Dan Cohen

@dancohen3000

16h

Erza Yachin was a member of the Lehi, the Zionist terrorist group that twice attempted to ally with Nazi Germany and sought to found a copycat fascist state.

On 11 January 1941, Vice Admiral Ralf von der Marwitz, the German Naval attaché in Turkey, filed a report conveying an offer by Lehi to "actively take part in the war on Germany's side" in return for German support for "the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich."

Middle East Eye

@MiddleEastEye

18h

“These animals can no longer live.”

Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old Israeli army reservist, is seen inciting “every Jew with a weapon” to kill Palestinians and “erase the memory of them”

Oct 13, 2023 · 9:32 PM UTC

https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1712944415637901684

>>19734963

>the Lehi, the Zionist terrorist group that twice attempted to ally with Nazi Germany and sought to found a copycat fascist state.

Where have I seen that logo before?

The Story Of Lehi, The Jewish Terrorist Organization That Tried To Form An Alliance With The Nazis

By Morgan Dunn | Edited By Leah Silverman

Published May 19, 2020

Updated May 20, 2020

Although never numbering more than 200, Lehi would leave a permanent mark on Israeli politics, history, and culture due to their violence.

Lehi established a reputation in Palestine for indiscriminate aggression, grandiose politics, and a willingness to do whatever it took to create an ethnic Jewish state.

In the first half of the 20th century, a profusion of groups worked to establish a Jewish nation in the state of Israel. Known as Zionists, these activists believed that Israel was the rightful land of the Jewish people and should be governed as such.

But one faction of Zionists took an extremist position. It was 1940, and amid the most vicious war humanity had ever seen, Lohamei Herut Israel, or Lehi, was just forming.

The self-described “terrorists” were led by the charismatic operative Avraham “Yair” Stern, and they vowed to stop at nothing, including assassinations, bombings, and allying themselves with Hitler himself, in order to realize their vision.

Indeed, Lehi did what was, for Zionists, unthinkable: they attempted to ally with Nazi Germany to establish a fascist Israel.

The Political Climate Before Lehi Zionism

Long before Stern established his group, militant Zionists struggled for independence from the more pragmatic Zionists under the guidance of Russian-born political activist Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky had also helped to found Irgun, a radical terrorist group that sought to evict the British from Palestine, which at that time loosely ruled the West Bank.

Palestine was already populated by opposing groups when the British invaded. These included Christians, Jews, Arabs, and Druze, among others, who each believed they held more right to the land than the others.

This uneasy balance in Palestine was further upset in 1939 when Britain mandated that it needed to become a Jewish state within ten years. Until such time, however, Jewish immigration into Palestine would be restricted. Both Arabs and Zionists rejected this mandate, viewing it as a betrayal of earlier promises they’d each made with Britain.

But when Irgun decided against an open revolt on the British, one of its members decided to go his own way.

Avraham Stern’s Bizarre Offer

Avraham Stern was born in 1907 in what is now Poland and emigrated to Palestine at the age of 18 as part of the Second Aliyah, which was the second time Jews immigrated en masse to Israel.

By 1939, Stern was a veteran of Irgun and other militant groups. He had come to believe that Britain was Israel’s most significant enemy and posed the greatest threat to the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel.

While Stern believed that Adolf Hitler was an anti-Semite, he also believed that the Führer could be useful in realizing his vision of a revived Kingdom of Israel founded on authoritarian principles.

Avraham Stern Portrait

Wikimedia CommonsStern was a poet and an activist, and he was convinced that Britain posed the greatest threat to the establishment of Israel.

Stern consequently led a splinter group of Irgun called Lohamei Herut Yisrael or “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.” The British referred to them as “the Stern Gang.”

>>19735063

>The Story Of Lehi, The Jewish Terrorist Organization That Tried To Form An Alliance With The Nazis

He took Jabotinsky’s idea of a mass exodus of European Jews to Palestine and crafted an outlandish proposal: in return for Lehi swearing their allegiance to the Axis Powers, Stern wanted all Jews under the Nazi administration to be transferred to Palestine, 40,000 of whom would be immediately armed and trained to rebel against the British authorities.

This proposal wasn’t entirely illogical. Stern had experienced firsthand how hostile the British were to Zionists and, until 1942, one could imagine that Hitler might have been satisfied with simply evicting the Jewish population out of his empire rather than exterminating them as he chose to do instead.

Besides, by this time, the Axis powers seemed invincible with their iron grip on Western Europe and it seemed like only a matter of time before Britain fell to them, too. Stern, misguided though he was, thought Lehi was taking the winning side in history.

Lehi Collapses

Stern made his offer three times, first to the Italians and then to the Germans, in 1941. But as far as is known, neither of these fascist governments took the proposal seriously.

Stern’s resolve against the British hardened when he learned that his father was trapped in Poland. He believed this was because of British restrictions on Jewish travel and did not realize that it was actually because Nazi death squads were preparing for the wholesale murder of Polish Jews.

Ultimately though, Stern’s biggest mistake was in failing to recognize Hitler for the monster he was, having so desperately hoped to establish an alliance with the powers he believed would take over the world.

NYT Article On Folke Bernadottes Assassination

Though Lehi’s mission was lofty and brutal, their ranks never numbered more than 200 at a time and were constantly broke. As such, their violent plans didn’t always come to fruition, and when they did, they often failed.

For instance, in January 1942, Lehi militants attempted to rob a bank in Tel Aviv, resulting in the deaths of two Jewish bystanders. This was followed by another attempt in the same month to kill the British commander of the Criminal Investigation Department. Three policemen were killed, two of them Jewish.

Furthermore, British intelligence was far too effective for a small terrorist organization like Lehi to succeed. Every detail of what they had attempted to do was known and the British even arrested an emissary Lehi had sent to meet with Italian diplomats in Beirut.

Although it’s possible that the Reich may have briefly considered Stern’s preposterous alliance, it would never amount to anything but a garish dream anyway.

In February 1942, with a price on his head, Stern was shot dead in uncertain circumstances in a Tel Aviv apartment. Lehi would be forced to struggle on without his dubious leadership.

Further Bloodshed

With Stern dead and many of his followers arrested or in hiding, Lehi was comatose. But then two leading operatives, Yitzhak Shamir and Eliyahu Giladi, escaped from custody and wasted no time in re-establishing the organization based on a campaign of bank robbery, bombing, assassination, and kidnapping wealthy Jews throughout Palestine.

William Guinness Lord Moyne

Imperial War Museum, LondonWhen Lehi assassinated Walter Edward Guinness, First Baron Moyne, in 1944, Britain was enraged and mainstream Zionists turned against them.

In 1944, Lehi succeeded in killing Walter Guinness, First Baron Moyne, and the highest-ranking British official in the Middle East. Killing a high-profile Brit garnered Lehi the notoriety they craved, but it won them no sympathy from Palestinian Jews and further infuriated the British government under Winston Churchill.

>>19735063

>>19735066

>>The Story Of Lehi, The Jewish Terrorist Organization That Tried To Form An Alliance With The Nazis

Then Lehi bombed the Cairo-Haifa train, killing nearly 100 and wounding dozens.

But their most renowned crime would come only after the war.

In 1947, more Jews than ever poured into Palestine and the time seemed nigh for the establishment of an all-Jewish Israel. But when the United Nations proposed the creation of separate Palestinian states for Jews and Arabs, Irgun and Lehi were outraged. They were committed to creating a purely Jewish nation free of Arab inhabitants, so they joined forces.

In April 1948, 120 Irgun and Lehi militants attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacring 100 to 250 villagers and wounding 12.

The massacre made the two groups hated by all but the most radical of Zionists. Along with international condemnation, the massacre was a vital catalyst in the decision of Jordan to invade and thus begin the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, finally ending with the creation of an independent Israel.

A Little-Known But Lasting Legacy

The Stern Gang quietly evaporated after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, with its last few leaders on trial despite its efforts to transition into a pro-Soviet political party. Those members who didn’t join the newly-formed Israel Defense Forces, or retire voluntarily, drifted into even more fanatical groups that continued to pursue campaigns based on assassination and bombing.

Yitzhak Shamir, one of Stern’s successors, would later become the seventh prime minister of Israel. He established a reputation for being relatively open to compromising with Israel’s neighboring Arab states.

Geulah Cohen, Lehi’s primary radio DJ, became a member of Knesset, the Israeli parliament, acting as a far-right hardliner until her retirement in 1992.

But while Lehi’s members may have seen themselves as liberators and nation-builders, their actions likely only hindered any hopes for a peaceful establishment of the nation they longed for, and their violence sealed their reputation as radical terrorists.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/lehi

>>19735072

>>>The Story Of Lehi, The Jewish Terrorist Organization That Tried To Form An Alliance With The Nazis

The following is a partial list of Lehi operations. Lehi split from the Irgun in August 1940, and dissolved in late 1948.

Operations by year

1944

January 28 – failed attempt to blow up St. George's Cathedral, Jerusalem, at the wedding of the Marquess of Douro to Diana, daughter of the British general Douglas McConnel.[1]

February 14 – Two British constables were shot dead when they attempted to arrest Lehi fighters pasting up wall posters in Haifa.[2]

March 13 – Lehi kills a Jewish CID officer in Ramat Gan.[2]

March 19 – A Lehi member was shot dead while resisting arrest by the CID in Tel Aviv. Lehi retaliated with an attack in Tel Aviv that killed two police officers and wounded one.[2][3]

March 23 – Lehi attack in Jerusalem kills a police officer and wounds another.

November 6 – Lord Moyne, British Deputy Resident Minister of State in Cairo was assassinated by Lehi members Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri; this operation triggers The Hunting Season. Moyne's driver was also killed. Hakim and Bet-Zuri were executed for the murders.

1945

October – The Jewish Resistance Movement, a cooperation between the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi is activated by the Jewish Agency until August 1946.

November 1 – Night of the Trains

December 27 – Irgun and Lehi bombings of police stations in Jerusalem and Haifa leave 10 dead and 12 injured.

1946

In 1946, several British high officials, including Sir Stafford Cripps, Ernest Bevin, and Anthony Eden received letter bombs apparently sent by Lehi.[4]

February 26 – Irgun and Lehi fighters attacked three British airfields and destroyed dozens of aircraft. One Irgun fighter was killed.[5]

April 25 – Lehi fighters attacked a Tel Aviv car park that was being used by the British Army's 6th Airborne Division, killing seven British soldiers and looting the arms racks they found. They then laid mines and retreated.[6]

June 17 – Lehi attacked railroad workshops in Haifa. Eleven Lehi members were killed during the attack.[7]

September 9 – Two British officers were killed by an explosion at a public building in Tel Aviv.[8] A British police sergeant, T.G. Martin, who had identified and arrested Lehi leader and future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, was assassinated near his Haifa home.[9]

September 29 assassination of Tom Wilkin[10]

1947

In 1947, several letter bombs were sent to President Harry Truman in the White House. They were intercepted by White House mail room workers, who were on alert because of similar looking letter bombs sent to British officials.[4][11] Former Lehi leader Nathan Yellin-Mor admitted that letter bombs had been sent to British targets but denied that any had been sent to Truman.[12]

January 12 – A Lehi member drove a truck bomb into a police station in Haifa, killing two British and two Arab constables, and wounding 140.[8]

April 23 - Lehi mines a train outside Rehovot. The bombing kills five British officers, two Arab adults and a 3-year old, Gilbert Balladi.[13]

April 25 – Lehi bombed a British police compound, killing five policemen.[8]

May 4 – Acre Prison break – Irgun members working with Jewish prisoners inside Acre Prison managed to blow a hole in the wall, and assault the prison, freeing 28 Jewish prisoners. Nine Irgun and Lehi fighters, including commander Dov Cohen, were killed during the retreat.[14] Five Irgun fighters and eight escapees were later captured.

May 15 – Two British soldiers were killed and seven injured by Lehi. A British policeman was also killed in an ambush.

June 4 – Eight Lehi Letter bombs addressed to high British government officials, including Prime Minister Clement Attlee, were discovered in London.[8] A British soldier was killed in Haifa.[15]

June 28 – Lehi fighters opened fire on a line of British soldiers waiting in line outside a Tel Aviv theater, killing three soldiers and wounding two. One Briton was also killed and several wounded in a Haifa hotel. A Jewish fighter was also wounded.

June 29 – Four British soldiers were wounded in a Lehi attack at a Herzliya beach.[8]

September 3 – A postal bomb sent by either Irgun or Lehi exploded in the post office sorting room of the British War Office in London, injuring two.[16]

September 26 – Irgun fighters robbed a bank, killing four British policemen.[17]

November 13 – Lehi grenade attack on British soldiers in cafe leaves 1 dead and 27 wounded.

December 25 – Lehi members machine-gun two British soldiers in a Tel Aviv cafe.[8]

>>19735087

>The following is a partial list of Lehi operations

1948

January 4 – Lehi detonates a truck bomb against the headquarters of the paramilitary al-Najjada located in Jaffa's Town Hall, killing 15 Arabs and injuring 80.[8][18]

February 29, March 31 – Cairo–Haifa train bombings 1948

April 9–11 – About 110 Arabs massacred (the estimate generally accepted by scholars, instead of the first announced number of 254) during and after the battle at the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, by 132 Irgun and 60 Lehi fighters.[19][20][21][22][23]

May 3 – A Lehi book bomb posted to the parental home of British Major Roy Farran was opened by his brother Rex, killing him. Roy Farran was court-martialed on a charge of murdering an unarmed 16-year-old member of Lehi during his command of an undercover Palestine Police unit.[24]

September 17 – Assassination of Folke Bernadotte

October 28 – Al-Dawayima massacre (killing of Arab civilians by IDF Battalion composed of former Irgun and Lehi members).

Lehi Wanted members 1. Jaacov Levstein (Eliav), 2. Yitzhak Yezernitzky (Shamir), 3. Natan Friedman-Yelin

Lehi Wanted members 1. Jaacov Levstein (Eliav), 2. Yitzhak Yezernitzky (Shamir), 3. Natan Friedman-Yelin

Lehi Wanted members Yaacov Levi, Moshe Bar Giora and Yehoshua Cohen

Lehi Wanted members Yaacov Levi, Moshe Bar Giora and Yehoshua Cohen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lehi_operations

>>19735087

>>19735091

List of Lehi members

Article

Talk

Read

View source

View history

Tools

Extended-protected article

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The following is a list of notable Lehi members. Twenty percent of Lehi members were women.[1] Many notable Lehi members were originally Irgun members.

Members

Geula Cohen, announcer of the Lehi underground radio station (1948)

Yaakov Banai, commander of Lehi's combat unit

Shaltiel Ben-Yair

Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, executed for his role in the assassination of Lord Moyne

Geula Cohen, member of the Knesset

Israel Eldad, leader in the Israeli national camp

Boaz Evron, left-wing journalist

Maxim Ghilan, Israeli journalist, author and peace activist

Eliyahu Giladi

Uri Zvi Greenberg

Eliyahu Hakim, executed for assassinating Lord Moyne

Amos Kenan, writer

Baruch Korff

Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli prime minister 1983–1984 and 1986–1992.

Avraham Stern, founder

Shimon Tzabar

Natan Yellin-Mor, member of the Knesset 1949–1951, leftist advocate of peace with Arabs.[2]

Commanders

Juli Torenberg-Elasar, commander of the women's group[1]

Tzelnik Yitzhak "Shimon", commander of Lehi in Jerusalem in 1941-1942 (before Avraham Stern's murder)[3]

Shpilman Anshel "Aryeh", notable commander who left Irgun, and was subsequently involved with many major Lehi operations[4]

Shomron Sovol Tzfoni, intelligence coordinator, head of training department, member of operations headquarters[5]

>>19735063

>>19735066

>>19735072

>>The Story Of Lehi, The Jewish Terrorist Organization That Tried To Form An Alliance With The Nazis

>>19735087

>>19735091

>The following is a partial list of Lehi operations

>>19735096

>List of Lehi members

Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents

Newly declassified files shed light on Israel's decision to overcome its sense of unease andenlist the help of Nazi murderersin its espionage agency throughout the course of the Cold War

One day, two and a half years ago, the Jerusalem-based historian Danny Orbach received a surprising phone call from his wife. She told him that a “huge, fat envelope” was sticking precariously out of their mailbox, and that it bore the logo of the Prime Minister’s Office.

When Orbach got home, he was astounded to discover that the Mossad had sent him internal documents that – until then – had been classified, and so were inaccessible to both scholars and the general public. The items were related to a historical phenomenon he was investigating: Nazi war criminals who were employed as mercenaries all over the world during the Cold War. Some of them worked for West Germany, others for the Soviet Union and the United States; some assisted Arab countries and some even collaborated with the Jewish state.

Orbach, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had waited a long time for the documents. “At first, I tried to work through all kinds of people I knew in the organization, but it didn’t help,” he says. “Afterward, I decided to try the most official way. I got in touch with the spokesperson’s unit at the Prime Minister’s Office [to which the Mossad is accountable], and I waited for a reply. I was already quite desperate, though I had been warned that things in that organization move slowly.”

The documents in the envelope helped Orbach write his latest book, “Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries during the Cold War” (Pegasus Books, 2022, with the Hebrew translation published this month by Kinneret-Zmora Bitan). But Orbach was not the only one who ever received a fat envelope from the Mossad. Another was Alois Brunner, though the contents of his envelope were very different. Brunner, who was Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, fled after the war to Egypt and subsequently settled in Syria.

ד"ר דני אורבך

Jerusalem-based historian Danny Orbach, who investigated the stories of Nazi war criminals who were employed as mercenaries all over the world during the Cold War.

“As Eichmann’s chief aide, he was responsible for multiple genocidal crimes,” Orbach notes. “He was a solver of problems that arose during the deportations and was in charge of a systematic apparatus of hunting people, of plunder and of transport to the camps.” Beginning in the mid-1950s, under a new identity he stole from another former SS official – Georg Fischer – he found new allies. “He chose to devote his life to the Arab struggle,” Orbach says. Living in an apartment in an affluent Damascus neighborhood, Brunner worked for the Syrian intelligence services and was also an arms dealer, notably with Middle Eastern countries that were Israel’s enemies.

On top of this, he came up with a number of outlandish ideas. For example, after the capture of Eichmann in 1960, he suggested that the Syrians mount a seaborne commando operation in which they would infiltrate Israel and liberate the escaped Nazi from prison. Another brainstorm idea of his for springing Eichmann was to abduct Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and offer to trade him in exchange for the Nazi's release.

>>19735122

>>19735122

>Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents

Orbach did not attribute much significance to those plans, but there is no doubt that they were conceived during what was a very tense period in Israel. Attesting to this is an entry in Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s diary, noting that Nazi gangs were plotting to disrupt Eichmann’s trial. Referring to the same subject, Mossad chief Isser Harel warned that Eichmann’s lawyer was in touch with a group whom he termed “a very dangerous and contemptible gang of Nazis … of arch-murderers, among them … some we are looking for.”

At this point, the role of the envelope sent to Brunner by the Mossad begins to loom. In the summer of 1960, the Mossad received information suggesting that Brunner was hiding under an assumed name in Damascus. The Israeli agency took up the gauntlet and made the decision to assassinate him, tasking one of its operatives, Yitzhak Shamir – later Israel’s prime minister – with organizing the mission. He sent to Damascus a former member of Lehi – the pre-state militia that Shamir had led – who spoke fluent Arabic (and whose identity remains unknown). In May 1961, the agent infiltrated the Syrian capital, made his way to Brunner’s front door and identified him, but did not assault him. “Killing the target on the spot was out of the question. Carrying out an assassination in the heart of an Arab capital would have been utterly insane,” Orbach says.

With Brunner’s whereabouts ascertained, Shamir received an “explosive envelope” for the killing, flew to Europe with it and handed it to the agent. The latter returned to Damascus, this time with intent to kill. He dropped off the envelope, addressed to Brunner, at the main post office. The German war criminal opened the envelope on September 13, 1961; the explosion left him blind in his right eye and semi-paralyzed in his left arm. Nineteen years later, in 1980, the Mossad tried again to kill Brunner, again via an exploding envelope that he opened. This time he was badly burned and lost several fingers.

The Mossad didn’t succeeded in assassinating Brunner, but the closing years of his life were distressful for him. In the book, Orbach describes how, after Brunner fell out of favor with the regime, he languished in the cellars of the Syrian secret police "in a tiny, windowless basement cell, without sunlight or medical care.

"He had to subsist on military rations, and choose every day between either an egg or a potato,” Orbach writes. The information was compiled from various sources in a number of languages, including recorded interviews with Brunner’s guards, to which he obtained access. “Luckily, I learned spoken Syrian in the army,” he says. Brunner died in 2001 and is buried in a Muslim cemetery in the Syrian capital. “His archive is in the presidential palace in Damascus. If Assad should ever fall, we might yet learn new and surprising things,” Orbach says.

Dark figure

Orbach, 41, studied history, first at Tel Aviv University and then at Harvard, where he received his doctorate. Currently he teaches military history at the Hebrew University. His interests cover a wide range of subjects, among them the history of intelligence, coups, political assassinations and military disobedience. His first book, “The Plots against Hitler” (English edition 2016), dealt with German resistance movements from 1933 to 1945. The second, “Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan” (2017), is about rebellion and disobedience in the Japanese officer corps during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Orbach’s new book is based on extensive archival research, which included the study of documents from German intelligence, the CIA and the Mossad. Its subjects are Nazis who held various positions in Hitler’s Germany and looked for new occupations after 1945. “The waste matter of history,” he calls them. “It was truly impossible to be a Nazi in the old sense after 1945. They were substantively different in every possible way from the Nazis. Not morally, but in their worldview, at the political and strategic level and also ideologically, because the world was different and because of the appalling defeat. After a defeat like that, you can’t preserve your ideology in full.”

Several possibilities were available to the “new Nazis.” Some continued to adhere to an antisemitic and antidemocratic line, but dropped the struggle against communism. As such, they were able to serve the Soviet Union. Others, who stuck to a distinctly anti-communist line but no longer espoused antisemitism or an antidemocratic viewpoint, worked for the United States. Another group continued to be rabid antisemites and chose to do battle against the Jewish people and Israel, but adopted a new ideology of ostensibly struggling against colonialism, which involved displaying empathy for the developing world and for various “races.”

>>19735132

>>Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents

And there were also those who went on “hating everyone,” as Orbach puts it. They remained neutral on paper, but “incited between the sides that were involved in the Cold War – Americans, Germans, Russians, Arabs, even Israelis – with the aim of getting as rich as possible without committing to any of them,” Orbach says. Some of these fugitive Germans are described as greedy adventurers, some as professional con men. This ideological flexibility accounts for the presence of Nazi mercenaries in every corner of the global arena in which the superpowers faced off in the 1950s and ‘60s. Some of them fantasized about a brilliant future of “Nazi-inspired” revolutions in the developing world, of spectacular terrorist attacks on Jewish targets and the like.

The intelligence services that were their collaborators also sometimes deluded themselves. The CIA, for example, believed that it was essential to utilize Hitler’s former henchmen in order to triumph over the Soviet Union.

The intelligence services of the Jewish state, which was surrounded by enemies, also did not balk at employing former Nazis. One of the more complex cases in this connection is that of Walter Rauff, a German war criminal with buckets of blood on his hands. Rauff played a key role in the development of the Nazis’ mobile murder facilities, the “gas vans” that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Rauff was also one of those tasked with establishing a unit whose objective was to annihilate the Jews of Palestine and to expand the Holocaust into the Levant in general – a plan that ultimately remained only on paper.

ולטר ראוף

Nazi war criminal Walter Rauff.Credit: AP

He was later posted to Tunisia, Greece and Italy, and in each country he persecuted Jews and resistance fighters alike. After the war, Rauff escaped any trial or punishment. He too joined the collection of Nazis who found refuge in Syria, becoming a military aide to the Syrian dictator Husni Za’im, the capacity in which he helped train the Syrian intelligence services “‘along Gestapo lines.’ Among other things, he designed torture devices to interrogate and terrorize Syrian Jews,” Orbach writes.

In 1949, following a change of government in Syria, Rauff was expelled from the country, and he relocated to South America. On the way, in Italy, he picked up surprising new masters: the Israelis. Bitter at the Syrians for throwing him out, Rauff agreed to sell information to Israel. His handler was Shalhevet Freier, a Foreign Ministry official who was one of the founders of Israel’s nuclear project. At the time, Rauff was posted in Rome to collect intelligence about Arab states. Rauff supplied the Israelis with detailed information about the situation in Syria and also agreed to become an Israeli agent in Egypt, but then decided to move to Ecuador instead. He remained in touch with Freier until 1951.

Did Freier feel comfortable about employing a Nazi? Apparently not, because at first he kept it secret even from headquarters in Tel Aviv, perhaps out of concern that he would be ordered to break off contact with the new agent. When he finally did report about Rauff, he was surprised to discover that the Foreign Ministry found no reason to object to the ex-Nazi’s employment. At the same time, the service he did Israel did not accord him immunity: In 1980, a Mossad team was sent to assassinate him. The squad planned to waylay him outside his house in Chile, where he had eventually settled down, but his wife started to shout and his dog barked. He died about a year later from cancer, entering the history books as a Nazi criminal who was both an agent of the Mossad and on its hit list.

Rauff was not the only war criminal Israel employed. Among the documents that awaited Orbach’s perusal in the envelope from the Mossad, he also found the file for the recruitment and employment of Otto Skorzeny, a former officer in the Waffen-SS who also worked with the Mossad. "There were more redactions there than [visible] lines," Orbach notes, referring to the censorship that continues to deny researchers full access to these historic documents. Still, he adds, he was able to find out “far more” about Skorzeny from other documents the Mossad sent him.

>>19735137

>>>Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents

The Mossad file on Otto Skorzeny. "There were more redactions there than [visible] lines," Orbach notes.

A “shady figure” is Orbach’s summation of Skorzeny. In World War II, he gained fame in commando operations, notably the daring raid that freed the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity in September 1943. After the war he became a businessman, arms dealer and mercenary “who was constantly looking for adventures to overcome his boredom,” Orbach writes. He helped recruit military advisers for Syria and was involved in various deals with German experts who were advisers in Egypt’s missile program.

In 1960, Mossad chief Harel considered launching a manhunt for him, but his successor, Meir Amit, preferred to prepare the ground to recruit him as a source for the organization. Rafi Meidan, a former commander of Amal, the Mossad’s Nazi-hunting unit, was assigned to the mission. To get to Skorzeny, he first befriended his wife, Ilse. According to various reports, the two conducted an intimate relationship, which ultimately paved the way to her husband, with whom she maintained an “open relationship,” according to the Mossad report. After setting up a meeting with the target, Meidan brought in Avraham Ahituv, a future director of the Shin Bet security service.

Ahituv and Skorzeny met in a Madrid hotel. For Ahituv it was a tortuous task, as he “hated what he was doing,” Orbach says. Ahituv immediately brought up the elephant in the room and spoke about the Holocaust. Skorzeny asserted that he had not taken part in the annihilation of Jews. Later, he surprised Ahituv by saying that he liked Israel, which he described as a small, daring country whose people even “excel in physical work.” Israel, he added, is the solution to antisemitism, and all Jews should immigrate there. Afterward the two became absorbed in an argument about the “Jewish question,” and only then arrived at the subject that was the reason for their meeting: Skorzeny’s recruitment by Israel to scuttle activity by German rocket scientists in Egypt.

אוטו סקורצני

Otto Skorzeny, a former officer in the Waffen-SS who also worked with the Mossad.Credit: USHMM / courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration / College Park

According to the Mossad’s in-house report as well as Meidan’s own testimony, Skorzeny did not ask for money, but rather requested one “small” favor: help in clearing his name and getting himself removed from the most-wanted list compiled by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Those requests were not fulfilled, but the collaboration still went ahead. Long afterward, Mossad agent Rafi Eitan told journalist and author Ronen Bergman that in his view, Skorzeny hoped that collaborating with the Israelis would ensure that he avoided Eichmann’s fate. Only the Mossad, he thought, could offer him “a life without fear.” From the Mossad documents, Orbach also learned that the connection between Skorzeny and his Israeli handlers continued in the years that followed as well.

>>19735143

>The Mossad file on Otto Skorzeny.

Our man in Damascus

In addition to the material from the Mossad, Orbach drew heavily on the archives of the German intelligence services. When he talks about perusing documents belonging to the BND, the Federal Intelligence Agency, it almost seems that his nonfiction book has given rise to a plot in which the author is a character. “I had to apply to an email address and then wait,” he recalls. “In Germany, as opposed to Israel, you can be sure you’ll get a reply. German federal legislation stipulates that a German governmental authority, be it the postal service or an espionage agency, is obligated to reply to everyone who contacts it – and they absolutely uphold that law.” Thus, a few months later, “I did indeed receive a letter stating that my request was being processed, and then another few months went by before another letter arrived inviting me to set a date for a visit by calling a certain phone number.”

So the day arrived when Orbach found himself at the entrance to the BND headquarters in Berlin, which he recalls as a threatening building “that looks like the castle of a villain from a James Bond movie – huge, gray and heavy, like a citadel.” His hosts, who did not introduce themselves, told him to leave his phone at the entrance and took him via elevators and labyrinthine corridors to an empty office whose only furnishing was a desk. “They brought the files, told me until what time I could stay and how to leave the premises for lunch – they escort you to anywhere place that’s farther than the washroom,” he says.

There was, however, one important document he didn’t succeed in obtaining through the official archives of that or any other intelligence agency. It was a cable in which Eli Cohen, Israel’s spy in Damascus, referred to the Nazis he met there. “In the end I found it quoted in a book by [Israeli journalist] Uri Dan from the 1960s,” he says, and points out what every novice historian eventually learns: In some cases, what is hidden by censorship in one place, is open in another. You just have to know where to look.

And that’s how Eli Cohen, who was sent to Syria by Unit 188 of Military Intelligence, ended up being mentioned in a study dealing with Nazi mercenaries in the Cold War. Cohen arrived in Damascus in 1962, equipped with a miniature Morse code transmitter concealed in a double-bottomed cigarette pack, powerful explosives camouflaged as soap, a shortwave radio and other espionage accessories. He posed as an Argentine businessman of Syrian origin named Kamel Amin Thaabet. His original mission was to provide information about military and political developments in Syria. But his superiors also asked him to find out what he could about German war criminals in Damascus.

“Despite the Mossad’s failure to assassinate Brunner, the Israelis still wanted information about his whereabouts, as well as about his escaped colleague Franz Rademacher, the expert on Jews in the Nazi Foreign Ministry and a mass murderer in his own right,” Orbach writes. Already in June 1962, before his first home leave, he received a message from Tel Aviv asking him for more information about Brunner and other Nazis who were in hiding.

>>19735149

it's the same story. Otto was part of theOdessa Ukraine Nazi SS ratline

PB

>>19734628, >>19734634 (Canada) Military investigating at least 6 active soldiers for supporting convoy protests

Otto Skorzeny, a former officer in the Waffen-SS who also worked with the Mossad.

Cohen was able to ingratiate himself with the circle of Arab Nazis in Damascus. Brunner stated afterward that Cohen had visited his apartment, but Orbach found no evidence of this, though “Cohen definitely kept an eye on Brunner,” he says. In contrast, a visit Cohen made to Rademacher is documented. In their conversation Rademacher said that “the Jews and the Germans are looking for me everywhere. They are unjustly accusing me of killing Jews during the war.” The next day, Cohen reported to Tel Aviv about the Nazi criminal’s location and noted that he was working for Syrian intelligence. He provided his precise address and also his wife’s name. He concluded the message: “I am ready to kill Rademacher.”

“From Cohen’s point of view, that visit was a very bad idea, because Rademacher was under the close surveillance of the Syrian secret police. A year earlier he had been recruited to the Federal Intelligence Agency, via worldwide neo-Nazi connections,” Orbach writes.

The Mossad, to which responsibility for running Cohen had passed from Military Intelligence, wasn’t enthusiastic about the suggestion of eliminate the Nazi in Damascus. Its top brass “would not let their prize asset in Damascus risk himself with a reckless assassination of dubious value,” Orbach writes. The message Cohen received was unequivocal: “refrain at all costs from any action regarding R. [Rademacher] that may foil your main task. Maintain your interest in R. and send us more information about him.” Subsequently a blunter message was received: “Leave him alone and focus on your main task.”

Orbach thinks that Cohen’s handlers in Tel Aviv made a serious mistake by not instructing him from the start to keep away from Nazis. “For a spy such as Cohen with such a brittle cover story, the attempt to approach such people (and certainly to plot their assassination) was sheer madness,” Orbach contends in his book.

Not long after their meeting, Rademacher was arrested by Syrian security agents and accused of being a spy. Subsequently he was deported to West Germany. Is that the reason that Cohen’s real identity was revealed? “As we know, there are a great many arguments about why and how Eli Cohen was caught. Instead of continuing to poke around in that little corner, I expand the canvas and show how Cohen’s story was intertwined with the story of the Nazis and the German espionage networks in Damascus, and with his attempts – clumsy and dangerous – to hunt down Nazis,” Orbach told Haaretz.

The relations between Syria and the West deteriorated, he explains, and Damascus started to tilt increasingly toward the Soviet Union. “Syria became fed up with the array of German double agents and crushed the different espionage networks that were based on former Nazis,” Orbach says.

“Against this background of spy hysteria, the Syrians suddenly took seriously one of Eli Cohen’s neighbors, a retiree of the security services, who informed on him after expressing suspicions all along, as well as an alert posted by the Indian Embassy to the effect that someone was interfering with their transmissions. That, in my opinion, was the background to the request for aid from the Soviet Union in locating the source of the transmissions, which in the end led to the arrest of Eli Cohen.”

>>19735163

>it's the same story. Otto was part of theOdessa Ukraine Nazi SS ratline

https://archive.ph/j8dT4#selection-457.0-457.65