A CALCULATED RESTRAINT: WHAT ALLIED LEADERS SAID ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Breitman

(Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at Yalta 2/1945)

The most frequent question concerning the Holocaust centers on what allied leaders knew about the genocide against the Jews and what they spoke about it in public and private. In previous monographs, FDR AND THE JEWS and OFFICIAL SECRETS: WHAT THE NAZIS PLANNED AND WHAT THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN KNEW Holocaust historian Richard Breitman addresses when these men knew what was occurring in the death camps. In his latest work, A CALCULATED RESTRAINT: WHAT ALLIED LEADERS SAID ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST Breitman shifts his focus as it took until December 1942 for allied leaders to issue a joint statement concerning Nazi Germany’s policy of eradicating Jews from Europe. It would take President Franklin D. Roosevelt until March 1944 to publicly comment on what was occurring in the extermination camps. In his new book, Breitman asks why these leaders did not speak up earlier. Further he explores the character of each leader and concludes that the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military conditions exhibited during the war that drove their decision-making and commentary.

Breitman begins his account by introducing Miles Taylor, a Steel magnate turned diplomat representing Franklin Roosevelt in a September 22, 1942, meeting with the Pope. Taylor described the Nazi genocide against the Jews and plans to exterminate millions. He pressured the Pontiff to employ his moral responsibility and authority against Hitler and his minions. In the weeks that followed Taylor conveyed further evidence of Nazi plans to the White House.

(Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary) in 1942

The Papacy’s response was much less than could be hoped for. Monsignor Dell’Acqua warned the Pope that any negative commentary concerning Nazi actions could be quite detrimental to the church, ultimately producing a Papal reaction that it was impossible to confirm Nazi actions, and the Vatican had no “practical suggestions to make,” apparently believing that only military action, not moral condemnation could end Nazi atrocities. It would take until 2020 for the Vatican to open records of Pius XII’s tenure to outside researchers.

Breitman states his goal in preparing his monograph was to discern what “Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin knew about the Holocaust to what they said about it in their most important statements on the subject.” The author’s approach rests on two key avenues of research and analysis. First, the extent to which allied leaders sought to create and mobilize the international community based on a common morality. Second, how allied leaders understood the relationship between the Holocaust and the war itself during different stages of the conflict. Breitman’s account relies on thorough research based on years of archival work, in addition to correspondence among allied leaders, numerous biographies and secondary works on the subject.

Despite the release of most allied documents pertaining to the war, except for Russia which has become more forthcoming since the fall of the Soviet Union there is a paucity of material relating to allied leaders. Further, there is little, if any record of allied leaders themselves addressing the Holocaust in any of their private conversations, though Stalin’s public commentary does allude to Nazi atrocities more so than Roosevelt and Churchill.

It is clear from Breitman’s account that with Hitler’s January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag that the Fuhrer was bent on the total annihilation of the Jews, not just pressuring them to leave Germany and immigrate elsewhere. It is also clear that Churchill and Roosevelt were fully aware of the threat Hitler posed to the international order, but were limited in their public reaction to the sensitive issue that a war against Germany to save Jews was not politically acceptable, particularly as it related to communism at a time when anti-Semitism was pervasive worldwide. Fearing Nazi propaganda responses, allied leaders generalized the threat of Nazi atrocities, thereby subsuming Nazi policies to exterminate Jews among a broader range of barbaric behaviors, thereby limiting explicit attacks on the growing Holocaust.

Breckinridge Long (1881–1958). Long was an Assistant Secretary in the US State Department during World War II, from 1940-1944.

(Breckinridge Long, anti-Semitic State Department official did his best to block Jewish immigration to the United States during the Holocaust)

The author is correct in arguing that had allied leaders spoken out and confronted Nazi behavior earlier it might have galvanized more Jews to flee and go into hiding and perhaps encourage gentiles to take serious steps to assist Jews. No matter what the result it would have confirmed the rumors and stories concerning Nazi “resettlement in the east,” and possibly encouraged neutral governments to speak out and do more.

Breitman’s overall thesis is correct pertaining to why allied leaders did not speak out publicly about the Holocaust, though they did comment on the barbarity of the Nazis. The reasons have been presented by many historians that Roosevelt was very concerned about providing the Nazis a propaganda tool because any comments would be used to reinforce the view that the Roosevelt administration was controlled by Jews and it would anger anti-Semites, particularly those in his own State Department, and isolationists in Congress. FDR reasoned the best way to approach the Holocaust was not to single out Jews and concentrate on the larger issue of winning the war. The faster victory could be achieved, the more Jews that could be saved. This opinion was similar to Winston Churchill’s beliefs.

The author spends the first third of the book focusing on the “Big Three,” and their early views as to what policies the Nazis were implementing in Eastern Europe. Breitman will focus on four examples of public commentary which he analyzes in detail. On August 24, 1941, Winston Churchill made a speech denouncing Nazi executions in the east. He singled out what the Germans were doing to the Russians on Soviet soil, with no mention of the Jews as victims. However, his last sentence read; “we are in the presence of a crime without a name.” Was Churchill referring to the Holocaust? Was he trying to satisfy Stalin? It is difficult to discern, but British intelligence released in the 1990s and early 2000s provide an important picture of what the SS and police units were doing behind battle lines in the Soviet Union in July and August 1941 – mass executions of Jews, Bolsheviks, and other civilian targets. Churchill’s rationale for maintaining public silence regarding the Holocaust was his fear that the Luftwaffe’s Enigma codes that had been broken by cartographers at Bletchley Park would be compromised should he make statements based on British intelligence. It is interesting according to Breitman that after August 1941, Churchill no longer favored receiving “execution numbers” from MI6, fearing that the information could become public. Churchill’s overriding goal was to strengthen ties with the US and USSR and would worry about moral questions later.

In Stalin’s case he made a speech on November 6, 1941, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 at the Mayakovsky Metro Station. According to Alexander Werth, a British journalist who was present it was “a strange mixture of black gloom and complete confidence.” Aware of Nazi mass murder of Jews, Stalin mentioned the subject directly only once, saying the Germans were carrying out medieval pogroms just as eagerly as the Tsarist regime had done. In a follow up speech the next day, Stalin said nothing about the killing of Jews. Stalin generalized the threat of extermination so all Soviet people would feel the threat facing their country, but at least he mentioned it signaling that subject could now be openly discussed, but Stalin’s overriding concern was to focus on the Nazi threat to the state and people of the USSR and believed that references to the Nazi war against the Jews could only distract from that. After his November remarks he made no further public comments about the killing of Jews for the rest of the war.

(Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski, 24 June 1914^[a] – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland’s Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others)

FDR’s approach was to prepare for war and his comments were designed to do so and not say anything that could rile up anti-New Dealers who opposed war preparation. At press conferences on July 31 and February 1, 1941, FDR did not raise the subject of Hitler’s threat to annihilate the Jews of Europe and was not questioned about it. Roosevelt feared any publicity surrounding saving Jews would create greater opposition to aiding the democracies of Europe to fight the Nazis. It took Roosevelt until August 21, 1942, for the president to denounce barbaric crimes against innocent civilians in Europe and Asia and threatened those responsible with trials after the war. He would reaffirm these comments in a statement on October 7, 1942, but in both instances he was unwilling to denounce the Nazi war against the Jews. However, if we fast forward to FDR’s March 24, 1944, press conference, shortly after the Nazis occupied Hungary, the president called attention to Hungarian Jews as part of the Nazi campaign to destroy the Jews of Europe, accusing the Nazis of the “wholesale systematic murder of the Jews in Europe.” Articles written by the White House press corps and government broadcasts were disseminated to a large audience in the United States and abroad.

Nazi camps in occupied Poland, 1939-1945 [LCID: pol72110]

Breitman dissects a fourth speech given on January 30, 1939, where Adolf Hitler lays out his plans in front of the Reichstag. The speech recounted the usual Nazi accusations against the west, praise for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, virulent comments and threat against the Jews, and fear of the Bolshevik menace. He was careful not to attack Roosevelt as he wanted to limit American aid. According to Chief AP correspondent Louis Lochner who was present at the speech Hitler reserved his most poisonous verbiage for the Jews as he would welcome the complete annihilation of European Jewry.

The title of the book, A CALCULATED RESTRAINT is somewhat misleading as Breitman focuses a great deal on events and personalities that may tendentiously conform to the title, but do not zero in exactly on that subject matter. The author details the negotiations leading up to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its implications for Poland and Eastern Europe in General. Further, he comments on the American and British about faces in dealing with communism. Breitman focuses on the “Palestine question” and its role in Nazi strategy and how the British sought to protect its Arab “possessions,” – oil! Operation Torch, as a substitute for a second in Europe is discussed; the battle of El Alamein and the role of General Erwin Rommel. Other prominent individuals are covered including Reinhard Heydrich who chaired the Wannsee Conference outlining the Holocaust and the Lidice massacre after he was assassinated. Breitman does deal with the Holocaust, not commentary by the “Big Three” as he introduces Gerhart M. Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress and Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who met with Roosevelt, and Peter Bergson who did his best to publicize the Holocaust and convince the leaders to focus more on containing it through his Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Another important American official that Breitman spends a great deal of time on is Oscar Cox, general counsel of the Foreign Economic Administration, which included the Lend-Lease Administration who tried to enlist others in the battle against anti-Semites, like Breckinridge Long inside the State Department. Both men played an integral role in making the Holocaust public and trying to convince Churchill and Roosevelt to be more forthcoming about educating the public about the annihilation of the Jews. This would lead to the Bermuda Conference and the War Refugee Board in the United States, neither of which greatly impacted the plight of the Jews. Breitman also includes a well thought out and incisive analysis of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz toward the end of the war.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) during a visit to the Auschwitz camp. [LCID: 50742]

(SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) during a visit to the Auschwitz camp. Poland, July 18, 1942)

Perhaps, Breitman’s best chapter is entitled, “The Allied Declaration” in which he points out that by the second half of 1942 there was enough credible information that reached allied governments and media that affirmed the genocide of the Jews. However, as Breitman argues, the atmosphere surrounding this period and the risks of going public were too much for allied leaders.

It is clear the book overly focuses on the course of the war, rather than on its stated title. The non-Holocaust material has mostly been mined by other historians, and in many cases Breitman reviews material he has presented in his previous books. Much of the sourcing is based on secondary materials, but a wide variety of documentary evidence is consulted. In a sense if one follows the end notes it provides an excellent bibliography, but the stated purpose of the book does not receive the coverage that is warranted.

In summary, Breitman’s book is a concise and incisive look at his subject and sheds some new light on the topic. We must accept the conclusion that the allied leader’s responses and why they chose what to say about the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military demands that existed in the war and drove their decision making. I agree with historian Richard Overy that Breitman spends much more time discussing what was known about the murder of Jews, how it was communicated and its effect on lower-level officials and ministers, rather than discussing the response of the Allied big three, which again reveals a generally ambivalent, even skeptical response to the claims of people who presented evidence as to what was occurring.

(Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November, 1943)

THE YEAR OF THE LOCUST by Terry Hayes

May 25, 2025szfreiberger Espionage Leave a comment

Natural gas production and processing in Russia

(Russian industrial complex in Siberia)

Ten years ago, I was fortunate to come across Terry Hayes’ first novel I AM PILGRIM. The novel was riddled with suspense with constant shifting plot lines, well developed characters, exceptional background information and exquisite detail developed with tremendous depth. It was a spy thriller that was almost addictive as Hayes led you from one scene to another keeping you on the edge of your seat. Once I completed the novel I soon learned there would be a follow up effort in a year or two. Much to my chagrin it took almost a decade for Hayes to complete his next novel, THE YEAR OF THE LOCUST. Hayes is a movie producer with a flair for constructing prose for thrilling spy novels. He is an expert in developing cliff hangers that seem to repeat after each of his short chapters. His latest effort replicates the strengths of his first novel, and I must say it was worth the wait, though I would request if there were a third novel on the horizon we did not have to wait another ten years for it to appear.

The star and narrator of THE YEAR OF THE LOCUST is a CIA operative with nom de guerre of Kane, though his real name is Ridley Walker. Hayes immediately draws the reader into his web of suspense as he describes the public execution of ten people, a few of which were CIA operatives embedded in Iran who were victims of a public hanging. It appears a US agent turned out to be a Russian spy who outed these individuals to the Tehran regime.

After searching for the double agent identified as Magus and failing to locate him, CIA Director, Richard Rourke, code named Falcon turned the mission to locate Magus to Kane. Kane had a special skill set, the most important being a specialist in entering what are called “Denied Access Areas” places under hostile control such as Russia, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and the tribal zones of Pakistan. Magus was an expert in disappearing and hiding, but so was Kane, and his target was kind enough to teach him a new technique which would eventually save his life.

This may contain: there is a map of the world with countries

Hayes’ approach is to keep the action moving as it seems as if Kane goes from one treacherous situation to the next, not allowing the reader to catch his breath. Kane’s next secret mission is to rendezvous with an informer within one of the world’s most dangerous groups, the Army of the Pure a fundamentalist, anti-western, and violent organization – another reincarnation of ISIS. The meeting was to take place in the Denied Access Area – where the borders of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan meet with the informer who had information concerning a major event that would emulate its darkest predecessors. The informer was a courier, who was also an air conditioning repair man and technician.

The courier provided a photo of Abu Muslim al-Tundra, a military commander of the Army of the Pure who was supposedly killed by an American bomb. He had been head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a founder of ISIS, and on his back was a tattoo of a locust. Hayes’ excels at developing the background for each character and their role in the plot, with al-Tundra is being no exception as the author explains his road to being a master terrorist. In addition, Hayes is very attuned to integrating historical events into his story. Historical references are accurate and important. For example, American distrust for the Pakistani intelligence service and overall direction of the government in Islamabad. Other references include; how Pol Pot might have never become a genocidal killer, Union Carbide’s Bhopal disaster, oil discoveries in Baku, Azerbaijan, and many others.

Hayes is a master at describing the technology behind Kane’s spy craft. Weapons and equipment are laid out for the reader including their development and use. The CIA’s attempt to kill al-Tundra with hell fire missiles fired from across the Iranian border into Iran and deceive its Russian air-defense system is a case in point. Further, his knowledge of submarines, stealth warfare, and weaponry is impressive, and reflects a tremendous amount of research that went into authoring the novel.

As in his first book, Hayes develops a series of interesting characters. First, and most important is Ridley Kane, but others play an important role including Dr. Rebecca McMaster, an ER doctor who lives with Kane. Laleh, an Afghan woman who Kane saved from execution, who later would reciprocate by doing the same for him. Richard Roarke, CIA head, an old school operator. Lucas Corrigan, CIA Head of Human Resources who was “the man with eyes as green and cold as river rocks,” a Ph. D and Psy.D whose father was CIA Station Chief in Saigon during the 1975 evacuation. Madeline O’Neill, a CIA analyst who tracks terrorists and is an expert at creating back stories for Kane’s missions. Clayton Powell, the CIA Archivist. Bill “Buster” Glover, a CIA Assistant Director. Baxter Woodward, a physicist who met Kane on “a submarine that didn’t exist, a craft that had been designed to disappear, was ready to set sail for waters unknown.” Yosef Faheez, the third richest man in Pakistan and bankroller of terrorist operations. Clifford Montgomery, President of the United States. Ghorbani and Bahman, two Blackwater operatives embedded in Iran. Aslan Kadyrov, known as “the Rifle,” is in charge of Russia’s large earth mining complex in Siberia called the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Lastly, Roman Kazinsky, the real name of al-Tundra who turned out to be Russian and former Spetsnaz in addition to being a devout Muslim.

(Terry Hayes, author)

As the reader you must pay careful attention to Hayes’ construction of the novel. He switches from scene to scene and mission to mission very artfully, but quickly. He creates a number of scenarios for Kane to confront and resolve. From searching for a traitor who divulged the agents embedded in Iran resulting in their execution, the search for the world’s most dangerous terrorist, being aboard the USS Leviathan, a stealth submarine which experiences disaster below the Indian Ocean. Lastly about two-thirds into the novel Hayes surprisingly pivots morphing his story into a Covid like apocalyptic salvation story which results from Kazinsky’s plan to use Russia’s mining operation in Kazakhstan at the Baikonur plant to spread siber spores that would transform the world as an instrument for his vengeance.

Aspects of the novel may seem a bit far-fetched, but Haye’s credibility as an amazing storyteller allows the reader to carry on. A number of Hayes’ characters are sarcastic, and this allows the author to inject a good amount of humor into dark situations that keep the reader entertained. The book has all of Hayes’ amusing elements: astuteness, clear-cut and intelligent writing; believable characters even if their missions are hard to digest; a complicated plot; lessons in history, geography, cultures and politics; and an incisive look, professionally and personally, into the mind of a spy. Further, in THE YEAR OF THE LOCUST things occur that pull the storyline together. It’s one thing to buy into the great research and detail behind creating a spy’s so-called “legend,” his claimed background supported by documents and memorized details. It’s another to come upon individuals in the most unlikely places as a convenient way to integrate disparate elements of the story. In closing I would request that the author does not wait another ten years to publish his next spy thriller.

(Russian industrial complex in Siberia)

BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA by Peter Beinart

May 17, 2025szfreiberger Middle Eastern History Leave a comment

Map showing the aid entry points and the military zone bifurcating north and south Gaza.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with an old friend from my Yeshiva days in Brooklyn. At Yeshiva and in high school we were very close, and it is the case with many people we drifted apart over the years but intermittently we kept in touch. Holiday greetings, a periodic email, or phone call were our communication over the decades, and I still have fond memories of our relationship. It was during that conversation and his reaction to a number of my book reviews which I posted on my web site that I realized that a wall might be developing between us. The foundation of our disagreement involved our reactions to events in Gaza that followed Hamas’ brutal attack of October 7, 2023, when over 1200 Israelis were slaughtered and 250 hostages were seized by the Palestinian terrorist group. In our last conversation we “agreed to disagree” as he said so we could continue our friendly catch up conversation. The crux of our disagreement rested on Israel’s reaction to the October 7^th massacre which led to the destruction in Gaza making large parts of the territory almost inhabitable.

(Evgenia Simanovich runs to the reinforced concrete shelter of her family’s home, moments after rocket sirens sounded in Ashkelon, Israel, on October 7. “In Ashkelon, residents have just seconds to seek shelter before a rocket launched from Gaza could strike,” photographer Tamir Kalifa told CNN. “Evgenia yelled for me to follow her, and I pressed my camera’s shutter as we sprinted to her home a few meters away.” )

I went to the Gaza Strip in the spring of 1984 when I had a Fulbright Fellowship at Hebrew University. It was a time of war after Israel invaded Lebanon to root out Palestinian terrorists who were making life miserable for Israelis living near their northern border. When I visited Gaza I witnessed many of the living conditions that made refugee camps that were run down and squalid. At the same time, I was amazed at the beauty of the Mediterranean coast that bordered the Palestinian enclave. As a Ph. D in history who focused and published on Arab Israeli relations I am keenly aware of the positions of both sides, Arab and Jew when it came to the riots of the 1930s, the Holocaust, and events surrounding the 1948 War that led to the bifurcation of the region between differing viewpoints. I have always held the belief that peace between the two sides was almost impossible based on ideology, the emotional attachment to the land by all parties, the leadership in the region, and the role of major powers.

Palestinians walk past the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive in Rafah

(Palestinians walk past the rubble of buildings destroyed during the Israeli offensive, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip).

With my mindset I was fortunate to come across Peter Beinart’s latest work; BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA where the author lays out the issues for people who have undying loyalty to the Israeli state, born of the Holocaust, seeing it always morally and ethically correct because of the neighborhood in which it resides, and those who find that the Netanyahu government, dominated by right wing nationalists had gone too far in trying to completely destroy Hamas. No one can defend the abhorrent behavior of Hamas, but at what point do we draw the line when contemplating the destruction of an entire society through collective punishment.

It seems that every Jewish person has had the conversation with friends, relatives, and acquaintances over whether as Jews we can still support a government that engages in war crimes. I realize “war crimes” is a difficult term to apply, but I must ask how else can you describe the discriminatory bombing and food deprivation of civilians who are being held hostage by Hamas that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. It is difficult to hold these discussions with people who firmly believe that Jewish goodness and integrity translates into Israeli virtue and exempts the Netanyahu government from the normal laws of humanity. As Beinart writes, “we are not hard wired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense,” which is at the core of the debate.

Over the years the author has been a stalwart supporter of Palestinian rights, even as he attends shul arguing that Jews are fallible human beings. His goal as Benjamin Moser writes in the May 4, 2025, New York Times is “to wrestle with the knottiness and ambiguity in our sacred texts and correct for the omissions in the mythology of purity that so many of us were taught as children and that many continue to subscribe to as adults.”

(Palestinians walk past the rubble of houses and buildings destroyed during the war, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, January 20, 2024).

Beinart relies on Jewish texts and draws lessons from South Africa, where his family is from, to confront Zionism and what he sees as complicity from the American Jewish establishment in Palestinian oppression. He argues for a Jewish tradition that has no use for Jewish supremacy and treats human equality as a core value. In his book, he appeals to his fellow Jews to grapple with the morality of their defense of Israel. Beinart has a history of changing his opinions be it his support for the Iraq War or tolerating workplace sexual harassment. Beinart’s plea is for the Jewish community to reexamine their views that would require a painful about face concerning views they have held for most of their lives.

Beinart called on American Jews “to defend the dream of a democratic Jewish state before it is too late,” especially in light of the policies perpetrated by a government whose leader is under indictment who clings to power by accommodating the right wing minority in his cabinet. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to prosecute the war on Gaza as a vehicle to remain in power which would avoid a trial and his possible imprisonment. Whether you agree or disagree with the author he should be commended for his courage for standing up to what he believes is correct and accepting the consequences of the loss of friendships, anger from family members, and constant criticism and ostracization by his many critics.

One of Beinart’s major themes revolves around the argument that victimhood often feels like the natural state for Jews throughout history. But this mentality covers up the fact that Jews can be “Pharoah’s too.” This selective vision permeates Jewish life. Jews employ the bible to refute the claim that Israel is a settler-colonial state. Anything that contradicts this contemporary narrative is not accepted. Interestingly the author weaves the ideas of Vladimir Jabotinsky, an important historical figure for right wing Israelis into the narrative, i.e.; the ideology of virtuous colonization, which today has been replaced by virtuous victimhood to support his views.

(Palestinians wait to buy bread in Gaza City, February 3, 2024)

To Beinart’s credit he recounts the brutal Hamas attack of October 7 in detail. He delves into the impact on Israeli families and society and accurately concludes the entire country was a victim on that horrendous day of murder, rape, and kidnappings, not just those who experienced the immediate impact. He even points out how Israeli progressives and leftists in the United States and Europe, ones, political partners reacted with indifference to the attack and many justified Hamas’s actions. The message that was conveyed is that the killing of Jews was nothing new, it’s just the way it has always been.

Many Jews have compared October 7 to the Holocaust, but Beinart concludes there is a fundamental difference . “To preserve Israel’s innocence, it has transforms Palestinians from a subjugated people into the reincarnation of the monsters of the Jewish past, the latest manifestation of the eternal, pathological, genocidal hatred that to the Passover Haggadah, in every generation rises up to destroy us.”

A fighter from Izz al-Din al-Qassam stands in front of a...

(Hamas fighter outside the myriad of tunnels under Gaza)

Beinart tries to understand Hamas’s actions; in doing so he tries to explain the Palestinian mindset as they see themselves as victims of colonialism. They, like other victims in the past, have no army, so they do not follow the rules of warfare and commit barbaric acts characteristic of colonial revolt. However, countries like China and Russia have armies and they do not follow the rules of law in Ukraine, Georgia, Crimea, Chechnya, and in China’s case the victims are the Uyghur population and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups who can be considered genocide victims.

In trying to understand, it is clear “that violent dispossession and violent resistance are intertwined.” In the end Israeli oppression is not the only course of Palestinian violence. It is Palestinians, like all people who are responsible for their actions. However, Israeli oppression makes Palestinian violence more likely. It comes down to despair for the Palestinian people as it is clear there is no way the Netanyahu government will accept a two-state solution.

(Israeli soldiers carry the casket of reservist Elkana Yehuda Sfez, who was killed in combat in Gaza, during his funeral at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, on Jan. 23, 2024).

In analyzing death figures put out by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Gaza Health Ministry it is clear that over 50,000 people have died and 20% are probably children. Beinart relies on many sources to verify these numbers, but Israeli leaders minimize the toll and shift blame onto Hamas arguing that Hamas uses human shields, seizes food and supplies targeted for Palestinian civilians, and murders any opposition. However, Beinart’s argument that Hamas’s actions are typical of other insurgent movements is no excuse and to absolve them of one iota of legitimacy is wrong and their actions are considerably heinous when compared to other insurgent movements. But Israel’s strategy to deliver as much destruction as possible in order to shock the Palestinians and get them to turn against Hamas has not been effective. Blaming the Palestinians for Hamas’s 2006 victory at the polls is not valid since the Palestinian people had little choice. Another Israeli argument that they must destroy Hamas to be safe, but it is an impossible task because the alternative Israel must offer, the ability to vote, a high degree of autonomy, and a future state will not be forthcoming so why should Palestinians opt for peace? They need a viable alternative for Hamas which is not forthcoming. In reality, as long as Israel tries to destroy each insurgent group, their actions foster the next generation of insurgents. As Palestinians believe they are not safe, they will do their best to make sure Israelis are not safe also.

In reading Beinart’s work I wondered if there is such a thing as “Jewish exceptionalism” that makes Israel unaccountable for the type of warfare they are waging. Historically I do not see it as other nations/groups have engaged in atrocities and war against civilians have been condemned with sanctions etc.

(Israeli protesters attempt to block the road as aid trucks cross into the Gaza Strip, as Israeli border police watch over them, at the Kerem Shalom border crossing, southern Israel, Jan. 29, 2024)

Another major issue that Beinart raises is that of the “new anti-Semitism.” Israel has equated any criticism of its actions as anti-Semitic as a vehicle of deflecting criticism of what they are doing in Gaza. In doing so they turn the conversation about the war into a conversation about the motives of people who oppose their actions. What is clear is that when Israel kills Palestinians, what is perceived to be anti-Semitism increases, but the Israeli government conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in order to depict Palestinians and their supporters as bigots, therefore turning a conversation about the oppression of Palestinians into a conversation about the oppression of Jews. In the end Judaism and Israel are separate and Jews, the world over should not be blamed for the actions of the Israeli government.

A great deal of Beinart’s discussion revolves around the actions of American Jews who support Israel’s policies. It seems as progressives in the United States turn against Israel they are forcing Jews to choose; defend exclusion in Israel or inclusion in the United States and some of America’s leading institutions are choosing the former.

(Israeli soldiers practice evacuating wounded people with a helicopter during a military drill in northern Israel, in preparation for a potential escalation in the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, on Feb. 20, 2025)

Beinart offers a comparison of historical situations that are somewhat similar to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He delves into apartheid in South Africa and the fears of white Afrikaners; he discusses the hatred and fears that existed in Northern Ireland until a settlement was reached overcoming Protestant fears of the IRA; the Reconstruction period in the late 19^th century in the United States is explored as southern whites feared the newly freed black population and fueled by northern liberals. In these situations, the key to avoiding as much violence as possible was to give the aggrieved party the vote and a voice to express their concerns because inclusion yields greater, not total safety.

I do not believe that Beinart is naive enough to support the idea that if a settlement ever arrives between Israel and the Palestinians that peace will break out in the Middle East. In a region where Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and numerous other terrorist groups abound violence will lessen, but the author’s emotional and heart felt appeal for reconciliation is really the only hope for the future no matter how impossible that appears today. I admire Beinart’s beliefs and the professional risks he has taken to engage the public in a proper debate – that should be allowed in a free society and the back and forth between those who disagree should be civil, not based on fear.

DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: RUSSIAN MERCENARIES AND THE NEW ERA OF PRIVATE WARFARE by John Lechner

May 15, 2025May 15, 2025szfreiberger African History, Middle Eastern History, Russian History Leave a comment

(Yevgeny Prigozhi in Saint Petersburg in 2016)

In June 2023, it appeared for the first time there was a clear threat to the rule of Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. This risk to Putin’s reign was fostered by the inability of Russian forces to achieve a quick victory after it invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and was unable to overthrow and replace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The danger Putin faced was the work of the Wagner Group, under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin, his former chef and caterer who led the armed rebellion against the Russian government. This rebellion, which lasted for about a day, was a culmination of simmering tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defense and the fact that the fighting had reached a World War I type of stalemate. Prigozhin accused the Russian military of shelling Wagner positions, refusing to resupply his troops, and also criticized the Russian leadership for their “maximalist positions” in the war in Ukraine. It is interesting to analyze Putin’s response to Prigozhin and his private army since it was Russia’s most effective fighting force against the Ukrainian army. The rebellion ultimately failed, as Prigozhin got cold feet as his army marched toward Moscow. Prigozhin turned his forces away from the Russian capital and reached an agreement to move Wagner forces to Belarus. However, in the end Prigozhin went the way of others who opposed Putin as he died in a plane crash on August 23, 2023. Despite the death of their leader, the Wagner group lives on with its political business and military ventures as a pillar of the Russian government’s operations the world over.

As the bloody conflict continues to play out in Ukraine journalist John Lechner’s latest book, DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: RUSSIAN MERCENARIES AND THE NEW ERA OF PRIVATE WARFARE has been published at a propitious time. Lechner’s excellent monograph is an education describing the origins of the Wagner group, its methods, and operations. We witness how the Wagner group gains a foothold in fragile nation states, gains access to a country’s natural resources, removes peacekeeping forces, all to cash in on the instability of weak states that possess resources that are viewed as vital for Russian strategic interests, and the profitability of the group itself.

Dirt graves with wooden crosses and red, yellow and black wreaths.

(The US says the Wagner Group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties)

Lechner points out in his introduction that after a two hundred year hiatus, private warfare has returned, albeit in new ways. For most of history private armies and mercenaries were the norm, nevertheless at the end of the Thirty Years War (1660) European rulers saw the advantage in recruiting public standing armies within their borders. By the 19^th century, the nation state was largely responsible for the prosecution of warfare on the continent. However, private armies were employed by colonial powers to subdue far-flung regions and governments would outsource the exploitation of colonies to private companies. Once decolonization made headway following World War II and late in the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union began to relax its financial and military support from previous colonial regions, they would partly turn to privatization both internally and externally. Newly independent countries would outsource their security requirements to private military companies, and the United States would turn to the privatization of warfare following 9/11. By 2010, private contractors outnumbered American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most famous of which was Blackwater. Lechner describes two types of private military companies. First, mercenary companies are private armies that conduct autonomous military campaigns. Military enterprises, like Blackwater, augment a powerful state’s regular armed forces and embed with one government. Secondly, the two types were merged into a new novel private military company. This new organization was cultivated and advanced by Yevgeny Prigozhin.

(Donbas Basin)

Lechner delves into a number of Private Military Contractors (PMC) providing details on recruitment, operations, geographic involvement, and important personnel. However, the author’s most important focus is the Wagner Group under the direction and tight control of Yevgeny Prigozhin. In 2014, on the heels of Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Prigozhin linked up with Dmitry Utkin, a career soldier a member of an intelligence unit, and carried out training and proxy wars for the GRU to create the Wagner Group which would prove to be an effective fighting force with brutal enforcers in the rear. By 2015, working closely with the Ministry of Defense in Syria, and autonomously in northern and central Africa the group spread its influence and profitability. By 2018 Wagner forces seemed everywhere from Madagascar to Mozambique, in addition to becoming the “tip of the spear” of Russian assertiveness. By August 2022 Wagner mercenaries were fighting in eastern Ukraine and successfully reached the outskirts of Bakhmut. Prigozhin’s success rested on his ability to recognize opportunity in unstable situations, bringing a team together to take advantage of the situation in a nation’s capital and on the ground, especially in Africa which had over 100 million refugees, and employing social media highlighted by misinformation to enhance his reputation and ego.

Alexey DRUZHININ/SPUTNIK/AFP Yevgeny Prigozhin shows Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin his school lunch factory outside Saint Petersburg on September 20, 2010 (“I had known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the 1990s,” Vladimir Putin recalled)

Lechner is clear that today there is little distinction between soldiers and mercenaries in large part because of globalization. When one examines Russian recruitment of PMC and those in other countries it is clear that Lechner is correct. Russian mercenaries presented as “little green men,” many on “vacation” and began appearing in 2014 in Crimea and the Donbas. Lechner accurately explains Putin’s motivations involving the expansion of NATO, western plots against Russia, and his desire to recreate the Russian empire. Putin was supported by the growth of domestic nationalist Russian ideologues witnessed by the number of volunteers who came to fight in Ukraine believing that Ukraine belonged to Russia harkening back to Catherine the Great and Lenin who artificially designated Ukraine and Belarus.

The turning point for Prigozhin came with the invasion of Crimea as his contacts with the Ministry of Defense provided a degree of access to Putin who allowed him to become the handler of mercenaries in the Donbas – it is here that he and Utkin created the Wagner Group. Slowly they were able to do away with other mercenary leaders and centralize other separatist militias into one. This would be accomplished for the most part in 2015. Prigozhin was an entrepreneur who envisioned a PMC like Erik Prince’s Blackwater. He would get his start in Syria, supported the regime of Bashir Assad and helped arm, train, and participate in the brutal civil war designed to overthrow the murderous government in Damascus.

Russia formally intervened in Syria in 2015, and the first Wagner fighters entered the conflict in September of that year. Lechner describes the brutality of the civil war, highlighted by Assad’s use of poisonous gases, cluster bombs, and doing anything to remain in power. He could not have done so without the Wagner Group. The key for the group is that it developed its own esprit de corps. Their soldiers were mercenaries, but they were also Russian patriots, men willing to fight and die for the motherland, more so than the Russian military. Their success provided Prigozhin with greater access to Putin directly to circumvent the Ministry of Defense.

Reuters Yevgeny Prigozhin helping Vladimir Putin at a dinner table, 2011 (Yevgeny Prigozhin (left) pictured serving Vladimir Putin (centre) at a dinner in 2011)

Lechner carefully lays out the structure of the Wagner Group and breaks it down into its military and business components. Prigozhin would create a corporate structure, first called Evro-Polis from which he negotiated contracts with governments and gained access to their natural resources, provided military services, and protection. The group drew from varying ideologies and priorities, most of which were various degrees of nationalists and white supremacists. Much of the group’s strategy was designed to seize oil and gas fields, mineral mining, and other lucrative opportunities in the countries they were involved.

The Wagner Group proliferated across central and northern Africa feasting on the resources of the Central African Republic, Libya, Chad, Sudan, Mali, Syria, and Niger. Most people think of the Wagner forces as it relates to the Donbas, but Lechner spends a good part of his monograph detailing how Prigozhin penetrated Africa, the contracts he signed, the coups and counter coups he was involved in, and the many personalities he dealt with, many of course were as ruthless as he was – perhaps that was why he was so successful. By 2021 Prigozhin and his PMC were truly global. The threat he represented for the west was proof to the Kremlin that his initiatives were a worthy investment. Their effectiveness was less important than the west’s reaction to them.

In developing his material, Lechner relied on interviews with the relevant government officials and soldiers, especially 30 members of the Wagner Group. Lechner’s success rests on beautiful first-person writing with granular reporting. Further, the author is an exceptional linguist as he speaks Russian and Chechen as well as Sango, the language of the Central African Republic. His interviews saw him travel across war zones in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the point he was almost kidnaped. Lechner witnessed the viciousness and cruelty in which the Wagner Group operated, a group that would eventually morph into a 50,000 man private army.

Reuters Yevgeny Prigozhin makes a statement as he stand next to Wagner fighters in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in Bakhmut, Ukraine, in this still image taken from video released May 20, 2023 (Prigozhin became most vocal in a series of video statements from Bakhmut where he criticised the defence establishment)

Prigozhin’s forces were initially deployed after the annexation of Crimea, a year later the Wagner Group was sent to the Donbas region to support the pro-Russian separatists. They would participate in destabilizing the region, taking control of key locations, and directly engaging in combat. A major component of their actions was to eliminate dissident pro-Russian commanders, potentially through assassination. The Wagner Group’s actions contributed to the escalation of the Donbas conflict and the overall instability in eastern Ukraine. By 2022 and onward they played a significant role in the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, even recruiting prison inmates for frontline combat operations – estimated to number between 48-49,000. These men would die by the thousands in the Donbas meat grinder, but for Prigozhin they served their purpose. Eventually Prigozhin let his substantial ego get in the way and threatened to march on Moscow, as stated earlier it did not go well.

In the end, according to Nicolas Niarchos in his May 13, 2025, review in the New York Times, the Wagner Group “was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century’s conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. “The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,” Lechner writes. “But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.”

Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow’s mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn’t matter if he’s around to swing it or not.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin points his finger, his gaze his slightly past the camera

(Yevgeny Prigozhin says he was required to “apologise and obey” in order to secure ammunition for his troops)

THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST by Shaun Walker

May 6, 2025szfreiberger Cold War, Espionage, Russian History Leave a comment

(The Lubyanka Building in Moscow, Russia, is most famously known as the former headquarters of the KGB (Soviet secret police) and now houses the FSB (Federal Security Service)

For six seasons between 2013 and 2018, “The Americans,” an American spy drama television series aired on the FX channel. It depicted the Jennings family as a typical suburban American family. There were two teenagers and parents who happened to be KGB spies at the outset of the Reagan administration who try to come across as your average American family grouping. Their job was to spy on the United States during a period when the Cold War was escalating. This Kremlin strategy of embedding spies in the role of everyday citizens was not an aberration as since the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, Moscow began deploying Soviet citizens abroad as deep-cover spies, training them to fit into American society and posing as different characters. In our current heightened environment with Russian aggression in Ukraine, interference in American elections, and Vladimir Putin’s obsession with recreating the Soviet Empire it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that Russia has continued this strategy today.

In his latest book, THE ILLEGALS: RUSSIA’S MOST AUDACIOUS SPIES AND THEIR CENTURY LONG MISSION TO INFILTRATE THE WEST, Shaum Walker, an international correspondent for The Guardian brings the Russian strategy to life as he explores the KGB’s most secretive program. His excellent monograph conveys a thrilling spy drama culminating with Putin’s espionage achievements as the Kremlin continues to infiltrate pro-western countries worldwide. In the current international climate Walker’s study is an important one as we try to combat Putin’s autocracy, particularly in light of Donald Trump’s seeming infatuation with the Russian autocrat.

Ishkak Akhmerov (undated)

Walker begins his study by introducing the reader to Ann Foley and her husband Don Heathfield, and their two sons Tim and Alex, However, in reality they were Russian spies; Elena Vavilova and Andrei Berzukov who had lived as a couple in Cambridge, MA for years. They would be arrested by the FBI and deported back to Russia in 2010. Their vocation was part of “the Illegal” program.

Illegals were recruited by the KGB. They were ordinary Soviet citizens who were given years of training to mold them into westerners. During the Cold War, the illegals living in the west were told to lie low and wait. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB was disbanded. However, once Putin assumed power he began to restore Russian spy capabilities, including “the Illegals” and a fresh batch of operatives was trained. Walker correctly argues that flying illegals based in Moscow on short term missions to assassinate enemies of the Kremlin abroad was standard policy. “A new army of ‘virtual illegals’ impersonated westerners on social media and were a key part of Russia’s attempts to meddle in foreign elections. Even if the era of long term illegals seemed over, the concepts underpinning their work remained at the heart of Russian intelligence operations.” It is clear that at various points during the last century the era of illegals seemed to be over. However, each time Russia’s spymasters resurrected the program. Today, a network of SVR safe houses scattered around Moscow has produced a new generation of operatives undergoing preparation for deployment overseas. They spend their time honing the pronunciation of target languages, studying archives of foreign newspapers and magazines to absorb culture and social context, and memorizing details of their cover stories. Soon, this new generation of illegals will be deployed to live what appears to be mundane lives in various locations around the world, while secretly implementing Moscow’s agenda.

Image shows the DVD cover for the 2003 film 'Cambridge Spies'. On the cover are four men standing face on and the film title above them.

Walker lays out the early history of using illegals by discussing their use before the Russian Revolution to overthrow the Tsar, and once in power as a vehicle to be used against the west and for their own survival. The strategy is based on Konspiratsiya, defined as “subterfuge,” or “conspiracy,” – “a set of complex rules, a rigid behavioral tool, and a way of life, the overarching arm….was to keep party operatives undercover and undetected, and was used by many groups of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries.”

Walker does a credible job explaining the Bolshevik approach toward espionage especially when they did not have diplomatic recognition in the west which meant they had no embassies to hide spies. The result was to develop the illegal program further. The author describes the role of many incredible operatives and their impact on the course of history. Men like Meer Trislisser, a Bolshevik operative, and Dmitry Bystrolyotov, another Russian spy perhaps the most talented illegal in the history of the program, make for fascinating reading as they navigate their training, implement what they have learned as they integrate into other societies, how they recruited local nationals to spy for them, and how successful they were in acquiring intelligence.

(Grigulevich (Castro) and his wife during their stay in Brazil in 1946).

The program was run through the Cheka’s ION office which was in charge of the illegal program. A case in point is how they flipped an English communications officer, Ernest Oldham, into providing documents which covered much of the secret European diplomacy, i.e., impact of the depression, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, etc. It is clear that the Soviets were far ahead of the British and Americans when it came to espionage, especially when Franklin Roosevelt granted the Soviet Union formal recognition which provided them with an embassy in Washington to run their agents. Since the American economic influence was worldwide spies were needed to ferret out US positions. In addition, the Kremlin needed to industrialize quickly, and American technological and scientific secrets were a major target led by the fascinating figure of Ishak Akmerov who would train Americans like Michael Straight and Laurence Duggan, both with strong ties to the US State Department.

Walker’s insights into the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s purges and “show trials” of the 1930s, and the awkwardness created by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 reflect the role played by a series of illegals who were trained assassins and acquired the ability to hunt down anyone whom Stalin deemed a threat. Stalin’s purges would decimate the military leadership and foreign intelligence sources, but information still flowed from England from the “Cambridge 5,” who were a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold war and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. The five were convinced that the Marxism-Leninism of Soviet communism was the best available political system and the best defense against fascism. All pursued successful careers in branches of the British government. They passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviets, so much so that the KGB became suspicious that at least some of it was false. Perhaps as important as the specific state secrets was the demoralizing effect to the British establishment of their slow unmasking and the mistrust in British security this caused in the United States. In addition, Soviet agents like Richard Sorge became friends with Eugen Ott, the Nazi ambassador to Japan who along with others provided Stalin with evidence of the impending German invasion of Russia in 1941. Stalin and NKVD head, Lavrenti Beria rejected this intelligence as scaremongering as it went against Russian official policy. In June 1941, the Kremlin would pay for their stubborn adherence to the strict laws of Marxism-Leninism and Stalin’s perceptions of Hitler who he believed would have to defeat England before he could invade Russia.

(Former KGB head Yuri Andropov)

About a quarter the way into the book, Walker turns to the Cold War and successfully argues that Stalin’s ability to negotiate a favorable postwar settlement was assisted by the work of the Cambridge 5 in England as they produced innumerable numbers of documents and intelligence. Anthony Blunt, Donald MacLean, and Kim Philby, all members of the Cambridge 5 were essential figures and Philby himself was put in charge of British counterespionage! In fact, Walker argues that Stalin knew about the atomic bomb much earlier than Harry Truman which is why at the Potsdam Conference he did not act surprised when the president warned him about the new weapons.

(Elena Vavilova and Andréi Bezrúkov, in Moscow, while training for the KGB)

Walker goes into detail concerning Stalin’s fears of Josef Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia who believed in a neutral approach to the Cold War and its path toward implementing socialism. Tito was able to act in this manner because his forces liberated his country from the Nazis, which was not the case throughout eastern Europe. Stalin tasked Iosif Grigulevich, a Soviet illegal to assassinate Tito. Interestingly, earlier Grigulevich was also involved in a failed attempt to kill Leon Trotsky. Stalin would fail to kill Tito, who would remain a thorn in his side and Russia in general. The dispute with Tito would last until Stalin died in March 1953 which also saved thousands of others he implicated in the Doctor’s Plot, a conspiracy that Jews were out to kill the Russian dictator.

Many of Walker’s chapters are like a movie script for an espionage thriller. Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters deals with a Soviet agent’s ability to gain connections in the Vatican and manage to become the Costa Rican ambassador to the Vatican at a time when there was a fear in the west of a communist victory in Italy. Other fascinating chapters include the life and work of Yuri Linov, a young man who was very facile with foreign languages and began his KGB career informing on fellow students while studying at the university. By 1961 he would be trained as an illegal and deployed to the United States. Linov was very patriotic, seeing Soviet success in space with the mission of Yuri Gagarin as proof of Russian exceptionalism. Walker describes his recruitment, training, and missions in detail providing the reader with further insight into the illegal program. First, Linov would find himself in Prague during the summer of 1968 ordered to infiltrate the liberal reform movement under the government of Alexander Dubcek, and by 1970 his training and focus shifted to the Middle East as his handlers steered him to becoming the KGB’s expert on Zionism. Apart from Linov’s espionage work, Walker delves into personal aspects of an “illegal” life. He examines how his wife Tamara was chosen for him, and the difficulties their careers presented for them on a personal level. At a time when it was becoming more and more difficult to choose, train, and deploy illegals, Linov’s work seemed to be a success.

AFP Paraphernalia belonging to KGB agent, including a minature camera, seen at the spy museum in Oberhausen, Germany (Illegals operate without diplomatic cover and blend in like ordinary citizens)

Walker also presents the American attempt to implement its own illegal program, and concluded it was almost impossible to train operatives in the intricacies of Soviet life and equip them with a story and documents that would stand up to Soviet security. The KGB on the other hand remained doggedly committed to a system that no longer seemed worth the enormous time and effort. The question is why? According to the author a number of reasons emerge. First, the institutional memory of success from the early Soviet period and its roots in Bolshevik idealism kept the KGB wedded to illegal work as a key part of their own internal mythology. Second, under the leadership of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev who was in such poor health as being functionally useless as a leader that massive change could not take place. Third, by the late 1970s few of Russia’s 290 million people were permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Those who were allowed to leave experienced a lack of free movement because of surveillance. As result, the only people who had some freedom in other countries were the illegals and they became the only reliable source of intelligence for Soviet leadership.

Once Yuri Andropov headed the KGB (1967-1982) he would employ illegals as he saw fit. Having witnessed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 as ambassador to Hungary he would use all tools at hand to block any threat to Soviet control. Prague has already been mentioned, and Andropov had no qualms about employing illegals in Afghanistan in 1978 and assisting in a coup against the regime in Kabul that would lead to the Soviet version of “Vietnam” as it would be stuck in the Afghan quagmire that ultimately led to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Toward the end of the narrative Walker reintegrates the lives of Tracey Lee Ann Foley and Donald Heathfield into the monograph. He uses them as background to the emergence of Vladimir Putin as Soviet Premier and President. Interestingly, the two were dispatched to the United States during Gorbachev’s “glasnost” period as the KGB remained paranoid of the United States. Walker explains the meteoric rise of Putin and the restoration of the “KGB” mindset in Russia under a new organization, the SVR. Putin would rekindle the illegal program as part of a process to restore Russia to great power status which continues to this day. For a complete examination of Putin’s rise and career the two best biographies are Steven Lee Myers’ THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN and Philip Short’s recent work, PUTIN.

(SVR Yuri Drozdov had a legendary reputation in Soviet and Russian intelligence circles)

Under Putin, Foley and Putin would continue their espionage work and lives replicating an American couple until the FBI got wind of their work and arrested them. It is fair to conclude as does Joseph Finder in his New York Times, April 17, 2025, book review that “despite periods of diplomatic warming, Putin has never abandoned his illegals. He ordered the program revitalized in 2004, three years before his Munich speech signaled the return of Cold War tensions. While America was busy declaring the “end of history,” Russia was quietly training a new generation of agents to live among us.

Walker’s book serves as a reminder that somewhere in Russia right now, ordinary citizens are being molded into simulacrum Americans, learning to enjoy Starbucks and complain about property taxes, prepared to live among us regardless of who occupies the White House or how many summit handshakes take place. In international relations, as in life, it’s the quiet ones you need to watch.”

THE GHOSTS OF ROME by Joseph O’Conner

April 27, 2025szfreiberger Historical Fiction Leave a comment

(Vatican City, 1945)

Two years ago, I read an impactful novel written by Joseph O’Conner entitled MY FATHER’S HOUSE that centered on the role of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish Catholic priest and senior official of the Roman Curia who was responsible for saving 6500 allied soldiers and Jews during World War II. He had the ability to evade traps set by the Gestapo and Nazi SD earning the nickname, “The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican.” O’Connor’s portrayal is one of suspense and intrigue creating a gripping World War II drama featuring the unlikeliest of heroes who did battle with SS Commander Paul Hauptmann who failed to corral the principled Vatican official.

O’Conner has returned with a strong sequel, THE GHOSTS OF ROME, which mirrors the same approach toward historical fiction dripping with action, and unforgettable characters. In his latest work O’Conner reintroduces the “Choir,” a ragtag group dedicated to spiriting those threatened by the Nazis to safety. As World War II winds down, this covert group successfully leads untold numbers of escapees out of Nazi controlled Rome along a secret route called the “Escape Line.” Once again, Hauptmann is ordered to destroy O’ Flaherty’s underground railroad – this time his family is seized by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Berlin until he accomplishes his task.

O’Conner begins the novel on Ash Wednesday, February 1944 as he introduces an eclectic group, all members of the “Choir” as they shelter from Nazi aerial bombardment. They are an interesting mix of people consisting of Giovanna Landini, a Countess, leftist who became a Red Cross motorcycle courier when the war broke out; Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne a British diplomat to the Holy See; Marianna de Vries, a Swiss reporter writing a book on the “Hidden Rome”; Delia Murphy-Kiernan, the de facto ambassador of Ireland to the Holy See and her daughter Blon, a university student; Sam Derry, a tough British soldier who escaped Nazi imprisonment; John May, a British jazz musician; Enzo Angelucci, a wise cracking newspaper vendor; and Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. As O’Conner introduces these characters, another is descending by parachute into Rome trying to avoid German fire as he hits the ground.

(St. Peter’s Square, 1945)

The author offers a series of storylines in the novel. First, as part of a continuation from MY FATHER’S HOUSE, is SS Commander Hauptmann’s attempt to shut down the “Choir” and its “Escape Line.” Second, is Countess Landini and Monsignor O’Flaherty’s prolonged attempts to hide escaped POWs, airmen, and others throughout Vatican City. Third, the battle to try and save a downed Polish pilot named Bruno Wisniewski. Lastly, the intertwining of the “Choir” and the diverse personalities and beliefs of its members as they tried to reach consensus as to what actions they should pursue. O’Conner integrates a series of interviews of some of the main characters given a 15-20 years after the war to fill in historical gaps, personal observations, and tightening the story. These made up texts from letters to memoir extracts to interview transcripts are important for the reader’s understanding.

O’Conner provides a tour of Roman historical sites as the diverse characters navigate Roman streets above and below ground in their cat and mouse game with the SS. In addition, the author provides a glimpse into the Nazi occupation of Rome which by February 1944 is dominated by increasing black market prices, a lack of food and other essentials including sanitation, constant bombing raids, and the omnipresent fear of being arrested by the SS, interrogated, and executed. As O’Conner takes the reader through the catacombs of Vatican City, particularly under St. Peter’s one is reminded of the novels of Steve Berry and Dan Brown for plot development and anticipation.

There are two watershed moments in the novel. The first centers on Heinrich Himmler’s warning to Hauptmann that Hitler wanted the “Choir” to shut down or the SS commander’s family would be the price for failure. Hauptmann’s wife and children were returned to Berlin where they would be guarded by Himmler’s henchman – the warning was clear, “smash the Escape Line or face the inevitable.” The second occurred on March 23, 1944, when the Roman resistance in the guise of pavement sweepers attacked a 156 German troop column with a 40 lb. bomb that killed 30 and wounded countless soldiers. The bombers would escape, and Hitler ordered 100 Italian civilians to be killed for every German soldier who died within 24 hours. Hauptmann would prepare a death list of people who hid POWs, Communists, Socialists, members of trade unions, journalists to be killed in retribution. Victims were sent to caves where they were shot 5 at a time known as the Ardeatine Massacre.

New details revealed on Vatican aid for escaped POWs in World War II

(The band of the Irish Brigade of the British Army plays in front of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, June 12, 1944).

THE GHOSTS OF ROME do not measure up to MY FATHER’S HOUSE in terms of pure excitement and thrills. It continues the story but with more dialogue and less action. It is still a strong historical novel, but with a more laid back approach, though the underlying fears and emotions of the characters easily come to the fore. As is the case in both novels, O’Conner has the knack for creating memorable characters and scenes. Perhaps the best in the current story is the character of Manon Gastaud, a medical student under Professor Guido Pierpaolo Marco Moretti, a superb surgeon, who happens to be pro-Nazi. The conundrum rests on how to save the Polish pilot who was wounded as he descended from his airplane. Most of the “Choir” members are committed to saving his life, no matter the cost and its is the pugnacious Gastaud who volunteers to operate on Bruno despite the fact she has never performed the type of operation that is needed. With a lack of medical supplies, an acceptable site to operate, and the fear of the SS, the “Choir” takes the risks necessary to save the pilot.

Important relationships abound in the novel. There is the haunting connection between Hauptmann and Countess Landini centering on his obsession with her palace which he seized and how she leads him on in the hope of providing misinformation that would work to the “Choirs” benefit. Another is O’Flaherty and Landini’s bonding and how in another life they could have been more than wartime compatriots. The commentary of John Moody, an American soldier, and a wisecracking charmer is priceless as O’Conner injects sarcasm and humor whenever possible.

In terms of historical accuracy, O’Conner does an exceptional job producing the ambiance of wartime Rome, but also the characters of O’Flaherty and Hauptmann. The Monsignor character as mentioned earlier is based on a historical figure. The Hauptmann character is fictionalized, but the character itself is based on Herbert Kappler, a key German SS functionary and war criminal during the Nazi era. He served as head of German police and security services in Rome during the Second World War and was responsible for the Ardeatine massacre. With the completion of volume two, O’Conner’s conclusion is useful as it creates further interest for the reader to continue on to the third volume as it is not clear in which direction O’Conner will go. Volume one focused on Monsignor O’Flaherty, the second, Countess Landini, one wonders what or whom the emphasis will be on in volume number three.

(Irish author Joseph O’Connor at the Festival of Literature in Rome)

According to Alex Preston in his February 4, 2025, New York Times Book Review, “Escaping the Nazis, With Help From a Priest and a Countess,” O’Connor has often been likened to the great Irish modernists for the lyricism of his voice-driven novels. But “The Ghosts of Rome” — which despite being the second in the trilogy can be read as a stand-alone novel —also situates him within a broader European tradition of memory and moral reckoning, one that returns again and again to World War II.

O’Connor embraces this legacy while transcending its clichés. His Rome is not merely a setting but a crucible, a city where the sacred and the profane collide, where resilience is forged in the shadow of ruins. By crafting a chorus of voices, he ensures that no single narrative dominates, reflecting the messy, multifaceted truths of history — both the way it is lived and how it is constructed in retrospect. What emerges is not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a meditation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.

(St. Peter’s Basillica, 1945)

SONS AND DAUGHTERS by Chaim Grade

April 20, 2025April 20, 2025szfreiberger Historical Fiction Leave a comment

(A portrait of Chaim Grade Image by Yehuda Blum)

In the tradition of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and his younger brother, Israel Joshua Singer, both Yiddish novelists, Chaim Grade last novel, SONS AND DAUGHTERS captures a way of life that no longer exists – the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania of the 1930s that the Holocaust destroyed. The novel, which is finally available in English was originally serialized in the 1960s and 70s in two New York based Yiddish newspapers, dissects the lives of two Jewish families in early 1930s Poland torn apart by religious, cultural, and generational differences.

Grade who passed away in 1982 was one of the leading Yiddish novelists of the 20^th century. His novel, RABBIS AND WIVES was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983 and his last book was expertly translated by Rose Waldman from Yiddish to English. SONS AND DAUGHTERS is a sprawling and eventful novel that takes place in the villages of Morehdalye and Zembin and depicts daily life as it unfolds among two families of rabbis that are splintering as they face the pressures of the modern world. The rabbis, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenberg and Eli-Leizer Epstein possess wonderful reputations as Torah scholars and leaders of their communities. Interestingly, Sholem Shachne is the son in law of Eli-Leizer, and both belong to different generations and beliefs of their children. They differ in religious stridency, the grandfather is stricter, but in no means is the son in law lax, even though he is more lenient. Both expect their sons to become rabbis, or at least Torah scholars, and their daughters to marry men of the same persuasion. Grade is the perfect novelist to convey this type of story as he was raised Orthodox, studied in Yeshiva as a teenager, but developed a strong secular view of life. Having lost his family in the Holocaust, he resettled in New York, remarried, and turned to fiction, writing in Yiddish.

The revolt by the younger generation against orthodox Judaism drives the novel’s plot, though Grade doesn’t forfeit his sympathy with old men who are trying to keep Judaism alive. The Sholem Shachne family is developed first as his children rebel against their religious upbringing. In his discussion with his son in law, Yaakov Asher Kahane we learn how each child rebelled. Bluma Rivtcha, perhaps the most attractive character in the novel, leaves home to attend nursing school in Vilna after her father fails to negotiate a successful arranged marriage. Naftali Hertz, the eldest son ran away to study at a secular university in Switzerland, earning a doctorate in philosophy and married a Christian woman who gave birth to a son who was not circumcised. Tilza, Sholem Shachne’s daughter is married to Kahane, but their marriage has issues as she does not want any more children with her husband as she rejects the life of a rebbetzin. Bentzion leaves for Bialystok to study business, and the youngest son, Refael’ke wants to join the pioneer Zionists and run off to Palestine. For their father there is a constant debate in his psyche as to the way his children have rejected the rabbinical life and what role he played in their decisions. He possessed internal demons, and he had to admit to himself that he had not been successful in instilling in his children the sense and strength to rebuff the modern trends developing in Poland in the early 1930s.

Grade’s writing apart from dissecting the rabbinical community embodied in Jewish family life is also an ode to nature as he describes the weather, the leaves, the trees, the Nariv river, fruit, lush green foliage that surrounded his village. Grade also describes inanimate objects with the same degree of detail and emotion, items like dishes, cups, glasses, figurines are all part of his approach. Grade also discusses his characters with the same introspective scope he applies to nature and objects through the diverse personalities he presents which allows the reader to gain an understanding of the Orthodox Jewish world of the period. In addition, we witness the arguments and disagreements between different rabbis and diverse individuals which at times reflects the similarities between the old world and the oncoming secular environment.

The Katzenellenbog family is at the center of the novel. The travails brought on by some of the children are fully explored, but Grade integrates the lives of other families, particularly that of Eli-Leizer Epstein, the Zembin rabbi who refuses to allow Jews to travel on the sabbath or attend any form of entertainment. The conversations between Sholem Shachne and Eli-Leizer are emblematic of the crisis in Judaism as it is confronted by an increasingly secular world. Both feel betrayed by their children as they torture themselves in trying to rekindle old world beliefs among family members.

Grade does a marvelous job developing interesting characters who epitomize the crisis in Judaism but also the character traits of people who are not part of the rabbinical world. Chavtche, one of Eli-Leizer’s four daughters despised her father’s third wife, Vigasia, who she believed was robbing her inheritance for her own sons. Further, she lived off her sister, Sarah Raizel’s money, who had a fulltime job. When Eli-Leizer wins a lottery much to Chavtche’s chagrin, he and Vigasia decide to devote the money to rebuild the Talmud Torah where orphans had been living in squalor. Chavtche is a selfish and jealous person emitting the characteristics of many people.

Refeal Leima is another sibling who left for the United States as he grew tired of the strict religious life fostered by his father and became a rabbi and Rosh Yeshiva of Chicago which practiced a less orthodox approach to Judaism. Shabse Shepsel, Eli-Leizer’s eldest son suffered from what appears to be a manic-depressive personality with delusions of grandeur as he changed his avocation repeatedly. He married Draizel Halberstadt because of her impressive dowry. He would deplete her wealth with a number of faulty business decisions but would move back to Zembin and purchase a house near his father who he disrespected. Grade uses his character as a vehicle to explain the religious dichotomy that exists throughout the novel. In fact, Grade describes him as “half demon and half schlemiel.” It seems that Shabse Shepsel is stalking his father and trying to humiliate him. But in the contorted logic of the rabbinical student mind, he also defends his father in a dispute over the teachings of the Tarbus school, where one of the teachers described his father an “an old, senile dotard who expects Jews to sit with folded hands here in exile until the Messiah comes and redeems us.” He further argued that the faithful hide behind their mezuzahs in the hopes it will protect them against the perpetrators of pogroms. Shabse Shepsel’s dichotomy is on full display as he humiliates his father in private and defends him in front of his congregation leading Eli-Leizer to try and convince his son in Chicago to send for Shabse Shepsel if at all possible due to America’s stringent immigration quotas.

Grade creates a number of important characters apart from the two main rabbinical families. We meet Rabbi Zalia Ziskind Luria, the head of the Silczer dynasty and father of the protagonist, Marcus Luria. He is described as an ascetic sage, burdened by the suffering of others and trying to keep Judaism alive in a world where the younger generation is rebelling against it. He is a complex character, portrayed with both sympathy and a sense of the harsh realities of the world he inhabits, seeming to absorb the pains of others as his own, reinforcing his depressive personality which fostered hatred on the part of his family. Further, as a favor to his friend, Sholem Shachne he tutored Naftali Hertz at his yeshiva to try and reinforce Judaism, however, it failed, and he would soon flee for Switzerland where he failed to fully free himself from his intense Orthodox upbringing. Marcus Luria, however, is a young man who also abandons his studies at rabbinical school after becoming wealthy in the stock market, signifying his rejection of his father’s traditional Jewish path. Marcus is seen as a pawn of trendy ideologies, who unlike his father embodies the younger generation’s revolt against traditional Judaism, and sees himself as a follower of Friedrich Nietzsche, and eventually turns to communism. Lastly, Grade introduces Khlavneh Yeshurin, an aspiring Yiddish poet, seemingly modeled on himself. Khlavneh is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter Bluma Rivtcha and strongly believes that secular Yiddishists like himself hadn’t rejected Judaism, but rather, they understand religion and Jewish folklife differently than their predecessors.

It is clear from Grade’s portrayal of Judaic Polish society with its petty jealousies, fervent scholars, crooked businessmen, class consciousness, dysfunctional families, constant conflict between religious and secular issues, fears of political movements, in this case Zionism in actuality mirror the same types of conflicts that exist among people in the gentile world. As a former Yeshiva student, Grade was well trained in the art of Talmudic debate. Unlike the first half of the novel, which describes the horrible reality the Polish Jews will face on the eve of the Holocaust, the second half of the novel accentuates the philosophical which is highlighted by arguments between Naftali Hertz and Khlavneh. It is in the protracted philosophical arguments that the author’s talents dominate.

(Jewish Street in Opatów, 1930s. Photo credit: the collection of J. Brudkowski)

One of the characterizations of the rabbinical world that Grade describes concerns Dwight Garner’s label that SONS AND DAUGHTERS is a beard novel. Writing in his New York Times book review of March 30, 2025, Garner states; It’s a great beard novel. The emphatic facial hair possessed by Grade’s rabbis and Torah scholars curls luxuriously around the margins of nearly every page. Here is a typical sentence: “Eli-Leizer’s mustache was still moist from the meal, and some dairy farfel noodles stuck to his beard.” And: “Avraham Alter Katzenellenbogen’s beard hung stiffly from his chin to his waist, as if it were made of porcelain like a seder plate. Who can trust these new, clean-shaven, Americanized rabbis? The greats of the Torah had beards so bushy they could hold water.”

The issue of how to raise one’s children emerges in numerous discussions. Sholem Shachne’s wife, Henna’le complains to her husband that had he been more flexible his children would not have run away. He wonders: “where they disobeying him because he slapped them too frequently, or because he hadn’t slapped them enough?” The doubts and inner thoughts of parents reflect this dichotomy which can be applied to modern children as well as rabbinical ones. Other issues that Grade integrates into the novel include the role of Zionism in Palestine, the ideas of Marx and Nietzsche, the allure of America, arranged marriages, the selling of kosher and non-kosher clothing, the overcrowding in rabbinical homes, what do trees tell us, and the beauty of certain foods. All are part of an intense examination of the orthodox world but also told with a great deal of humor. What stands out is a remark by Naftali Hertz who ruminates on children who have been bequeathed an inheritance which is basically growing up in a shtetl, and its impact on their lives which in the end is why they desert their family and home.

As the book begins to wind down, parents and children begin to soften toward each other, but since Grade never finished volume two of the novel (it was to be written in two parts) we do not know how the familial tensions were resolved. But at the same time modernity cannot be stopped as Jewish socialist youth groups parade through villages, and more concerning, anti-Semitic Polish nationalists mount a successful boycott against Jewish merchants across the region.

In her article describing SONS AND DAUGHTERS appearing in the April 2025 edition of The Atlantic Judith Shulevitz relates that “Toward the end of the book, Grade unites life and fiction in the character of a lapsed yeshiva bocher (student) named Khlavneh who has become a Yiddish poet. He is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter, the one who went to Vilna to study nursing. Lest we fail to grasp that Khlavneh is a self-portrait, Grade drops hints. The daughter, for instance—an attractive, spirited woman, perhaps the most appealing figure in the novel—is named Bluma Rivtcha, a rhyming echo of Frumme-Liebe, the name of Grade’s murdered first wife, also a nurse and also the daughter of a rabbi. Bluma Rivtcha brings Khlavneh home to meet the family. Over Shabbos dinner, the brother who moved to Switzerland and no longer observes Jewish laws ridicules him for writing poetry in “jargon”—that is, Yiddish, the bastard language of the uneducated Jew, “a common person, an ignoramus, a boor”—rather than in Hebrew, and for thinking that he and his fellow Yiddish writers could capture the spirit and poetry of Jewish life without following Jewish law themselves. Khlavneh refutes the brother in a brilliant show of erudition, then concludes: “You hate the jargon boys and girls because they have the courage to be different from their fathers and grandfathers, even to wage battles with their fathers and grandfathers, and yet, they don’t run away from home. The father, who everyone thinks will be offended by a guest’s outburst at the Sabbath table, laughs in delight. Grade, having fashioned a world in which the old fights mattered, now gets to win them.”

Rose Waldman, the translator provides interesting insides in her note at the end of the novel. She describes Gade’s personal dilemma as he experiences “the tension between his desire to live and write like a secular human being in a modern world and the constant nostalgic pull of his Yeshiva past, the traditional Jewish Vilna of his youth.” For Grade sees himself as “a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.” This dichotomy is pervasive throughout the novel. Waldman does the reader an important service by tracing the history of the novel’s preparation for publication and the difficulties that arose due to the fact that it was incomplete. Grade was prepared to write a two volume novel but never completed the second volume. However, the translator discovered some of Grade’s ideas for the second book and its ending, which she includes in her note which provides the reader with a semblance of a conclusion.

Roman Vishniac. 'Grandfather and granddaughter, Lublin' 1937

The tortuous rabbinical arguments are on full display throughout the novel as the characters dissect the Torah, Mishna, and Gemora, and other sacred texts of Judaism as they apply them to their modern situations. These commentaries can appear to be provincial but in their day were the rule of law and every yeshiva bocha (which I was one in the 1950s and 60s!) must conform to. In the end Grade’s novel overflows with humanity and heartbreaking emotions for a world, once full of life with all of its contradictions, that within a decade of the novel’s setting would be destroyed forever.

In closing, Grade never mentions the coming Holocaust in the book, however its future existence is felt on every page. According to Yossi Newfield in his February 24, 2025 review in the Yiddish newspaper, Forward; “In some sense, SONS AND DAUGHTERS can be considered a Holocaust memorial, as the events it describes foreshadow the upcoming annihilation of Polish Jewry. It is this tragic awareness that animates Grade’s questioning and demand for answers from the rabbinic establishment, from the Torah, and from God himself.”

A photograph of the writer Chaim Grade, who is wearing a trench coat and beret and standing in front of a house in a forest.

(Chaim Grade wrote “Sons and Daughters” during the 1960s and ’70s.Credit…YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

THE TRIALS OF HARRY S. TRUMAN: THE EXTRAORDINARY PRESIDENCY OF AN ORDINARY MAN, 1945-1953 by Jeffrey Frank

April 6, 2025April 6, 2025szfreiberger American Diplomatic History, American Political History, Biography Leave a comment

(President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vice President elect Harry S. Truman, Vice President Henry Wallace)

During my forty-four year teaching career on the secondary and university level I was often asked; “Who is your favorite President?” The answer came very easily, Harry S. Truman. My response was based on his personality, moral code, and his actions during his lifetime culminating in the presidency. My opinion is not based on hagiography, but on a clear view of his important successes, and the mistakes that he made. There have been a number of important biographies written about Truman, perhaps the best are the works of Alonzo Hamby and David McCullough. Both are balanced and quite readable. The latest effort to unmask the thirty-third president is Jeffrey Frank’s THE TRIALS OF HARRY S. TRUMAN: THE EXTRAORDINARY PRESIDENCY OF AN ORDINARY MAN, 1945-1953 which focuses on the major decisions made during his administration, and whether they were the correct ones that resulted in success, and those that ended in failure. Truman, like most people, is a complex person who assumed the presidency at a time when the world was still in crisis and Frank delves deeply into how he managed those calamities and whether his approach was correct or flawed.

Upon entering the White House with the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman was unprepared as the deceased president had kept him in the dark about virtually everything before dying three months into his fourth term. Truman’s position was untenable due to a myriad of crises he was forced to confront, making decisions, whose impact still reverberates in today’s world. Frank’s goal is to reevaluate Truman’s presidency and his decision making, puncturing the myth of his “Give Him Hell Harry” persona while concentrating on foreign policy issues, and less so on the Fair Deal, Truman’s domestic agenda. According to historian James Taub in his April 10, 2022, New York Times book review; “biographies have a built in bias toward giving their subjects too much credit for anything within reach; Frank leans almost in the opposite direction,” focusing more on Truman’s imperfections. In Frank’s case he leans almost totally in the opposite direction in presenting an important contribution to the Truman literature analyzing many of the important achievements and disappointments during his administration.

President Harry Truman and Gen. Douglas MacArthur sit in the back seat of the sedan that carried them to their two-hour conference on Wake Island on Oct. 14, 1950.

(President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur at Wake Island, October 14, 1950)

Frank immediately offers an astute analysis of Truman’s personality and decision making that would impact American foreign policy for generations. He considered indecisiveness to be a character flaw which allowed him to decide questions quickly and intuitively – “making what he called ‘jump decisions’ with all the risks of undue haste.” This trait was evident throughout his presidency. Truman was an insecure man based on his background and earlier career possessing an imperfect knowledge of the people around him, some of whom like Secretary of State James Byrne and Vice President Henry Wallace believed that they should have been president. The problem was that he met many of his cabinet members and administration officials for the first time on assuming office. Further he was too deferential to military leaders, especially George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur. One individual he relied on a great deal was his fourth Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, whose stubbornness concerning the Cold War would lead Truman into many dangerous policy decisions. To better understand Truman, it helps to understand how he was guided and affected by these men and others, i.e., political enemies in Congress, a generation of powerful newspaper columnists who disliked Truman, assorted scientists and engineers, and “hangers-on from Missouri,” who cast doubt concerning his integrity. Frank continues arguing that Truman liked the reputation of honesty and directness, but he could fudge, and lie, when he felt concerned or embarrassed. He had a temper and like most presidents held grudges especially if it involved his family. This is an astute analysis that captures Truman’s true nature and how it impacted the impactful decisions he was forced to make.

The decision making process is evident throughout the narrative. In a book that was dominated by the decision making that led to the Korean War and the resulting “police action” and its results, and policies surrounding the use of and the possibility of sharing atomic secrets which led to the hydrogen bomb and the nuclear arms race, the author does not provide enough depth in his discussions of other important policies. The process that created the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Crisis, and the creation of NATO needed greater discussion as it would have been beneficial for the reader to have been exposed to a more in depth analysis of these measures.

Black and white photo of Harry Truman holding newspaper with headline "Dewey Defeats Truman"

From the outset Truman viewed the Soviet Union as a country inhabited by “semi-primitives, incapable of advanced thought, a people that somehow had managed to explode a nuclear something.” He regarded Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” similar to politicians in Jackson, Mo. and held to the idea that the Soviet Politburo, not Stalin, made the major decisions and was to blame for Soviet duplicity. This attitude is evident after the Potsdam Conference, the Berlin Crisis, and the Russian decision to support Kim Il-Sung’s invasion of South Korea. This view was reinforced by his last Secretary of State Dean Acheson who probably had the greatest influence on Truman than any other official and greatly affected the conclusions he reached.

Within the Truman administration there were numerous personality conflicts that needed to be managed. First, the inability of Acheson to get along with Defense Secretary Louis Johnson. Second, Truman’s inability to work with Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace due to his left leaning policies; Secretary of State and Defense Secretary George C. Marshall’s dislike of Douglas MacArthur because of his imperious nature; both Acheson and Truman found it difficult to work with then Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who Truman saw as pursuing appeasement toward the Soviet Union; and the plight of Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal’s mental condition fostered difficulties with most individuals that he came in contact with. These are just a few of the personality conflicts that existed among administration officials. Throughout these discussions Frank provides an exceptional window into Truman’s personality and thought process. Further the author provides wonderful descriptions of the many characters that dominated the American domestic and foreign policy scene throughout Truman’s presidency. His description of George Kennen is a case in point as he describes him as “an enormously perceptive and spookily prescient, qualities that eluded Bynes, whose missteps on Russia were nothing compared to his missteps with Truman.”

Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference

(Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, July, 1945)

Frank is correct in stressing that the watershed moment for Truman and the coming Cold War was England’s decision to effectively end military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. This would lead to the United States filling the power vacuum in the Middle East and elsewhere as it would culminate in American aid to those countries and ultimately the Marshall Plan which would provide aid to European countries. Frank could have developed this further as the Marshall Plan was designed as a program to help Europe recover economically so they could serve as markets for American products and enhance the American economy. This is indicative of Frank’s approach to the many topics in his monograph. While he does delve into the creation of the European Recovery Act, another name for the Marshall Plan, he gives short shrift to other areas.

Another watershed event that Frank is correctly addresses his discussion of the 1948 election where an underdog Truman shocks the political world by defeating New York governor Thomas Dewey. For nearly four years the Truman presidency experienced a great deal of success in the foreign policy realm, though less so domestically. However, in the ensuing four years Truman would not be as successful and was prone to make poor decisions.

A further turning point was the implementation of NSC 68 as it should be seen as a lesson in how American foreign policy was being developed – shaped by the expanding role of the nation’s defense and intelligence agencies. The document called for a massive increase in defense spending in the hazardous post-war world which would allow the United States to confront and contain Soviet expansion. It is clear that the document was impacted by the “who lost China?” debate and the rise of Joseph McCarthy, two issues that Frank should have discussed in greater detail.

Frank takes his deepest dives when discussing the implications of decisions relating to the development of the Atomic bomb and its use, and events surrounding the Korean war. A number of scientists involved in the A bomb project favored sharing the technology and the creation of an international regulating body as a means of preventing a nuclear arms race. Truman was adamant in his opposition concerning the sharing of nuclear knowledge, but did support a role for the international community to regulate peaceful ways to use that information. Further, Truman had no qualms about dropping the two atomic devices, and if Japan had not surrendered he would have approved dropping a third bomb because his advisors inflated the Soviet menace, and the US needed to project unflinching firmness which would send a message to Stalin. In the end, because of Acheson’s influence the International Atomic Energy Commission was created as well as the Atomic Energy Committee domestically.

(Korean War, June–August 1950 Map showing North Korean advances in the Korean War in June–August 1950)

The Korean War proved to be Truman’s Rubicon as he committed US troops to beat back the North Korean invasion and allowed MacArthur to cross the Yalu River with American troops provoking Chinese entry into the conflict. Truman and Acheson believed that the Soviet Union was behind the North Korean invasion as Stalin was influenced by Acheson’s “defense perimeter speech” on January 12, 1950, which omitted South Korea. Truman’s belief in what would become the “domino theory” at a time when the Sino-Soviet split was in its early stages is a total misreading of the struggle between Mao Zedong and Stalin for leadership in the Communist world which would impact US foreign policy for two decades.

The role of General Douglas MacArthur is especially important because Truman did not rein him in and almost gave him card blanche to conduct the war anyway he saw fit. This would lead to China’s entrance into the war which would prolong the “bloody” police action for almost three years. Further, the Wake Island conference between Truman and MacArthur reflected the general’s disrespect for the president as he treated Truman as his equal and provided false information concerning Chinese intentions as Truman did not stand up to military figures until in this case it was too late. The summary notes of the meeting reflect “a chronicle of extraordinary disrespect by a general toward his commander-in-chief. Out of pride, or unwilling suspension of disbelief, Truman was unable to recognize the impertinence before his eyes.”

: President Harry Truman with Bess and Margaret Truman

(Margaret, Harry, and Bess Truman)

According to Frank, Truman “saw the North Korean invasion not only as a test of national will, but of his personal backbone. Truman was in a quandary, partly of his own making. To do nothing meant ignoring the administration’s policy blueprint, NSC-68; risking American prestige; and possibly surrendering Korea and Formosa.” However, if he chose the military option, with available manpower, there was no way to predict, or control what might happen next as Eisenhower warned him. Interestingly, in the midst of the crisis when Chinese troops crossed the Yalu in late November 1950 Truman committed a major faux pas when asked at a press conference if he would deploy Atomic weapons, Truman responded, “There has always been active consideration of its use…it includes every weapon we have.” This would send allies into an uproar and allowed MacArthur to begin choosing the North Korean sites he would use atomic weapons to destroy.

Despite Truman’s limitations, according to Henry Dykstal: “it is remarkable how much he accomplished despite this. Truman set the terms for the post–World War II alliances and determined how the Cold War would be fought for decades. He began the government’s response to the Civil Rights movement by desegregating the armed forces. And when Medicare passed in 1965, Truman was given the first card in recognition of his pioneering efforts in creating a health-care safety net.

(Secretary of State Dean Acheson)

He was a private, ordinary man: the last president not to have gone to college, a man who was chosen to be vice president for lack of a better option. He took hell from all sides and left, if not popular, with some everyday dignity. He and Bess departed Washington by themselves in their own ’53 Chrysler, staying in modest motor courts and unaccompanied by security on the way home to Missouri. Frank has made a case for a man who, when given the responsibility of the entire country, was able to thread many needles, based on personal confidence, trust in the right people, and healthy relationships with family and friends.”* But one must remember in the end Truman held an unrealistic view of American power. As Frank argues “he held fast to the confident, and ruinous, idea that, from a great distance-and with no easily understood national interest at stake-the United States could successfully wage a war and administer a lasting peace.” As Walter Lippman wrote, the Truman Doctrine was “inflated globalism” which led to “misinformation, miscalculation, and misjudgment at the highest levels of decision and command” which would, and did not end well.

*Henry Dykstal. “A Private Gentleman: On The Trials of Harry Truman,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 1, 2022.

(Harry S. Truman being sworn in as President, April 12, 1945)

AN ICE-CREAM WAR by William Boyd

March 27, 2025szfreiberger Historical Fiction Leave a comment

(German East African Campaign. A halt on the march from Kisaki to Rufiji River, January 1917. Nigerian Brigade)

Any novel that begins with the following scene has to be an attention grabber and a prelude to a superb example of historical fiction. “What do you think would happen, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt asked his son Kermit, if I shot an elephant in the balls? Father, Kermit said, keeping a straight face, I think it would hurt a great deal.” The former president was with his son on a train on June 6, 1914, in Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa. Maybe it is more my “demented” nature, but I thought this opening was quite comical and interesting. The novel I am speaking about is William Boyd’s AN ICE-CREAM WAR which presents an anti-war message as he explores England and East Africa, the homes of interesting characters whose interactions make the novel enjoyable.

Those who have any knowledge of Theodore Roosevelt’s post-presidency will not be surprised by his presence with his son on a big game hunting expedition in Africa. Walter Smith, an American, arrived in Africa in 1909 after responding to a Smithsonian Institution advertisement for a manager to run and organize a hunting and specimen collection trip to Africa and would be in charge of Roosevelt’s adventure. Interestingly, during the expedition Smith dreamt that he found Kermit shot his father in the back. This nightmare spurred Smith to return to his farm near Kilimanjaro in British East Africa, near the small town of Tavela, a former mission station.

(A colonial Askari company ready to march in German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika), 1914-1918)

In developing his novel Boyd easily captures the ambiance of colonial rule in Africa. The poor housing, except for the rich Britons and Germans, lack of roads, the role of the military, the inherent poverty, and the use of local labor in a quasi-slave situation, all endemic to colonialism. Boyd does well with historical fiction as he nicely blends the major events of the period, the road to World War I, and what took place on the battlefield, concentrating on East Africa, a border area of present-day Kenya and Tanzania, but with repeated reference to battles in Europe.

Boyd’s writing is a blend of sardonic humor, sarcasm, and seriousness hidden amongst the dialogue and the offshoot of the war in Europe that bled over to the African continent. Some of the scenes border on the absurd and black reigns at times, but there is an underlying gravity to the events depicted and the reaction of the characters. An example of humor is clear as Gabriel Cobb, the son of a conservative military type who owns the Stackpole plantation marries Charis, his fiancé upon her return from India. He has no idea why he married her, and Boyd’s description of their honeymoon is both poignant and hilarious. One week after the wedding, Gabriel is assigned to be part of the Indian Expeditionary Force “B” set to invade German East Africa as World War I breaks out in the summer of 1914. Another example is when Gabriel’s younger brother becomes infatuated with his Oxford roommates’ sister. The problem is that Felix has a cold sore on his lip that won’t go away, and his amorous advances are rejected in a chapter that focuses on Felix’s “lip” situation and final rebuff.

The absurdity of war is carefully laid out by Boyd as the British invade the village of Tanga and its environs. Orders were either not received or when they were finally issued were not very clear. The racism endemic to the empire is on full display as British forces are made up of black Africans, Indian, South African, and British soldiers who suffer from a strong element of superiority. As Gabriel’s comments about Rajput Sepoys never being in the places they were supposed to be, and many ran away with the first sounds of German guns and artillery reflected. The British gave orders in English and many of their allies spoke only their native tongues making for interesting communication on the battlefield.

Boyd explores British society and focuses on the obligations men feel when it comes to war. Gabriel immediately does his duty and is sent to Africa, but his younger brother, Felix is rejected because of weak eyesight which is humiliating for him. He decides to attend Oxford as a means of getting away from Stackpole and embarrassment in that he is not able to fight. His father, Colonel Cobb, is not happy with his son and tells him that at times he is worthless. Felix’s roommate at Oxford, Philip Holland also is rejected by the military and suffers the same feelings of inadequacy – for him Oxford is also an escape from being with people who look down upon him.

Boyd creates three separate storylines which amazingly come full circle toward the end of the novel. First, Walter Smith and his spouse Matilda’s farm is seized by the British army for the war effort, and we follow his attempts to protect it and his interactions with his German neighbor across the border in German East Africa. Second, is Major Cobb and his two sons and the divergent paths each takes, particularly Gabriel who will be severely wounded early in his deployment. Third, the von Bishops, Erich and Leisl. Erich, a German officer, had always had his eyes on the Smith farm, and the war provided an opportunity to take it from the British and incorporate valuable machinery onto his own property. Interestingly, Leisl who is bored by her marriage volunteers at a German hospital and there she meets a new patient, Gabriel Cobb.

A number of situations stand out. Charis is not happy how her short honeymoon evolved and winds up having an affair with Felix and it will lead to interesting consequences. Walter Smith became an advisor to the British military since he his geographical knowledge of the region was so valuable. Finally in February 1916 the British made their move against the Germans at Salaita. During the fighting Smith leaves the battlefield to check on his farm. Upon arriving he experiences a horrible smell, and it seems that German troops have defecated all over his house and other buildings, dug up the grave of his daughter, in addition to stealing his expensive Decorticator machine which he could not run his farm without. Erich von Bishop is responsible.

Charis like many women had married right before their husbands were shipped out to fight. For many, they really did not know their partners very well which more than likely would lead to marriage difficulties upon their return – if they returned. The loneliness of these women would lead many of these women to engage in affairs while not knowing if their husbands were alive or dead. In Charis’ case it would lead to a fateful decision.

Boyd exposes the acute skepticism concerning the war in Africa as more men died of disease caused by unsanitary conditions, lack of food, and poisoning. Others would succumb to their wounds because of the lack of proper medical care and supplies. Many would contract PTSD which would lead to numerous complications for those conducting the war.

(Map of the proposed Mittelafrika with German territory in yellow)

The author develops a series of important characters that dominate the story. Major Cobb, the family patriarch at Stackpole is an ornery man who is a tight fisted individual who possesses little empathy, and each day reads bible verses to his family. Walter Smith is a well meaning American who settled in East Africa who is obsessed with expanding his farm. Erich von Bishop has a typical German mentality in that he wants to expand his farm, and his target is “Smithville” across the border. Of course, there is the relationship between Gabriel and Felix which dominates the story. These and other characters set the background for Boyd’s real purpose – examine warfare, how people cope with wartime and interact with each other to survive. The most interesting relationships revolve around the Cobb brothers who love and respect each other, but the outbreak of war changes their dynamic. Gabriel will spend three years in a German hospital as a patient and then assisting others as he gathers intelligence for when the British army will arrive. Felix is the opposite of his brother, but by 1917 the British were desperate for bodies to fight so they accepted him as an officer. He is sent to Africa, and his major goal is to find his brother before he receives a letter from his bride.

Boyd explores a range of human emotions throughout the novel. Guilt, infatuation, greed, and desire dominate the actions of the major characters. He will bring together some of these characters in an ingenious manner as they all seem to wind up in East Africa. Michael Gorra in his February 27, 1983, New York Times book review sums up the importance of the novel and his evaluation of the author. He writes; “In its treatment of its central theme, it fulfills the ambition of the historical novel at its best: to comprehend the past, not as the colorful backdrop to a costume drama, but as the controlling force in the lives of its characters. Such novels rarely have pleasant things to say about any individual’s position in the large scheme of the world, and ”An Ice-Cream War” is no exception. Its characters – the survivors in particular – are mercilessly knocked about by the force of historical circumstance: by the war, by the problems of commanding men whose culture they do not understand and whose language they do not even speak, by the influenza epidemic that followed immediately upon the Armistice. But Mr. Boyd sees even domestic life, as Gabriel’s and Felix’s mother sees her marriage, ”as a relentless challenge, an unending struggle against appalling adverse conditions to get her own way.” That bleak comic vision suggests the early Evelyn Waugh, and ”An Ice-Cream War” is a good enough novel, for all its flaws, to persuade me that Mr. Boyd, who was born in 1952, may someday write a great one.”

(Advance on Kilimanjaro)

IN THE MIDST OF CIVILIZED EUROPE: THE POGROMS OF 1918-1921 AND THE ONSET OF THE HOLOCAUST by Jeffrey Veidlinger

March 20, 2025szfreiberger German History, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Russian History Leave a comment

(Victims of a pogrom perpetrated by Ukrainian forces in Khodorkiv, 1919)

According to Webster’s dictionary a “pogrom” is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a Russian word meaning to “wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries. The first such incident to be labeled a pogrom is believed to be anti-Jewish rioting in Odessa in 1821. As a descriptive term, “pogrom” came into common usage with extensive anti-Jewish riots that swept the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire in 1881–1884, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

One of the most impactful pogroms took place in Kishinev located in the southwest corner of Imperial Russia in April 1903. It resulted in the death of 49 Jews, an untold number of Jewish women were raped, and 1,500 Jewish homes were damaged. This sudden rush of hoodlum violence — prompted by accusatory rumors of Jewish ritual murder — quickly became a talisman of imperial Russian brutality against its Jews. More than that, the incident brought the word pogrom to the world stage and set off reverberations that changed the course of Jewish history for the next century.

Pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th century became the impetus for Jewish immigration to the United States. Between 1880 and 1924 over 2,000,000 Jews immigrated to the United States to escape persecution and poverty. My own grandparents left their small village north of Kyiv in 1905 on arriving at Ellis Island and settling in the New York area.

(A funeral held for desecrated Torah scrolls following the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were murdered and hundreds of women raped)

For those who have difficulty imagining what a pogrom is or looks like I refer them to the film “The Fixer” based on the novel of the same name by Bernard Malamud. THE FIXER was based on an infamous case known as the “Beilis case” or the “Beilis trial” of 1913, in which the mutilated corpse of a Christian boy was found in a cave outside Kiev in 1911, and it became the cause célèbre for myriad virulent antisemitic groups to propagate widespread persecution of Jews. A Jewish laborer named Menahem Mendel Beilis (Yacov Bok in the film and novel) was arrested on ludicrous trumped-up charges for ritualistically extracting the child’s blood to be used in Passover matzos and it led to his imprisonment and torture –a prelude to further pogroms and the coming Bolshevik Revolution. In a highly publicized trial akin to the Russian version of the Dreyfus affair, Beilis was ultimately acquitted by an all-Christian jury.

The latest use of the term pogrom has sparked controversy when it was applied to the devastating actions of Hamas terrorists perpetrated on October 7, 2024, against Israel. The end result was 1,180 people killed, of which 797 were civilians, including 36 children and 379 security forces. A further, 3,400 civilians and soldiers were wounded, and 251 civilians and soldiers were taken captive (74 later died in captivity or were confirmed dead). Hamas’ savagery fits the definition of the term “pogrom” with all the elements of violence, sexual attack, and antisemitism.

(Symon Petliura, a 1920s Ukrainian statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots)

In his latest book IN THE MIDST OF CIVILIZED EUROPE: THE POGROMS OF 1918-1921 AND THE ONSET OF THE HOLOCAUST Jeffrey Veidlinger tackles the pogrom-like violence in western Belorussia (Belarus) and Poland’s Galicia province (now West Ukraine), that resulted in the murder of over a hundred thousand Jews between 1918 and 1921. According to Veidlinger, apart from murders, “approximately 600,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation and set off alarm bells around the world.”

The perpetrators of pogroms organized locally, sometimes with government and police encouragement. They raped, murdered their Jewish victims, and looted their property. During the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Ukrainian nationalists, Polish officials, and Red Army soldiers perpetrated these massacres blaming the Jews for the turmoil and destruction of World War I and the ensuing Russian Revolution. At the time reports of this violence were published in the press and many warned that the Jews were in danger of extermination – a prediction that would come to fruition in the Nazi imposed Holocaust between 1939-1945.

Veidlinger relies on long-neglected materials that include recently discovered eyewitness accounts, trial records, and government orders concluding that the genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. He explains how and why so many groups believed that the murder of Jews was a suitable reaction to their perceived problems, allowing “pogroms” to be seen as one of the defining moments of the 20th century.

(Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger)

The development of pogroms as a threat to the existence of Jews came to a stage. First, the reaction to the assassination of Alexander II which Russian newspapers and right-wing Christians blamed the Jews. Next is the results of the Russo-Japanese war which set off a wave of pogroms as the Russian people could not accept defeat. The situation was further exacerbated by the 1905 Revolution allowing the Black Hundreds and individuals within the Tsarist police to unleash devastating pogroms. It took until 1906 for the pogroms to subside. The pogroms unleashed between 1903-1906 helped model behavioral patterns that were further refined with each wave of unrest. Tensions were heightened with the appearance of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, first circulated by the Black Hundreds in 1903 it would be widely disseminated across Russia (and Europe) accusing the Jews of a global conspiracy to take control of world finances and manipulate government leaders. The next stage in the development and implementation of pogroms was a result of World War I where Jews were accused of financing the German war machine and supporting Russia’s arch enemy, Germany. Rumors of Jewish betrayal throughout the war led to their removal by Russian troops from front line areas leading to thousands of Jews imprisoned and others becoming refugees forced out of their homes and sent to other parts of the empire or forced to emigrate elsewhere when possible to eradicate what was perceived as a world Jewish revolutionary movement.

One of Veidlinger’s most important themes revolves around what happened to Jews in Ukraine during World War II, having its roots in what happened to Jews in the same geographic area in the post-World War I era. The massacres established violence against Jews as an acceptable response to the excesses of Bolshevism due to the unrelenting exposure to bloodshed which habituated local populations to bloodshed and barbarism. When the Germans arrived in 1941 they found a decades-old killing ground where the mass murder of innocent Jews was an acceptable reality.

Veidlinger correctly points out how Jews could not escape victimhood as after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk was signed in March 1918 by the Bolsheviks and Germans, the Jews would once again found themselves as victims. As the Germans occupied Ukraine the Bolsheviks accused them of collaboration with the enemy as well as being members of the bourgeois class. The Germans accused them of being Bolshevik sympathizers and engaging in violent attacks against German officials. The Jews were victims of attacks from both sides further reinforcing the concept that it was acceptable to beat up and kill Jews. Things grew worse when the Bolsheviks created the “Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption” (Cheka) under Felix Dzerzhinsky which employed torture and terror to root out the opposition. Interestingly, with so many Bolshevik leaders with Jewish backgrounds it was easy to spread lies pertaining to them by opposition to the new Soviet regime. The remnants of the central powers, the White Army, the Black Hundreds all developed strong rationalizations to unleash further pogroms.

(Leon Trotsky)

With the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empire the nationalist goals of the Poles for their own nation ensued. Joseph Pilsudski, a Polish military figure and statesman called for a multi-ethnic Polish state and became the first Chief of State for the new country. However, for Jews the situation was complex as they once again were caught in the middle of divergent forces and soon became victims of pogramatic violence as Poles, Ukranians, and others fought for control of cities within the new Ukrainian and Polish republics. Violence in Lviv set a new pattern as soldiers deliberately targeted Jews in their homes and businesses with no apparent military objective. This seemed different as now soldiers were added to gangs of ruffians and local discontented types who openly attacked Jews. This spread across Poland and Galicia resulting in over 130 pogroms against Jews by soldiers with the general population participating in the violence as crowds cheered them on. Once again Jews were caught in the middle as a Ukrainian Republic had been proclaimed that seemed to be more tolerant of Jews when compared to the new Polish state.

The author does an excellent job exploring in insightful detail four of the 85 attacks on Jewish life and property between January and March 1919. The four include pogroms in Ovruch, two in Zhytomyr, and Proskuriv. What set them apart from previous pogroms was that they were not necessarily an unprompted spree committed spontaneously by unruly soldiers rampaging through civilian neighborhoods, but part of a protracted reign of terror perpetrated by officers, or leaders who achieved some military control acting under the authority of the state military. They became a watershed for Jews because the Ukrainian government when it came to pass was predicated on the principle of minority rights and national autonomy and their lack of action showed they could not protect them. For Jews targeted for supporting Bolsheviks it betrayed the trust Jews had in their government.

(A 1934 edition by the Patriotic Publishing Company of Chicago)

The problem that emerges in all four pogroms is that the high minded ideals of the Ukrainian cabinet and intellectual elites were not shared by the rest of the military leadership. Instead, the officers and soldiers, many of whom had been poisoned by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Imperial Russian army which they had served and by prejudices learned in their villages, continued to view Jews as speculators stealing the wealth of the Ukrainian people, as enemies of the church, and the agents of Bolshevism. It was a belief system that reverberated throughout the region to the detriment and of the well-being of Jews. This would continue in the battles for Kyiv, Fastiv and other areas as the White army with their Cossacks entered the picture.

Fastiv is another example of the horrors Jews faced in September and October 1919 as the White army entered the fray resulting in the death of over 8000 Jews, some the result of outright murder and the rest the effects of hunger, exposure and the lack of any medical care. The Whites wanted to eradicate the Jewish population anywhere they could find them. The Whites were made up of former Tsarist officers and soldiers, along with the Cossacks just enhanced the terror Jews faced under the leadership of Anton Denikin, a former peasant and disgruntled Tsarist officer. The former Tsarist officers saw the Jews as the progenitors of Bolshevism and as an internal enemy whose perfidy had led to Russia’s defeat in the Great War. Their goal was to restore the Tsarist empire sans Jews.

(Anton Denikin)

As previously mentioned the Jews were once again caught in the crossfire between the Red army, the White army, the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the new Polish nation. With the settlement at the Versailles conference unclear when it came to borders and the fate of Ukraine, it left an opening for these disparate elements to continue to fight and for Jews who grew confused as to whom to support as the political situation was a minefield. The battlefield consisted of Whites fighting Reds, the Red Army fighting Poland, Poland fighting the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and sorted warlords seizing property and randomly killing Jews as opportunities presented themselves. Throughout Ukraine and border areas with the new nation of Poland, government control of territory was always tenuous giving anti-Semites the perfect opportunity to engage in pogroms. Fueled by conspiracy theories and past learning under the Tsar and the fact that Bolshevik leaders had Jewish backgrounds the plight of Jews seemed preordained. As Veidlinger describes the many pogroms with its executions, shootings, rapes, seizures of property, and outright torture physically and psychologically one has to wonder how depraved the perpetrators of these atrocities were.

Veidlinger sums up the plight of the Jews very clearly: “Jewish civilians were singled out for persecution by virtually everyone. The Bolsheviks despised them as bourgeois nationalist; the bourgeois nationalists branded them Bolsheviks; Ukrainians saw them as agents of Russia; Russians suspected them of being German sympathizers; and Poles doubted their loyalty to the newly founded Polish Republic. Dispersed in urban pockets and insufficiently concentrated in any one contiguous territory, Jews were unable to make a credible claim to sovereignty, no party trusted them. Regardless of one’s political inclination, there was always a Jew to blame.”

The concept of scapegoating stands out. If one follows the plight of Jews in Europe since the Middle Ages , the Jew was the perfect target. No matter what century we are speaking about pogroms would draw local people, at times the victim’s neighbors in what the author describes as a “carnivalesque atmosphere” of inebriated singing and dancing. The perpetrators were often young peasants who had suffered greatly during World War I, who lacked any guidance from their elders who also participated in the bloodshed.

POSTPONED – Pogroms and the Origins of the European Genocide of the Jews

(1919 map of Ukraine)

As the Nazis rose to power and consolidated their rule in Germany in the 1930s the situation for Jews grew untenable. The Nazi invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union created an invitation for “liberated peoples” to take out their frustrations against Jews. The Nazis encouraged anti-Semitism in the Ukraine taking advantage of its previous history of persecuting Jews. In 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, told subordinates “not to hinder attempts of local anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles to the newly occupies territories to engage in cleansing activities. On the contrary, they should be carried out and intensified, if necessary, and channeled in the right direction, but without leaving a trace.” Heydrich would organize the Wannsee Conference where the decision labeled the ‘Final Solution” was reached.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. [LCID: 91199]

(Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia.. Place uncertain, 1942)

Pogroms broke out throughout the Ukraine in 1941 as the Nazis were aided by those who had participated in the horrors that took place between 1918 and 1921, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The Germans would incite the Ukrainians by equating Jews with Bolsheviks, drawing upon the same language which peasants and Cossack militias had massacred Jews twenty years earlier. The most deadly massacre took place in Kyiv on September 26, 1941, when Jews were marched to an open meadow, part of the Babyn Yar system were 33, 771 Jews were killed over thirty-six hours. By the spring of 1942, the genocide of the Jews of Ukraine was complete, with over 500,000 Jews, , one-third of the prewar population murdered. The pogroms Veidlinger describes in his deeply researched monograph had been mostly spontaneous and scattered, but once the Nazis crossed into Poland, the Ukraine, and the Soviet Union the Holocaust became increasingly systematic. The intellectual preparation lingered from twenty years before, became a reality. The precedent of1918-1921 came to fruition. The script of twenty years before was reenacted.

In the end Veidlinger’s scholarly presentation concluded that few of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were punished when compared to their victims. Some higher ups escaped, some were convicted, and many lesser accomplices had been sentenced to death by tribunals or vigilantes, but the reality is clear, as Veidlinger states, “the value of Jewish life had been debased.”

(Bodies of the Jewish victims of the pogrom in Orvuch, Ukraine, in February of 1919)

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