The Forgers, by Roger Moorhouse. 2023. Basic Books, New York
Move Over, Schindler. Aleksander Lados the Invisible Pole Did Far More for Jews Than You Did
After Poland’s 1939 defeat, Aleksander Lados was appointed by the Polish government in exile as the Polish envoy to Switzerland. (p. 49). He began to deal with the Polish Jews on Swiss territory, as well as the Polish and French military units that had taken refuge in Switzerland following the fall of France in 1940. (pp. 81-83). He and like-minded Poles and Jews hatched a conspiracy to make fake passports so that Jews, from places all over German-occupied Europe, could be passed off as foreign citizens, and thereby spared Nazi persecution.
THE SCALE OF JEW-RESCUE EFFORTS OF THE ALEKSANDER LADOS GROUP
The author summarizes the staggering scale of Lados’ achievements, “The total number of recipients of Lados passports is not known, but is estimated by Abraham Silberschein in 1944 at around ten thousand, a figure that is borne out by the available statistical data…an estimated total of between 3,800 and 5,300 documents issued…the average number of individuals entered on Paraguayan and Honduras passports issued by the Lados Group was 2.2 people, one arrives at an estimate of between 8,300 and 11,400 individuals…It is known that, from a sample of 3,284 known recipients of Lados documents, some 868 survived the war…a realistic estimate for a survival rate–based on this figure–might be between 30 and 35 percent. On this basis, bearing in mind a conservative estimate of between eight thousand and ten thousand recipients, it is thought that perhaps between two thousand and three thousand of those people who received Lados documents may have survived the Holocaust.” (p. 279. Emphasis added).
Historian Roger Moorhouse concludes, “The Lados Group carried out one of the most ambitious rescue operations of the Holocaust. Until very recently, its story was unknown…” (p. 277). That’s putting it mildly!
WHY OSKAR SCHINDLER IS A HOUSEHOLD WORD WHILE ALEKSANDER LADOS IS A NOBODY
Oskar Schindler rescued 1,200 Jews while Aleksander Lados did much better. As noted above, he had rescued at least 2,000–3,000 Jews. And yet Yad Vashem has repeatedly refused to honor Aleksander Lados as a Righteous Gentile. This heinous act is so egregious that even some Jews have raised objections. Please see:
In the above article, Eldad Beck comments, “The Polish government saw the carelessness of the committee as a deliberate Israeli political move aimed at preventing recognition of the efforts of the Polish government-in-exile to save Jews during the Holocaust and to perpetuate the impression that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.”
Absolutely. Let’s take this a little further. Jews want to give Schindler maximum publicity and adulatory coverage so that the Germans don’t “look so bad” in killing 6 million Jews. But Jews don’t want to give Aleksander Lados any publicity so that Poland continues to “look bad” for comparatively trivial acts against Jews. The spurning of Aleksander Lados by Yad Vashem is not some kind of isolated instance: It is part of a generalized Jewish hostility towards publicity surrounding the Polish rescuers of Jews. Think of Jan Grabowski and company. Can the Holocaust Industry be far behind?
THE “ALL JEWS MUST DIE” MYTH IS SHATTERED
The cornerstone Holocaust supremacist argument, which is endlessly repeated in the effort to keep the Holocaust elevated above all other genocides, is the one about the Nazis out to kill every single possible Jew. The success of the Lados Team blows this away. And so much for rhetorical devices such as Jewish “existential enemies” and the presumed Nazi “redemptive antisemitism”.
The fact that some exchange Jews were actually freed proves that this operation was not a Nazi cynical lie designed to raise false hopes and to lure fugitive Jews out of hiding. It was real.
In fact, far from wanting every single Jew dead at any cost, Nazi Germany was long willing to exchange Jews for German nationals in Allied countries. (pp. 154-155, p. 190), even at the height of the Holocaust itself! Moorhouse writes, “…in the summer of 1942, the Foreign Office and the SS agreed that some thirty thousand might potentially be held back from the transports to the death camps so that they could be exchanged or otherwise leveraged.” (p. 156). He adds that, “In the winter of 1942-1943, German thinking toward the new category of Exchange Jews began to crystallize.” (p. 157).
THE GERMANS HAD TO LEAVE SOME JEWS ALIVE IN ORDER FOR LADOS AND SCHINDLER TO BE SUCCESSFUL
Ironically, the Germans played along with Lados’ deception, “What’s more, the German authorities were not especially concerned whether the foreign passports they saw were genuine.” (p. 156. Emphasis added). For example, the newly minted Jewish “citizens of Paraguay” did not even have to speak Portuguese or Spanish! (p. 128).
Let us keep things in perspective. The Jew-rescue successes of both Schindler and Lados were predicated on the fact that the Nazis were willing to let some Jews emerge alive from their totalitarian rule. The case of Lados is obvious. In the case of Schindler, his success depended on the German decision to use some Jews for forced labor, and not merely “temporarily diverted from the gas chambers”, but on a quasi-permanent basis, and with a real potential of surviving the Third Reich.
In the wake of such things as Hotel Polski, some 2,533 Polish Jews were deported to Bergen Belsen in summer 1943 for the purpose of prospective exchanges. Most held passports or promesas. (p. 204). For more on Hotel Polski, see:
https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/holocaust-exceptional-all-jews-die-a-myth-shulman/
However, the Germans eventually grew hesitant in using Polish Jews in exchanges, as the Polish Jews were eyewitnesses to so many German crimes. (p. 212, 215, 228). For this reason, Dutch Jews, who saw few or no Nazi atrocities, became the preferred exchange material. (p. 215, 228). For an example of Dutch Jews freed by the Nazis, see:
NO NATIONS WERE ACTUALLY REQUIRED TO ACCEPT THESE EXCHANGE JEWS!
Moorhouse clarifies the issue, “As Abraham Silberschein and others had explained to the Swiss police earlier that year, the intention of the passport program was not actually to send Jews to Latin America; it was merely to preserve imperiled Jews from certain death at German hands by granting them temporary protection that citizenship would confer…Merely by declaring that they would recognize the illegally produced passports, the Latin American governments could give thousands of desperate Jews a real chance of survival, without any of them ever leaving European shores. If these countries refused, however, then the passports were worthless and those who held them would be robbed of what little legal protection they had.” (p. 177).
WESTERN DITHERING GUARANTEED THE DEATHS OF MOST OF THE JEWS THAT THE THIRD REICH OFFERED TO FREE
The Nazis did send some exchange Jews to Auschwitz to their deaths (p. 244), but most exchange Jews that died in Nazi captivity died not as Jews but as the captives of horrible Nazi German concentration camps (notably Bergen Belsen).
The author sums all this up, “Abraham Silberschein estimated that, in January 1944, the vast majority of the ten thousand Lados passport holders were still alive, being held by the Germans in internment camps. Their tragedy, of course, is that they then had to survive a further eighteen months of privation and ill-treatment in German hands, while distant bureaucrats in Washington and Asuncion discussed whether they should be permitted to abuse the sanctity of official documents.” (p. 280).
Let us elaborate on how the West failed these Jews:
Moorhouse sadly tells us, “To make matters worse, there were powerful voices arguing against that recognition. Most important among them were the Americans, who were still far from convinced of the utility–or advisability–of pursuing rescue through the forging of passports.” (p. 177).
He adds that, “Consequently, through 1943, US diplomats in Latin America had been nudged by their host governments toward a careful scrutiny of all such exchanges and a rejection of false or illegally produced papers. In September, the State Department had gone a step further and sent word to German officials, via the Swiss, to inform them that Jews holding false papers would not be considered eligible for exchange. Then, as if to deepen the confusion, they relented, following pressure from the World Jewish Congress…” (p. 235).
The British grew hesitant about exchanging Jews, citing their policy of not negotiating with the Germans. They also feared that the released Jews would move to Palestine. (p. 214).
The South American nations were long noncommittal. Moorhouse comments, “Paraguay, whose passports made up the overwhelming majority of those illegally issued in Bern, continued to waver, while Honduras failed to respond to the Polish approaches at all.” (p. 238).
CONCLUSION
And yet nowadays Poland is blamed for “not doing enough” for Jews during the Holocaust! Aleksander Lados must be turning over in his grave.
