

There is an old Roman poet that once said truth does not say one thing and wisdom another. I’m a believer in that. Tell the truth and wisdom will follow.

Paul H. Rosenberg is a columnist for Al Jazeera English and Senior Editor for Random Lengths News. 

Denying Nazi-Zionist Collusion

McClatchy, The Sacramento Bee, Darrell Steinberg and Islamaphobia

By ALISON WEIR
Weekend Edition
March 4 - 6, 2011
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

In an inversion of journalistic ethics, the Sacramento Bee reported on opposition to an event before and after it took place, but didn’t cover the event itself.

It featured an entire report on accusations against a flier, but didn’t include a response from the flier’s authors.

It printed claims by powerful local figures that the flier was “an outrageous lie,” but refused to print information showing that the flier’s statements were factual.

Its headline about the allegedly offensive flier emphasized a Muslim connection, even though there was virtually no Muslim connection to the flier.

It neglected to report that one of those attacking the flier had previously attempted to use his official position to prevent the event at which the flier was distributed from taking place.

And finally, the Bee’s parent company, McClatchy, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains, then sent out the Bee’s deficient story about a fliernation-wide, also emphasizing a (largely non-existent) Muslim connection in its headline, which then appeared on newspaper websites in Florida, Texas, Idaho, Mississippi, Alaska, and elsewhere, generating anti-Muslim comments.

The event in question was part of a national speaking tour that featured an Auschwitz survivor speaking about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Called “Never Again For Anyone,” it was sponsored by a diverse array of eight national organizations and nine local ones, secular, Jewish and Muslim, who reserved a hall owned by the local Islamic Center as the venue for the event. Also speaking was Dr. Hatem Bazian, a prominent academic from UC Berkeley.

The talk was immediately opposed by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, who contacted the Islamic center and demanded that the center refuse to allow the event to take place.

The rabbis called it a “program of hate,” claimed that both the theme and the presence of an Auschwitz survivor speaking about the plight of Palestinians were “anti-Semitic,” stated that allowing the 86-year-old Auschwitz survivor to speak would “defile the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust” (nothing was said of the multitudes of non-Jews, including Arabs and Muslims, who died under the Nazis), and threatened that Jewish-Muslim relations would be fatally jeopardized if the Islamic Center did not renege on its agreement to allow the event to take place on its property.

The Sacramento Bee ran a news story on the rabbis’ complaints, claiming in its lead sentence that because of the proposed event, “Sacramento's carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit,” although there is no indication that the planned talk was interfering with Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or other faith’s relations with the Muslim community.

Despite the attempt to prevent it, however, the event went forward as planned, drawing approximately 500 people. The Bee, despite choosing to cover prior complaints against it, chose not to cover it.

Four days later, however, the Bee carried another news story about the event, this time focusing on a complaint by the President Pro-Tem of the California Senate condemning a flier that was distributed at the talk.

California is in deep trouble. It is over $26 billion in debt and is facing potential bankruptcy. People have lost homes, businesses have failed, university fees have escalated. Yet, the Senate’s President Pro Tem, Darrell Steinberg, one of California’s most powerful politicians, twice took time out of his necessarily busy schedule to lodge semi-official complaints about the “Never Again” event.

Steinberg, who has worked to promote tolerance and build bridges with Muslim leaders to oppose bigotry, is devoted to Israel. In 2008 he was host of “Salute to Israel,” a celebration of Israel’s creation 60 years before, which had involved the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians to make room for the Jewish state.

According to the Jewish Forward, Steinberg became President Pro Tem “after intense involvement in the Jewish communal world, including stints as chairman of Sacramento’s Jewish Community Relations Council... The lobbyist for the California Jewish Public Affairs Committee, Cliff Berg, said he is looking forward to working more with an old friend.” Both organizations advocate for Israel; JPAC sponsors an annual 9-day trip to Israel for state legislators.  

Steinberg was strongly opposed to the “Never Again for Anyone” event. First, although the Bee didn’t mention this, Steinberg tried to stop it, sending a letter on official Senate stationery urging the Islamic Center to revoke permission for it.

Then, after the talk had taken place (which Steinberg did not attend), he sent a second letter to the Bee and to a few individuals in the interfaith community (it’s available only on a pro-Israel website), again on official stationery. In it he condemned a flier that had been distributed at the event.

Produced by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a cosponsor of the event, the flier included information about collaboration between Nazis and leaders of the Zionist movement (the political/military movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine that created Israel in 1948).

Steinberg was outraged. In his letter he particularly objected to the flier’s statements that “…Zionist leaders made ‘transfer agreements’ with the Nazis.... refused to observe the international boycott of Nazi Germany… and even kept silent about impending plans to deport Jews into Nazi death camps.”

Steinberg called the statements an “outrageous rewrite of history,” and claimed that "in essence, they are saying the Jews orchestrated the Holocaust,” although the flier said no such thing.

Similarly angered, according to the Bee news report, was one of the rabbis who had tried to prevent the talk, Rabbi Mona Alfi of Sacramento’s prominent Congregation B’nai Israel.

While the Bee didn’t mention this, Alfi is also the official California Senate Chaplain, a position she has held since 2008. She was appointed to this position by Steinberg, a member of B’nai Israel. 

(According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, two percent of Californians are affiliated with the Jewish faith.)

According to the Bee, Rabbi Alfi called the flier’s allegations that some Zionists were Nazi collaborators “a disgusting lie.”

While the Bee’s report also included statements defending the talk, it contained no statements in defense of the flier itself, the paper having made no attempt to interview the authors of the flier that was the focus of its article.

As a result, the report contained none of the extensive evidence supporting the flier’s content, thus giving readers the impression that a flier filled with objectionable falsehoods had been distributed.

Worse yet, since the Bee and McClatchy then chose to emphasize the venue of the event in their headline (“Flier at California Muslim center condemned by state senator”), despite the fact that the center had nothing to do with the flier, a headline and news story were sent around the country that served to reinforce the Islamophobic fiction that Muslims are inherently anti-Semitic, generating comments such as:

“Muslims have been successfully trading in anti-Semitism for decades, Steinberg isn't going to put a dent in it,” “ ‘The holocaust never happened.’ Since that didn't work, certain Muslims decided to try this disgusting piece of nonsense,” “My, my, those Muslim propaganda sites must be working overtime.”

Zionist-Nazi Collusion

In point of fact, however, the flier’s statements are accurate. There is detailed evidence that some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, that Zionists sabotaged anti-Nazi boycotts, and that Zionists interfered with efforts to rescue victims of Nazi oppression.

When facts first emerged in the 1950s about Zionist-Nazi collusion, it caused considerable scandal in Israel and led to the fall of the Israeli government of the time. A number of books are dedicated to this subject and it is discussed in numerous others, almost all by Jewish and/or Israeli authors. 

The topic inspired novels by well-known Israeli writers Amos Elon and Neil Gordon, was the subject of a 1987 British play, and was portrayed in a 1994 Israeli docudrama. It’s surprising that Steinberg and the Board of Rabbis make no indication of ever having heard anything about this.

Popular American playwright and fervent Zionist Ben Hecht wrote the first book on the subject, “Perfidy,” relating the history of a Hungarian Zionist leader who arranged for his family and several hundred prominent Jews to escape while facilitating the movement of the rest of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

Hannah Arendt, in her 1960 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil,” writes: “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”

In “The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine” (containing an afterword by ADL head Abe Foxman), pro-Israel writer Edwin Black reports that in 1933 Zionist leaders concluded a secret pact with the Third Reich that transferred 60,000 Jews and $100,000 to Palestine, Zionists promising in return that they would halt the worldwide boycott “that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.”

Author-researcher Lenni Brenner wrote of Zionist-Nazi collusion in “Zionism in the Age of Dictators,” of which the London Times stated: “Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.”

Brenner’s second book on the topic, “51 Documents, Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,” includes a 1940 letter from underground Zionist terrorist leader Avraham Stern proposing that Jewish militias would fight on Germany’s side in exchange for Nazi help in creating an “historic Jewish state.”

In “What Price Israel,” American Council for Judaism member Alfred Lilienthal describes FDR’s efforts to set up a program to rescue refugees, only to find Zionists sabotaging it. Roosevelt explained: “The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place this poor Jew can go.’”

When New York attorney Morris Ernst joined this refugee effort, he was shocked: “I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine who very frankly said ‘Morris, this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.’” Ernst wrote that he found a fanatical movement of men “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”

In “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Israeli historian Tom Segev quotes Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.”

Segev writes that Ben-Gurion worried that ‘the human conscience’ might cause various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany and saw this as a threat, warning: ‘Zionism is in danger.’”

In the Bee’s report on the controversy, Sacramento’s Rabbi Alfi is further quoted as saying "there is no comparison" between the treatment of Jews in pre-war Germany and Palestinians. Yet, in 2002 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli military was specifically studying Nazi Warsaw Ghetto strategies for use in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Journalistic Malpractice

The Bee’s decision not to cover an event about which it had reported prior complaints is highly questionable.

Even more serious, its decision to publish a news report featuring attacks against a flier without also interviewing the flier’s authors violates fundamental journalistic principles. The story was published four days after the event took place; taking the time to follow professional good practices would have made sense.

However, hindsight is always clearer than decisions made under a looming deadline, and in the rush of daily journalism serious lapses sometimes occur. The real test of a newspaper’s commitment to honest, principled journalism is how it handles such lapses.

Bee editors failed this test with flying colors. From here on I speak from personal experience.

I happened to read the Bee’s flier report soon after it was published. Because I’ve studied Israel’s history extensively and own the books mentioned above (and others that mention the topic), I was aware that the flier’s statements were factual and that the undisputed complaints against it were unfounded.

I felt this information needed to be given to readers as soon as possible to correct the misimpression conveyed by the Bee’s one-sided reporting. Since op-ed columns were specifically created as a place for outside writers to convey views and information not otherwise contained in a newspaper, I took several books on the topic and went to the Bee’s offices to propose an op-ed.

From the lobby I called opinion page editor, Stuart Leavenworth, saying that I’d like to discuss a potential op-ed for the paper. He said he was in a meeting and couldn’t meet with me, but asked what I wished to address.

When I told him, he expressed skepticism and said he would not print an op-ed saying that Zionists had collaborated with Nazis.

I told him that I had books on the subject with me that I could show him. He replied that normally someone would schedule such a meeting ahead of time. I agreed and asked when we could schedule such a meeting. He said he would not schedule one. He asked me a few more questions, interrupted my answers, and then told me to submit an op-ed. He said that I must supply citations.

I wrote the article, cited seven books, and said that I would provide more extensive citations if he wished (even though I had already supplied far more references than normally required for an op-ed). I also said that I would be glad to cut the piece if it was too long and said I was very comfortable with rewriting.

He refused to publish it, providing no explanation for this decision.

I am fully aware that editors always retain the power to decide what they will and won’t publish (I’ve been an editor myself). However, since journalistic ethics required the Bee to remedy sloppy, one-sided reporting that gave readers a false impression of a controversial local event, of Muslims at a time when violence and bigotry against them is escalating, and about Israel, with which the U.S. has a unique “special relationship,” I emailed and phoned my concerns to the Bee’s chief editor and others (it has no ombudsman), but to no avail.

The newspaper’s response was disappointing but unsurprising. Editors, particularly when it comes to Israel-Palestine, are far more concerned with daily deadlines, financial necessities, and the need not to anger powerful constituencies than with moral or ethical principles.

This reality, combined with considerable ignorance on the Middle East among many journalists, and pro-Israel, anti-Muslim bias among others, means that there is virtually no effort to correct errors or remedy significant omissions in coverage having to do with Israel.

As a result, Americans are largely left in the dark about the current reality and past history of the tiny, rich nation that receives more of our tax money than any other country on earth, currently at least $8 million per day, and that is at the center of profoundly important issues concerning both the region and our own nation.

Israel and its partisans are working to make sure it stays that way. If Steinberg, Alfi, Leavenworth, the Bee, and McClatchy continue their current pattern, it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon – unless enough people start to demand better.

Alison Weir is President of the Council for the National Interest and Executive Director of If Americans Knew, a nonprofit organization that provides information on Israel-Palestine. She splits her time between Sacramento and Washington DC. She can be reached atcontact@ifamericansknew.org.