C-Span Presentation on the Rescue of Rebbe Schneersohn
Language: English (en)

and public affairs, you're watching Book TV on C-SPAN 2. Coming up at 10.45 a.m. Eastern, Rescued from the Reich, Brian Mark Rigg on a rabbi's escape to America. Then, a new biography of 20th century British comic novelist P.G. Woodhouse. Tonight on Book TV, Encore Book Notes with Nathan McCall, author of Makes Me Wanna Holler. After that, When the News Went Live, a look at television coverage of the Kennedy assassination. And at 9.30 p.m. Eastern, Hero Mama, Karen Spears Zacharias, on Growing Up After the Death of Her Father in Vietnam. We're at the National Press Club Book Fair and Authors Night. We're with Clayton Swisher, the author of the... ...movement who escaped to America in 1940. This talk is an hour and a half. Thank you very much. Thank you, Director Strauss and Director Ryans, for having me again. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Now, can everybody hear me? Okay. I'm going to wait. We are blessed to have C-SPAN here tonight. I'm just going to wait and hear if they are okay. Okay. Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming tonight. I am honored to have in the audience my wonderful in-laws, Mary Dell and Dr. Paul Stelter. And also, we're honored in the audience to have Miss Neumark, or Newmark. She is the daughter of... ...Samuel Kramer, and Debbie Newmark, who joins us here. And Samuel Kramer was very instrumental in organizing this rescue. Without this gentleman, the rubbish nursing would not have gotten out of Europe during World War II. Now, before I begin, I'd like to give you a little background on my person. I was born in Texas in 1971, and I was raised in a very Protestant environment. I did not know about my own Jewishness. I didn't have a Jewish background until I was 21, when I went over to Germany and started researching my family's past. And I found all these Jews in the family tree. And I did not know what that meant at that time. I just had visions of an old white guy coming off a mountain with two rocks in his hands. I had no context from which to put that information into and understand about my Jewish background. And so, when I came back to Yale University to begin my sophomore year in 1992, I began talking to a lot of my... Jewish friends about what it meant to be Jewish and who is a Jew. And I was at the Hillel there. And during the course of this conversation, an Orthodox rabbi in the corner of the room overheard it, came over, and started mapping out my family's tree. And suddenly he got very excited, and he said, Baruch Hashem, you're a Jew! And I asked him, well, what does that mean? He says, well, according to Halakha, Jewish law, you are a Jewish. Welcome to the tribe. And soon thereafter, I got a book by Donan called, To Be a Jew, from him. And then about a year later, I got a scholarship from him to go to Or Sameach Yeshiva in Jerusalem and study with the Yeshiva bochas there, the Yeshiva boys. And so, I've really embraced my Jewish background, and I'm proud of that legacy. When I was in the Marine Corps, actually, I was in a platoon that had a man by the name of Schweitzer, had another guy by the name of Lee, he was from, you know, the tribe of Lebanon. And then there was Rigg, me. And I was the only person that knew the Shema. And every night, before we went to bed, we would line up, and in the Marine Corps, we'd always say, God, country, and corps, put our heads down, put our hands together, and there would be somebody that would lead us in a Protestant prayer, and then a Catholic prayer. And I went up to the company commander and said, hey, we got three people here in the platoon that are of Jewish descent. Do you mind if I do the Shema every night? And he agreed to do so. So every night, I led the Shema for Schweitzer, Lee, and myself. I also got the other extreme of Jewish experience and did a little stint in the Israeli military in 1998. So I've embraced that, and the reason why I tell you about that is had I not found out about my own Jewish background, I would not be standing before you talking to you about a book about Nazi Germany and the Third Reich. I'd also like to give you a little background on my educational history. Having failed first grade twice, I have what people today call ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Back when I was a kid, it was called HLD, hyperkinesis learning disabled, or MBD, minimal brain dysfunction. I also had a speech impediment when I was a kid. I got my Ts and Fs mixed up all the time, so when I played with my trucks around my family's friends, it was quite an interesting conversation. Or when I asked the babysitter to tuck me into bed, my mom was beside herself with grief going, oh vey, what am I going to do with this kid? So after I failed first grade twice and started having these creative language skills, my mom realized she had to do something very quickly. She had this nightmare that her 20-year-old son would be able to eventually drive himself to his own sixth grade graduation if she didn't do something. So she started looking around the area in Dallas-Fort Worth, where we lived, to find a special school for me. And she found one at Texas Christian University called Star Point. And it was a lab school that focused on severely learning disabled children. I met all the requirements, was accepted, and when I went there, I was very demoralized. Since the school that I had gone to, where I had failed first grade at twice, was also the church that my family went to, every Wednesday night, every Sunday morning, and every Sunday night, I went there. I was continually reminded of my failures. So when I went to this school, I was very down on my luck. And I told Mary Stewart, my teacher, about this. And after she heard about my experiences, she said, Brian, you're not a freak, you're not abnormal, you're just different. You're not learning disabled, you're learning different. And I'm here to help you find your strengths. And in one year, I went from not being able to pronounce individual words to reading books at the third, fourth, and fifth grade level, and doing math at the junior high level. I also, thank God, figured out the difference between T's and F's. And she taught me through this experience, she said, look Brian, you're a contrarian. All those kids were calling you stupid, that you couldn't read, and now you're reading at a higher level than they are. She also taught me through this experience that when people label criticism at you, they're telling you more about themselves than they are about who you really are. And that philosophy has really lived with me for the rest of my life. And when I graduated Yale University with honors in history, that teacher, Mary Stewart, was there. She's been a guiding light and angel in my life. And I tell you that because without that experience, I would not be in front of you today. Also, I had a wonderful mother and grandmother that helped me with my learning disabilities, and they got me on an all-natural diet, the fine gold diet that really helped me. They took away artificial flavors and artificial colors, and that got me on track as well. And I'm still on this diet today. I watch what I eat. A lot of people don't realize that artificial flavors and artificial colors and preservatives, they're petroleum-based products. You're actually eating oil when you eat them. BHT, which is in a lot of cereal, that's actually formaldehyde. That's what they use them bomb bodies with. So when I would eat that with the sensitive system that I had, it would make me go haywire. So I tell you this information, again, to give you a little background on my person, and also to let you understand that when I started researching about a Nazi soldier rescuing the head of Lubavitch, the most orthodox rabbi in 1939 out of Europe, and most of my professors told me, hey, you're not going to find anything. That contrarian kicked in. I said, hey, I'll look into it and see what I find. So now to my research. In 1992, I began researching the phenomenon about Jews and men of Jewish descent who served in the German armed forces during World War II, the results of which were published in 2002 as Hitler's Jewish soldiers. During the course of this research, I came across this story about our anti-Semitic, anti-refugee U.S. government working with the Nazi secret service to rescue a rabbi. And what makes this story even more incredible is that the person that the German secret service used to rescue the rabbi was a half-Jewish German major who had been Aryanized by Hitler. Now, ladies and gentlemen, tonight I'll be using terms like half-Jew, quarter-Jew, Aryan. Please have these terms and quotation marks in your mind's eyes. They are Nazi terms, but they help us understand the history from back then. And when I first came across this story, as one can well imagine, I doubted the validity of it. But further research has proved the truth of it. And it has been a wild journey that has brought me in touch with some wonderful professors and historians of the Third Reich, like Jonathan Steinberg, Michael Berrabaum, Richard Kranzler, and Henry Feingold. It also has brought me in touch with several Wehrmacht veterans of Jewish descent. Wehrmacht is the German term for the armed forces of World War II. And it has brought me in touch with numerous rabbis of one of the most ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, the Lubavitchers. Now, some of you might be asking, if this story is so incredible, why hasn't it been documented until now? Well, the Lubavitchers are a very ahistorical group. They do this in a very spiritual way. And many of them have not looked into it in depth. Also, the documents are spread out all over the world. And so many of them have just carried on the oral tradition that God saved the Rebbe. And that's basically the explanation that was good enough for them. Also, some historians and journalists have touched upon this rescue, but usually only in a few pages or a few paragraphs. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first historical account to synthesize sources from the Lubavitchers, documents from the archives, National Archives in America, as well as Germany, and written in oral testimonies into a single book. Much of what I'm about to tell you has never been told before. And in order to write this book, I had to go over 10,000 pages of documents, read over 60 books of the secondary literature, interview over 60 individuals, and collect hundreds of photographs. To understand this rescue, you must have a fundamental understanding of the Lubavitchers and their arch leader, the Rebbe. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect, known as the Lubavitchers, had its origins in the Hasidic movement, which began around 1730, under the charismatic leadership of the Baal Shem Tov. Hasidic is the Hebrew word for pious. Now the Baal Shem Tov came on the scene when Eastern European Jewry was suffering a lot of hardships. They had undergone the trauma of the false crusade of Sabbatai Tzvi, the false messiah crusade of Sabbatai Tzvi in 1666, and they had been devastated by pogroms in Poland and Russia. So they were hungering for a better future and for a better way to connect with God. And the Baal Shem Tov tapped into their desires with amazing power, and by the end of his life in 1760, the Hasidic movement numbered into the hundreds of thousands. This Hasidic movement is somewhat akin to what happened here in America with the Great Awakening, what the Baal Shem Tov was able to do for Eastern European Jewry. Now soon after his death, several of his closest disciples spread out through Eastern Europe and they set up their own schools of theology and their own Hasidic sects. One of them was Rebbe Shner Zalman of Lydia, who set up his headquarters in Lubavitch, Russia, hence the term the Lubavitchers. Now the Lubavitchers believed that, like other Hasidic sects, that their Rebbe and their philosophy, their Chabad philosophy, were incomparable. Chabad is an acronym for the Hebrew words Chokmah, Binah, and Dat, meaning wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. And these are Kabbalistic terms or Jewish mystical terms. And the Lubavitchers believed that every Jew should have a deep and mystical connection with God and have a thorough understanding of the 613 commandments that God has given every Jew to fulfill in his or her life. And although Messianism has been a constant theme of Judaism the last 2,000 years, the Lubavitchers focused much more on the Messiah and what each Jew must do to hasten his arrival than other Hasidic sects. And this has caused some controversy recently when Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, passed away with no heir apparent and many in the community declared that he was indeed the Mashiach, or the Messiah. Also since the beginning of this group, each Rebbe has focused heavily on outreach programs, building up, building up Chabad houses all over the world as they call them. As many of you know who have had contact with Lubavitch, there's not a corner on this world without a Lubavitcher Chabad house. I saw a cartoon recently that illustrates that point dramatically. It shows a picture of Mars. And as you look at this cartoon, it says underneath, intelligent life has been found on the red planet. And as you look over the horizon, you see golden rings and McDonalds, and then next to it you see a Chabad house. So they have really been amazing with their outreach program. Now I've used the term Rebbe several times, and many people have asked me about this word. The term Rebbe is a variation of the word Rabbi, which means my teacher or my leader, and is the title given to heads of Hasidic courts. While there can be many Rabbis in one Hasidic community, there usually can be only one Rebbe, not akin to the Catholic community, where you can have one Pope, but many priests. And in the Hasidic community, the leadership of a Rebbe is usually dynastic. Now the Lubavitchers believe that their Rebbis are endowed with mystical powers and are the potential Messiahs of their generations. Now for most observant Jews, every generation has a potential Messiah. The Lubavitchers just believe that if the Messiah is going to come, it's going to indeed be their Rebbe. They also believe that their Rebbe is endowed with the Holy Spirit, the Ruach HaKodesh, and is without sin. Elie Wiesel, a noted Holocaust writer and survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, eloquently describes what these Rebbis are. He says, He is what can be, what man wants to be. He is the chosen one who is denied nothing in heaven or on earth. God is angry. He can't even smile. God is severe. He can induce him to leniency. The Lubavitchers also believe that their Rebbis intellectually know and emotionally feel the spiritual and physical needs of every Jew everywhere and know how to connect him or her to God and reveal his or her role in the divine blueprint of humanity. So for members of Chabad, they believe that their Rebbis are not only perfect human beings but prophetic figures worthy of total submission. Elie Wiesel goes on to explain that in Hasidim, the Rebbi by the virtue of the strength he incarnates and the majesty he invokes is the father figure par excellence. Someone good yet strict. Someone charitable yet severe. Tolerant with others but inflexible with himself. In other words, a singular human being in whom all attributes converge and in whom all contradictions are resolved. The Lubavitchers also believe that their Rebbis, once dead, unlike other Jews who have died, are closer to heaven to God and are still able to hear the requests of people down here on earth. And as a result, many Lubavitchers go to the grave sites of their Rebbis and leave prayer requests there so that they may be heard more quickly. When our story starts to unfold in the 1930s, six generations of Schneerson family members had led the movement of Lubavitch as Rebbis. And the current leader was the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbi, Joseph Isaac Schneerson, who was born in 1880 in Lubavitch, Russia, and assumed command of the leadership in 1920 on the death of his father. He came on the scene as leader of Lubavitch when Russian Jewry was having a lot of difficulties. Most Lubavitchers at this time were living in Russia. And since the Soviet Union had taken over power, they had outlawed a lot of religious organizations and religious education. And this was one of the core tenets of Lubavitch. In Lubavitch, most Lubavitchers are very stubborn and they refuse to obey these decrees. And as a result, many of them were arrested and sent off to gulags in Siberia and killed. The Rebbi himself was arrested several times, beaten up horribly in jail. And in 1927, he was condemned to death. But before the death sentence was carried out, several prominent individuals throughout the world, one of them being Leo Beck, a famous reformed rabbi in Germany, Leo Beck, and even our president in the United States, President Coolidge, wrote on his behalf. Under this pressure, the Rebbi was released. But the Soviet Union was tired of the Rebbi shenanigans and they kicked him out of the country. And he went to Riga, Latvia, where he became a Latvian citizen. But then soon thereafter, he moved down to Warsaw, Poland, where he set up his headquarters outside of the capital in a town called Otwock. Now by 1939, his new headquarters there had spread out its tentacles all throughout the world. In America at this time, according to Lubavitch sources, there was around 150,000 Lubavitchers here. And also this headquarters was doing a lot of work, clandestinely of course, to support communities in Russia. In 1939, the Rebbi was 59 years old and he was not in very good health, probably due to all the persecution he had suffered under the Soviets. He had suffered a heart attack and a stroke and he was sick with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system, symptoms of which ranged from paralysis, numbness to incontinence, all of which the Rebbi seemed to suffer from. He also had difficulty moving around. He had to be put in a wheelchair to go from one point to another. And he also had to be helped up from chairs and out from cars. He also had difficulty speaking. When he did speak, it sounded like he was mumbling and his volume was not very high. Also adding to his ill health was the fact that he was overweight and he smoked over a pack of cigarettes a day. There wasn't a lot of knowledge back then about the dangers of smoking. Standing at 5 foot 8 and weighing over 200 pounds, he didn't strike a very impressive figure physically. Yet his followers thought of him as an incredible spiritual giant. Our story begins on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. And as 1.5 million German troops crossed over the border into Poland, 3.3 million Jews lived in that nation. By 1945, only a few hundred thousand of those Jews had survived the Shoah, that survived the Holocaust. With this in mind, one sees that half of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish Jews. Hitler's blitzkrieg tactics quickly overwhelmed the Polish nation, preventing most Jews from escaping. Behind his military legions came his killing squads that quickly implemented his world view of doing away with undesirables like socialists, priests, members of the intelligentsia, and Jews. Many of these barbaric acts were done in front of Wehrmacht commanders who surprisingly decided to protest these acts. One of them was the head of the German secret service, the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. And he believed that these atrocities defamed the German nation and that these units should be removed from Poland at once. Now when these protests reached Hitler, Hitler declared that our struggle must not be measured by terms of legality or illegality. Our methods must conform to our principles. We must prevent a new Polish intelligentsia from seizing power and rid the greater German Reich of Polish and Jewish riffraff. With such a policy in place, the Jews of Poland quickly fell into the abyss of the Holocaust. Jews who had survived in Poland during World War II did so by passing themselves off as Aryans, as the Nazis would call them, serving with the partisans, or surviving the ghettos and death camps. And one of the most remarkable rescues or escapes, if you will, from Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe in World War II was the escape of Joseph Isaac Schneerson, head of Lubavitch, and he did so with the help of Abwehr agents, with the help of German secret service agents. Now as I studied this story, the more I came to really believe that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. And to set that tone, I'd like to tell you the following story. A little boy comes home from Hebrew school, and his mother asks him, Hey, Johnny, what did you learn today? And Johnny says, You know, Mom, I really don't want to talk about it. And she's like, No, Johnny, I'd be interested. Come on, tell me, hon, what did you learn? He's like, Well, Mom, we learned about this guy by the name of Moses. And he was in Egypt at the time, and he was tired of the way the Egyptians were treating the Jews, so he gathered all the Jews together. There was a few million of them, Mom. And he escaped from Egypt. And then they came up to the Red Sea. And suddenly, they heard that the Egyptians and the Egyptian army was coming after them, Mom. We're going to kill them. So Moses, he got on his walkie-talkie, and he called in the Israeli Air Force to bomb and strafe the Egyptians. And while the Air Force, Mom, was bombing and strafing the Egyptians, he had his pioneers build this huge pontoon bridge across the Red Sea. And then he got the millions and millions of Israelites across that pontoon bridge, across the Red Sea on the other side. And then, Mom, he put satchel charges all along that bridge. And then when the Egyptians came on that bridge, he had those satchel charges blown up. The Egyptians, Mom, they can't swim. So when they fell in the water, they all drowned. And that's why we have the state of Israel today. The Mom looks down at Johnny, says, Johnny, is that what you really learned in Hebrew school today? Johnny looked down at the ground, kind of shuffled his feet and says, No, Mom, but if I told you the truth, you wouldn't believe it. Now, when the Germans invaded Poland, many of the Lubavitchers there went up to the Rebbe, and they said, Rebbe, you got to get out of here. It's dangerous to stay. The Germans are going to come here. But the Rebbe did not agree with the timing or methods. He said that the Lord Almighty would take care of his children in times of danger, and that he as a shepherd of his flock should not leave them in times of misfortune. He also said, slamming his cane down on the ground, that he would not have to get out of Poland, but Hitler would have to leave. Yet, for all of his bravado, he soon saw the writing on the wall, and he realized that he indeed needed to get out of Poland. And the plan was to take a car from Otwock to Warsaw, and then once in Warsaw to get on a train there and get to Riga, Latvia, to freedom. And before he left all his followers who had to remain behind, he told them, Be well and accept the yoke of heaven upon yourselves. Remember that the king takes care of those who serve him. Remember also that you are children of God, and may he protect you and keep you alive. May he watch over all of us and let us survive. And with that he got into the car and started on his way to Warsaw. Now the road leading to the capital was lined with the dead remains of horses, civilians, and Polish soldiers all caught in the maelstrom of battle. All along the horizon you saw the crumpled heaps of villages and buildings that had been hit by the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and large black plumes of smoke rose up high into the air. The sky and the earth seemed to be welded together into the chaos of war. And as the Rebbe and many of his followers were driving through this horror, many of them became scared for their lives and they started yelling out the Shema, the holy Jewish prayer. They thought that they were about to meet their maker. But the Rebbe calmed them down, telling them that God was watching after them and that his father, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, was right then and there in heaven, interceding on their behalves with God. A journey that should have taken them only a few, you know, half an hour to an hour, took them several hours, but eventually they arrived in Warsaw. But the Rebbe wasn't able to escape. The main train station had been bombed down to the ground and most of the train links leading down to the capital had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe. So the Rebbe was trapped. And here is a picture of Warsaw. In 1939, during the bombing campaign, 40% of the city would be bombed down to the ground and over 40,000 civilians would lose their lives. So the Rebbe was in the middle of a war zone. But he seemed to be always followed by a divine cloud of protection. One time he left a building and a minute later it was hit by bombs from the Luftwaffe. The whole structure came crumbling down. Everybody died. Another time he was in a courtyard during a bombing attack. Everybody outside that courtyard was hit and killed. The Rebbe was thrown by the concussion from one side to the other side, yet he was untouched. Another time the Rebbe was studying his Torah at a desk in somebody's home during a bombing attack. And the whole place was sprayed with shrapnel. Yet the Rebbe and his Torah were untouched. Many people at this time felt that if they wanted to survive the Nazi bombardment of Warsaw, they just had to stay close to the Rebbe. Now the Rebbe during this time, since he couldn't leave, he was trying to get a lot of his yeshiva students out on foot to neutral countries. He also was doing everything he could to save his library. He had a deep and mystical attachment to his 40,000 book library. On the 17th of September, and also I have this scene in your mind's eye, during bombing attacks, the Rebbe was in a wheelchair. So during a bombing attack, his yeshiva students had to run up to his room, pick him up in the wheelchair, carry him downstairs and into a bunker. If the building got destroyed, they had to put him on a stretcher or put him in the wheelchair and carry him through the burning streets of Warsaw. So this is what's going on all during this time. 17th of September, the Lubavitchers got a lot of bad news. The Soviet Union had invaded Poland from the east and were moving quickly on to the capital. And the Lubavitchers felt that if the Rebbe fell into the hands of the Soviets, no amount of international pressure would help save him this time. Yet they also felt the coils of the Nazi regime tightening around the capital, and they knew that if the Nazis got their hands on the Rebbe, he would also be murdered. On the 25th of September, Hitler decided to raze the whole capital to the ground. He was tired of the intransigence of the Polish High Command's unwillingness to surrender, and so he had all his forces focus on the capital. 500 tons of explosives and 72 tons of incineraries were dropped on the city by the Lubavitchers.