Target: Special Victims of the Holocaust

By David Chagall

Before World War 2, there was a total of sixteen million Jews in the world--over one fourth were sephardic Spanish Jews, tracing their ancestral lineage from the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Hitler engineered the genocide of six million Jews, almost all of them Ashkenazic or European Jews, descended from the Khazars, a pagan people from west Asia that converted to Judaism in the 8th century A.D.

Who were the Khazars? And why did their legacy result in persecution and death? Why have the Sephardim called the Ashkenazim "Tedescos"--Teutons? This important book shifts the basic question of the Holocaust from "Why the Jews?" to "Why the Ashkenazim?"

Challenging the myths of religious bigotry--since the ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews were nomadic Gentile Huns who galloped around the Steppes of Asia at the time Jesus was crucified--TARGET shows just where the true bloodlines of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are centered. On a deeper level, it explores the more complex geo-political roots of anti-Jewish feelings, the amazing number of prominent and influential Ashkenazim, and their role in the emergence of modern Israel.

Timely and incisive, TARGET presents new and incontrovertible genetic and DNA evidence that supports a long-overdue examination of "Who is a Jew" and who exactly are "The Chosen People." Buffered by strong historical evidence and documentation, this is a work that will forever change the way the reader looks at the complex question of Jewish identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 24, 2000
• ISBN: 9781453550564

David Chagall

For over 20 years, David Chagall was a research project director for The Roper Organization. Turning to investigative reporting, he served as a contributing editor (politics and media) for TV Guide, and a political analyst for ABC Radio, and the Christian Science Monitor. A Pulizter Prize nominee, he is the author of six other books, including THE NEW KINGMAKERS (Harcourt Brace, 1982), THE SUNSHINE ROAD (Thomas Nelson, 1988), and SURVIVING THE MEDIA JUNGLE (Broadman & Holman, 1996). Biographical sketches appear in Who’s Who In America and Who’s Who of International Writers.

Book preview

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1. BEGINNINGS

2: SPECIAL JEWS

3: NEW JEWS

4: OLD JEWS

5: THE ASHKENAZIC DIASPORA

6: LIFE IN THE LITTLE TOWNS

7: CZARS, KHAZARS

AND REVOLUTION

8: STALIN, HITLER &

THE ASHKENAZIC DEATH MACHINE

9: ISRAEL, BORN OF FIRE

10: THE ASHKENAZ SUNSET

11: GENES DON’T LIE

NOTES AND SOURCES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

PERIODICALS

To My Wife

JUNEAU

Whom I love with all my heart,

my lifelong partner, editor and encourager,

whose ongoing faith and persistence

in the face of great difficulties

has brought this book into print.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, whose collection of Holocaust and Judaica materials proved an invaluable source of information for this book. Also my thanks to the Center’s Senior Researcher Aron Breitbart who was most helpful in answering some tough questions and digging up documentation on the persecutions within World War II’s Russian zones of occupation.

I am also indebted to Jack Polak for his insights on Sephardic Jews, to Igor Kotler for his cogent recollections on growing up Jewish in the postwar Soviet Union, to Susan Suffes for her cogent suggestions and encouragement during the writing of this book, and to all those who paved the way—both obscure and renowned—in allowing me to offer up this next brick in the road of historical understanding.

To my wife and partner Juneau, go my gratitude and admiration for her invaluable insights, toughness of spirit and loving patience all during the research and writing of this book.

One final note. For the sake of easier readability, I have omitted numbered source references throughout the text. Whenever numbers pop up over a word, I find it tends to stifle the flow of thought and vision. That is why you will find no superscripted numerals in the expository portions of this book. Instead, the Notes sections in the back of the book, broken out by chapters, identifies page and line numbers of additional comments and source references for readers who have a serious wish to follow up the data or carry out further research.

David Chagall

Los Angeles, California

1999

1. BEGINNINGS

Adolph Hitler was walking the streets of Vienna’s Inner City late one afternoon in 1907. As he passed a Lubavitcher Jew from Eastern Europe, it was as though he had run into the Devil himself.

I suddenly encountered this apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks, he noted in Mein Kampf. "My first thought was—Is this a Jew? I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?

"I now began to relieve my doubts by books. I could no longer doubt that the objects of my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.

"The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell these were no lovers of water and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and generally unheroic appearance.

In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by my slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!

So began Hitler’s obsession with the Jews—specifically, the caftan wearing, black bearded Jews of Eastern Europe, centered in Poland, whom he saw as the biological basis of the Jewish race. When November of 1938’s Kristallnacht launched his holy war against the hated Jewish foe, obscured by talk of territory and conquest was the overriding frenzy of Hitler’s greatest passion—to cleanse Europe once and forever of these caftan-wearing devils corrupting German blood and culture.

Aiming directly at the destruction of Ashkenazic Jews, the Nazi death machine left the Sephardic Jews relatively unmolested. Ashkenazics are Jews of European extraction, who overwhelmingly make up the Jewish population of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Russia. Sephardics are Jews deriving from Spanish, Portueguese or Middle Eastern origin, who were among the early settlers in North and South America but who today represent less than 5% of all American Jews. Their major population centers today are in Israel, North Africa, Spain and France.

The fact that Hitler specifically targeted East European Ashkenazic Jews while pursuing with less zeal or frequently even ignoring Sephardics was, and still is, one of the least widely known and discussed features of the Nazi War Against The Jews. The big question remained—Why?

One afternoon I was at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles researching aspects of the Holocaust for a magazine article and I stopped off to talk to Aron Breitbart, the Center’s senior investigator. In the course of our conversation, I put the question to him. Did the Center’s research show significant differences between how the two major kinds of Jews—Sephardim and Ashkenazics—fared in the hands of the Nazi murder machine of World War Two?

His answer surprised me.

Sephardic Jews were by and large not molested by the Nazis, Breitbart told me. Especially when you compare what happened to them to the near obliteration suffered by the Ashkenazics. As you know, Hitler’s murderers killed over six million Jews—and ninety-nine percent of them were Ashkenazics.

Why the huge discrepancy? I asked, puzzled.

That’s a good question, he replied. "And I don’t know if I have a really good answer for you. Some say it was a simple case of geography, that the European Ashkenazics were just easier to reach because they lived close to Germany. Others blame it on the fact that the Nazi armies occupied precisely those lands which just happened to have Ashkenazic Jews in them.

But that really doesn’t hold up, the researcher explained. Rommel’s troops took over most of North Africa and the Middle East, so they really had millions of Sephardics in their grasp. Breitbart shrugged. In the end, I have to say we really don’t know.

Over the next few weeks, that question continued to plague me. Why Ashkenazics and not Sephardics? Was there anything about these two major branches of the Jewish people, any real or perceived differences, that could account for this tragic oddity of Twentieth Century history?

Looking for answers to that question led me back through the tunnel of time, back to those mid-Twentieth Century years when the world was aflame with war, when Europe had turned into a living hell and the mere fact of Jewish ethnicity virtually assured one of a one-way ticket to a death camp.

Particularly if you happened to be an Ashkenazic—or European—Jew.

2: SPECIAL JEWS

The stark facts are eye-opening. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, before World War 2 there were some 16.5 million living Jews in the world. One tenth—or 1.65 million—were Sephardic or Sephardi Jews, those of Spanish, Portuguese and Middle Eastern extraction.

Hitler’s murder machine killed off over 6 million Jews—and, just as Breitbart had pointed out—almost all of them (99.2%) were Ashkenazics or European Jews.

Informed death counts reveal that some 60,000 Sephardic Jews lost their lives to Nazi butchers between 1938-1945. While undoubtedly a tragedy of major proportions, this amounts to a Sephardic death rate of 3.6%. For world Ashkenazics, however, the death rate was about 40%—over eleven times the slaughter ratio for Sephardics!

The argument that the Nazis could not kill Sephardic Jews because they did not control their lands simply does not wash with the facts. In all conquered lands of Europe, Africa and the Middle East where the Nazis maintained firm or even absolute power to arrest, deport and kill, three of every four Ashkenazic Jews were murdered while nearby Sephardics were persecuted with far less zeal and in many cases spared or even protected.

The question remains, why? Was it simply the luck of the draw? Did some vague military imperatives enable Sephardics to avoid the virtually total destruction suffered by their Ashkenazic co-religionists, as some analysts claim? Or were there other factors—particularly some real or perceived ethnic differences between these two kinds of Jews—that helped promote a more virulent hatred toward Ashkenazics than Sephardics?

What did the Nazis know and believe about the Jewish people? Early Nazi attitudes about European Jews were shaped to a large degree by the ideas of Alfred Ploetz, Germany’s founder of racial biology. While Ploetz believed that all peoples were racial mixtures, he hypothesized that the blond, tall Germanic stock represented the ultimate breed.

The majority of European Jews, in his view, were racial aryans with little Semitic blood flowing in their veins. When Ploetz organized the Society for Racial Hygiene, his group’s statutes of 1904 and 1922 did not mention race, and in fact implicitly encouraged mixing between Germans, French, English and Jews. Ploetz drew the line at colored races, however, an aversion Hitler was later to share.

In 1933, when Ploetz joined the Nazi Party, he still countenanced no racial feeling against Jews. It was not until late 1935 that his Society’s Journal for Racial and Social Biology first ascribed signs of inferiority to Jews. Ploetz’ high regard for Jewish abilities, in fact, may have provoked Hitler to regard European Jews as even more dangerous antagonists than he had previously thought.

When Kristallnacht in November 1938 launched Nazism’s holy war against the hated Jewish foe, obscured by talk of territory and conquest was the overriding frenzy of Hitler’s greatest passion—to rid Europe once and forever of these caftan-wearing devils corrupting German blood and culture.

Soon after the Nazis invaded Poland, Hitler confided his intention to Secret Police chief Heinrich Himmler—I have after much deliberation decided to blot out once and for all the biological basis of Judaism, so that if the Aryan peoples emerge weakened from the conflict, at least a crippling blow will have been dealt to those other forces.. whatever the consequences.

Aimed point-blank at the destruction of European Jews, the Nazi death machine left many Sephardics relatively untouched, and in some instances even made special exceptions of them. Even more marked was the different treatment accorded the two Jewish groups by their host nations.

In Holland, for example, an enclave of several hundred Sephardics lived among a much larger community of German Ashkenazics. The Sephardim had originally arrived in Amsterdam from Portugal starting in 1590. At that time the Netherlands was a world financial center, one of the leading industrial nations of the world with a tolerant political and religious climate. The agreements of the Union of Albrecht gave complete religious freedom to every inhabitant, thereby making Holland one of the very few countries where Jews never suffered persecution or lived under legal restrictions. Such emigre thinkers as Baruch Spinoza and Manasseh ben Israel, whose familes were among the Sephardic refugees expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, were warmly welcomed by the Dutch.

Bringing their wealth with them, the Sephardics quickly found their places in Dutch society by investing in international finance, maritime trade, manufacturing and retail shops. Though their numbers would never become large, they soon produced outstanding statemen, surgeons and scientists. Many were artists, engravers, poets and playwrights, others became involved in the stock market and export business. Sephardics led in setting up trade relations with the North African Barbary states and Turkey which then dominated the eastern Mediterranean. Owning a fourth of the Dutch East India Company, they helped establish the firm’s West India branch and many of them resettled in Brazil.

They built impressive houses and imposing synogogues, acquired prestigious art collections and generally enjoyed a sumptuous life style. A typical Spanish Jewish family lived in a narrow brick house, with sunny glass windows, sharing common walls with their neighbors. The front room served as their parlor, while the entire family cooked, ate and slept in the back room.

A wealthier family occupied a similarly narrow structure with an additional two or even three stories, featuring an upstairs parlor along with their sleeping chambers. The walls of every room were adorned with paintings, mirrors and maps. Some of the wealthiest families boasted original Rembrandts, as the artist often was commissioned by the Sephardics to portray Jewish subjects in his oil paintings.

Interacting with the non-Jewish Dutch in business affairs, their social life was nonethless centered in their family, synogogue and circle of Sephardic friends. Like the Dutch Christians, their community enjoyed a rich, family-centered religiously oriented life style. For more than two centuries the Sephardics enjoyed an exclusive Jewish franchise in the Netherlands.

Then, in the mid-17th century, large numbers of Ashkenazics began filtering into Holland, escaping persecution and hard times in Germany. These were followed by large numbers of Polish Jews, who were forced to unite with the Germans by a municipal ordinance. Differences between the entrenched Sephardics and the European newcomers were enormous.

Most of these Ashkenazic Jews were impoverished. Coming from shtetls (little towns) and walled ghettos, many of them congregated into enclaves in the cities and larger towns to form a new sort of Jewish community. In marked contrast to the Sephardics, the Ashkenazics were of peasant extraction, mostly ignorant, poor, illiterate and uncultured.

The life style of Dutch Ashkenazics was harsh, their work menial, and they rarely interacted with their Sephardic co-religionists, not to speak of their native Dutch countrymen.

Ashkenazics owned few possessions. Their homes lacked both water and sanitation, and contained almost no furniture. Their houses were so small that privacy of any kind was unknown and family life was badly compromised in their tiny one-room hovels, really little more than cramped sleeping shelters. Inside, there was living space only for the parents and infants.

Older Ashkenazic children were quickly separated from their families and sent out to live and work as apprentices or live-ins so as to cut down on expenses. The men eked out meager livelihoods as butchers, livestock dealers, diamond workers, peddlers, printers, grocers and dealers in second-hand goods.

It was only in their religious life that the Ashkenazics excelled. They held to ultra-severe and strict interpretations of all the rules and regulations required not only by Mosaic and Talmudic law, but also the even more demanding codes of the rabbis. The Sephardim, with rare exceptions, were much more relaxed in their observances.

Though remaining in a lowly, subservient social position, over the years the Ashkenazics outbred and soon outnumbered the Dutch Sephardics who over time lost their absolute power and wealth. Nevertheless, they continued to boast class supremacy through their geneological and historical pride.

Then, in 1940, the Nazis marched into Holland. By July 1942, deportations began with wholesale roundups of Ashkenazics. But there were special exemptions for pure Sephardics without Eastern European Jewish blood and no Jewish marriage partners.

Appeals presented to the Nazi administrator for Holland, Dr. H.G. Calmeyer, claimed that the Dutch Portuguese Jews had almost no Jewish blood by race since prior to 1750, their rabbis absolutely forbid mixed marriages between Sephardics and Ashkenazics. Intermarriages were so rare as to create a scandalous stir in the Sephardic community when they did occur, to the shame of the afflicted family. Historically, the two groups had studiously maintained separate charities, schools, synogogues, identities and lifestyles.

A report titled Die Herkunft der Sogenanten Portugiesische Juden (The Origins of the So-Called Portuguese Jews) was prepared by two university professors, Profs. J.F. van Bemmelen and C.V. Ariens, lauding the Sephardics while treating their German co-religionists with contempt.

Another study focused on blood analyses, concluding that Sephardics carried in their veins a strong strain of West Gothic blood. Yet another research project offered up historical proofs that the entire community of Sephardics were of non-Jewish origin.

The Germans were provided with a list of names common to Portuguese Jews and a list of 370 individuals was published in 1943, allowing these Special Jews to move about freely. The Nazi administrators absolved them of the requirement to wear the mandatory yellow star of David, and they were entitled to use streetcars and travel from town to town without permission.

In the wake of analyses by Nazi experts and genetic consultants, Dr. H. G. Calmeyer authoritatively declared that the Amsterdam Sephardim had no affinities whatsoever with Eastern Jewry. Therefore they were exempted from the true racial Jews targeted for destruction.

By the summer of 1943, when 60% of the Ashkenazics had already been sent east to the death camps, a respected Dutch anthropologist—Dr. A. de Froe—published a paper called An Anthropological Investigation of the Composition of the so-called Portuguese Jews in the Netherlands. Based on a study of 375 men and women, it concluded that skull measurements proved convincingly that so-called Portuguese Jews could not by any stretch of the imagination be classified as Jews. Rather, they showed strong affinities with western Mediterranean races.

It was only during the last months of the war when Adolph Eichmann’s Jew-hating frenzy reached non-discriminatory fever pitch that some of the exempted Dutch Sephardics were picked up and sent to Theresienstadt.

Jack Polak, who survived the Nazi death camps, is a Dutch Ashkenazic who, prior to his arrest by the S.S. in 1942, identified with the Sephardic community and regularly attended services at the Sephardi temple in Amsterdam. Polak confirmed to the author that The Portuguese Jews regarded themselves as a nobler race and manifested this sense of superiority in their lives. If the war had ended twelve months sooner, the Dutch Sephardics would not have lost anyone at all—except by mistake!

Similarly dramatic distinctions between Ashkenazics and Sephardics were encountered elsewhere in Europe. When roundups were instituted in many of the occupied countries, the Nazis found themselves facing powerful resistance among the conquered people, many of them loathe to include their Sephardim with foreign Jews of Ashkenazic origins in the eastbound death trains. Whereas the usually wealthier Sephardics were firmly integrated into these societies, the Ashkenazics—predominately poor, ghettoized, Yiddish-speaking aliens—were seen by contrast as completely expendable, even undesirable outsiders.

When Rumania, one of the most anti-Jewish countries in pre-war Europe, entered the war as a Nazi ally in 1940, Marshal Ion Antonescu immediately declared all resident Jews to be stateless persons—with the exception of several hundred Sephardic families who his administration labeled as Spanish nationals, a designation accepted by the Nazis. But the Ashkenazics, as a legally unprotected minority, were soon decimated by the persecutions, pogroms and butchery that followed.

Historically, Rumanian Jews had not been regarded as citizens for centuries. The population was so violently anti-Jewish that, if Nazi reports are credible, even the S.S. officers were horrified by the butchery they encountered against Jews by homegrown pogroms. They claimed to have intervened on occasion, on the premise that the killing be done in a more humane way by shooting or gas.

The Rumanians took a major role in the Nazi invasion of Russia, which for them amounted to a war against the Jews. Slaughtering 200,000 Jews in Bessarabia, they packed Jews into cattle trucks without food or water and drove them around aimlessly until they died.

In October 1941, the Rumanians massacred the Jews of Odessa, crowding them into warehouses where they poured gasoline over them and set them afire. Some 30,000 Jews were burned alive in one day. In the Ukraine, the Rumanians killed 140,000 Russian and Rumanian Ashkenazics. Next to the Germans themselves and the Austrians, the Rumanians were the third-place champion Jew killers.

Yet thanks to Franco’s intervention and Rumanian cooperation, not one Sephardic Jew in Rumania was ever molested. Their properties, real estate, businesses and bank accounts were kept intact. They could drive their cars freely, use their telephones, keep servants and not have to wear the infamous yellow star. In his report to Madrid, the Spanish ambassador in Bucharest boasted, In the midst of a country where Jews in general were being sacrificed, our Jews became the envy of all other Jews.

In Nazi-occupied France, a Statut des Juifs (Regulations of Jews) was issued by the Vichy government, purging Jews from government, commerce, the crafts, news media, publishing and industry. The edict severely limited Jews from holding jobs as doctors and lawyers, while at the same time it established a maximum 3% limit for Jewish university students. Since one of the cornerstones of Vichy ideology was a sharp distinction between French Jews and foreign Jews—with Sephardics safely ranked among the French variety—more than 30,000 foreigners, superfluous in the French economy, were arrested and interned in prison camps during the summer of 1940. These foreigners were overwhelmingly Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe, along with a sprinkling of German, Austrian, Dutch and Slovakian Ashkenazic Jews.

Special exemptions were granted by the Vichy government for all Jews of Sephardic origin, whose families came from Spain to France. Freed from the indignity of wearing the yellow star, Paris-owned property of many Spanish Jews was exempted from government confiscation. This priveleged status enabled many French Sephardim to go through the war years enduring little greater hardship than most other French citizens, and they were able to avoid the economic ruin suffered by Ashkenazic Jews, not to mention sharing their murderous fate.

Francisco Franco’s Spain, allied with Nazi Germany even if nominally claiming neutrality, was able to use its considerable influence throughout occupied Europe and Africa to save Sephardic Jews, some from the very gas chambers themselves. When the Spaniards drove the Moors out of its territory, one of the monarchy’s first acts was to expel their Jews in 1492. But Spanish consulates all over the world continued to maintain fastidious records of all the names of exiled descendants. So it was that the Holocaust gave the Spaniards the opportunity of making partial amends by reinstituting citizenship for Sephardim who had not set foot on Spanish soil for nearly 500 years. In every European country where Sephardic Jews could be found, the Spaniards stretched every loophole of international law to save Sephardics.

In March 1942, reports reached Madrid that some Sephardim were being arrested in central France. Generalissimo Franco ordered his ambassador in Paris to put severe pressure on the Vichy government, threatening to seize all French holdings—and the Sephardim were released immediately! According to the Spanish embassy records, its interventions directly allowed some 6,000 Sephardic Jews to live, work and survive Nazi persecutions in occupied France.

Tens of thousands of French Sephardics were permitted to cross the border into Spain, where they were able to survive the war with government aid and the help of local Jewish families.

Turkish and Rumanian Sephardics, hiding out in south-Central France, made contact with the Spanish embassy who furnished nearly 600 people with identity papers, enabling them to escape to Spain and Switzerland.

When the Nazis began deporting Jews