That Time the Nazis Went on a Quest to Save a Major Jewish Leader

On September 1, 1939, 66 infantry divisions, 2,750 tanks, and 1,315 aircraft of the German Wehrmacht thundered across Germany’s eastern border into neighbouring Poland, plunging Europe into the Second World War. Two weeks later on September 17, the Soviet Red Army followed suit, invading Poland from the east with 33 divisions. The Polish armed forces, brave but outnumbered and outgunned, could do little to resist the savage two-front onslaught. In the wake of the advancing Wehrmacht troops and tanks followed the Einsatzgruppen or “task forces” – special SS death squads tasked with rounding up and executing priests, politicians, and other members of the Polish intelligentsia who might resist the occupation; as well as Jews, Romani, and the mentally ill, whom Nazi ideology deemed to be untermenschen or “subhuman.” The Polish government capitulated on October 6, and by the end of 1939 the occupying Germans and Soviets had murdered nearly 80,000 Poles. Millions more would follow over the next five years. Yet amidst this orgy of murder and destruction, Major Ernst Bloch, an agent of the Abwehr or German Army Intelligence Service, was dispatched on a seemingly unthinkable mission: to locate and rescue Rabbi Yosef Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe – one of the most beloved and influential Jewish thinkers and leaders in modern history. This is the unlikely forgotten story of how the Nazis saved a major Jewish figure from the jaws of their own genocide.

The Hasidic Jewish movement of Chabad [“Ha-bad”, with a fricative on the H] was founded in 1775 by rabbi Schneur Zalman in the Russian village of Liozno – now Liozna in Belarus. Named after the combination of the words Chokmah, Binah, and Da’at – Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge – Chabad was heavily based upon Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism and emphasized such concepts as intellectual inquiry being the gateway to understanding God and the idea that people are not inherently good or evil but rather face a continuous inner struggle between these two extremes. In 1796, Rabbi Zalman published the Tanya, the foundational text of Chabad. Today, the movement preaches 10 basic Mitzvahs or commandments: Ahavas Yisroel, or the love of one’s fellow Jew; Chinuch or Torah Education; Torah Study; the donning of Tefillin – leather boxes containing Jewish texts wrapped around the left arm and head during weekday morning services; the affixing of a mezuzah or scriptural scroll on the doorpost of a house; observing Tzedakah or the giving of alms every weekday; the possession of Jewish holy books; the lighting of Shabbat and festival candles; the following of Kashrut or Jewish dietary laws; and the following of Taharas Hamishpocho or the Torah perspective on married life.

In 1813, Rebbe Zalman’s successor, Dovber Schneuri, moved the seat of the movement to the village of Lyubavitchi in Smolensk Oblast, where he established a long-lived dynasty of Rebbes. In 1915, the fifth Rebbe, Shalom Dovber, left Lyubavitchi and relocated the movement – now commonly known as Chabad-Lubavitch – to the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

Rabbi Dovber’s only son, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, was born in Lyubavichi on June 21, 1880. From an early age, Yosef was groomed to become the next Lubavitcher Rebbe, being appointed his father’s personal secretary at age 15 and attending numerous rabbinical conferences in Kovno and Vilna – today Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania – to discuss various issues affecting Jews across the Russian Empire. In 1897 he married Nechama Schneerson, great-grand-daughter of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Tzemach Tzedek or third Rebbe, in 1898 he was appointed executive director of the Teshivah Tomchei Tmimim talmudic seminary, founded by his father the previous year. Throughout his long career, Schneerson proved himself a brilliant religious scholar, a skilled civic organizer, and a staunch advocate for the rights and welfare of Russian Jews, who were often persecuted by the Tsarist and later Bolshevik governments. In 1901 he worked with various business leaders across the Russian Empire to establish textile factories in the cities of Dubrovna and Mahilyow which ultimately employed some 2,000 Jewish employees, while during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war he arranged the shipment of kosher food to Jewish conscripts serving in the Russian army. Meanwhile, he petitioned government officials and bankers in various European countries to use their influence to end pogroms or antisemitic riots in Russia. For these activities he was arrested four times by the Tsarist government, but released every time due to lack of evidence.

Schneerson’s activism only increased following the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Jewish community found itself in opposition to the official Bolshevik policy of State Atheism. This policy, which sought the eradication of all religion across the Soviet Union and the world, was overseen by a special branch of the Communist Party known as the Yevsektzia. Throughout the 1920s, Schneerson established a network of underground yeshivot or traditional religious schools across Russia in order to preserve Jewish culture. Then, upon the death of his father on March 21, 1920, he assumed the title of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe.

In 1924, the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, forced Schneerson to leave Rostov-on-Don and relocate to Leningrad – today Saint Petersburg. There he continued his underground activities, dispatching Chabad representatives and founding seminaries across the Soviet Union to strengthen Jewish communities. But on March 21, 1927, as Schneerson was observing the yahrzeit or anniversary of his father’s death, three Cheka agents burst into his synagogue to arrest him. According to legend, Schneerson responded to the armed men by saying:

“This little toy [your gun] has made many a man change his mind. That little toy can intimidate only the kind of man who has many gods-passions, and but one world-this world. Because I have only one God and two worlds, I am not impressed by your little toy.”

Schneerson was imprisoned in Leningrad’s infamous Shpalerna Prison, and following a show trial was convicted of counter-revolutionary activities and sentenced to death. Thankfully, following protests from Western governments and the International Red Cross, his sentence was commuted to three years’ exile to the city of Kostroma and then banishment to Riga in Latvia. There he established another Talmudic seminary and organized the state-controlled factory production of Matzah or unleavened bread for the celebration of Passover. Today, Rebbe Schneerson’s release from Soviet prison is celebrated annually by the Chabad-Lubavitch community

In 1929, Schneerson visited the Holy Land – then in the British Mandate of Palestine – before travelling to the United States, arriving in New York City on September 17th aboard the ocean liner SS France. Some 600 followers gathered at the docks to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe, while 100 New York City Police officers were assigned as his security detail. During his eight-month visit, Schneerson travelled to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., where he met with President Herbert Hoover – among several world leaders who had petitioned for his release. Schneerson’s goal was to spread awareness of the plight of Russian Jewry, who due to Soviet policy were easily censored and forbidden to leave the country. Due to this dangerous political climate, Schneerson’s American followers urged him to remain in in the United States, but he refused, the newspaper The Jewish Record reporting that:

“A movement has begun among Chabad Chassidim to have the Lubavitcher Rebbe remain in America. A committee was organized under the name of “Agudas Chassidei Chabad,” in which are represented all of the Chabad shuls of Chicago. The committee will develop plans that will enable the fulfillment of this wish, for the Rebbe to stay in America…The committee, under the leadership of Rabbi [Chaim Tzvi] Rubenstein, presented their wish to the Rebbe. While the Rebbe hasn’t yet given a positive response, he stated clearly that he cannot even begin to consider their plan, unless it would be understood that his coming [to America] would also mean the establishment of a Yeshivah Tomchei Temimim in whichever community he would choose to reside.”

At the time, the establishment of a traditional Yeshiva in the United States was not a popular one, with American Jews viewing such establishments as outdated holdovers from the Old Country incompatible with progressive American values. As a result, Schneerson dismissed the United States as too irreligious and returned to Riga, where he remained until 1934 when he again relocated to Otwock, a suburb of Warsaw. Then, in September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and this is where our story finally begins.

Initially, Schneerson refused to leave Otwock, remaining to tend to his community as best he could. But once it became clear that the Polish Army could not hold out much longer, Mordecai Dubin, a Chabad follower and member of the Latvian parliament, arranged for Schneerson and his family to settle in Riga. However, to reach the Latvian capital the Rebbe would have to reach Warsaw and catch a train north – a perilous 60 kilometre journey along a road frequently bombed and strafed by Luftwaffe aircraft. Nonetheless, the now 59-year-old Rebbe, overweight and suffering from multiple sclerosis, left Ostwock along with his family and a group of devoted followers – only to find the Warsaw Train Station destroyed. They were thus forced to seek refuge among Chabad followers in the Warsaw Ghetto while day after day German aircraft systematically flattened the city’s Jewish neighbourhoods. It seemed only a matter of time before Schneerson and his family were either killed or arrested.

But across the Atlantic, an unlikely rescue was being organized. Though at the time the Chabad movement in America was small, a small group of followers led by Brooklyn rabbi Israel Jacobson managed to hire Washington lobbyist Max Rhoade to petition for the Rebbe’s relocation to the United States. Rhoade contacted dozens of politicians including Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis; Sol Bloom, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives; and New York Senator Robert Wagner, who on September 22 sent a telegram to U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull informing him that:

“Prominent New York citizens concerned about whereabouts of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, … present location unknown.”

Four days later, Mordecai Dubin in Riga telegrammed Rabbi Jacobson, describing his failed rescue attempt and urging him to:

“Save lives. Rabbi and family. Try every way. Every hour more dangerous. Answer daily what accomplished.”

Rhoade’s lobbying campaign quickly picked up steam, with Phillip Rosen, head of the American Jewish Joint Committee’s European office writing to the U.S. representative in Riga:

“Greatly interested world famous rabbi Schneersohn … now Muranowska 32 Warsaw. Urge your doing utmost to effect his protection and removal to Riga …”

And on September 29, New York attorney Arthur Rabinowitz wrote Justice Brandeis requesting:

“… any aid you can render possibly through Ben Cohen … feel justified in troubling you by extreme danger to Schneersohn’s life and his great moral worth to world Jewry.”

Benjamin Cohen was a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so-called “Brain Trust” and the author of several major pieces of New Deal legislation. As a former counsel for the American Zionist Counsel, Cohen was a staunch defender of the welfare of Jews around the world. Yet despite mounting pressure from within his administration, President Roosevelt, then running for a third term, was reluctant to intervene in the rapidly-escalating European war. At the time, isolationist and anti-semitic sentiment in the United States was at an all-time high, stoked by such figures as legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh and Catholic preacher and broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin. But Max Rhoade persisted, and by doggedly badgering figures such as Brandeis, Cohen, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he finally succeeded in convincing the Roosevelt Administration to intervene on Rebbe Schneerson’s behalf – if only to throw the American Jewish community a bone and keep them quiet.

Luckily, while the American government had little interest in helping European Jewry, the government of the Third Reich had a keen interest in maintaining good diplomatic relations with the United States and keeping them out of the war. Benjamin Cohen thus contacted diplomat Robert Pell, whom he knew to be friends with German diplomat Helmut Wohlthat, head of Germany’s four-year economic plan. As Cohen suspected, Pell confirmed that Wohlthat was willing to cooperate, seeing the rescue of Rebbe Schneerson as a small price to pay for continued good relations. Pell conveyed this message to Secretary of State Hull, who telegrammed Wohlthat at the U.S. consul in Berlin to approve the extraction of the Rebbe from occupied Poland.

There was just one problem: Poland was under military and not civilian administration. Wohlthat thus appealed to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr or German Army Intelligence Service. Secretly opposed to Nazi ideology, throughout the war Canaris committed numerous acts of internal sabotage and resistance against the regime, including passing vital intelligence to the Allies, helping 500 Jews escape the Netherlands in 1941, engineering the continued neutrality of Francoist Spain, and participating in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Canaris was eventually arrested on July 23, 1944, convicted of treason, and executed by hanging at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on April 9, 1945.

To rescue the Rebbe, Canaris selected Major Ernst Bloch, a highly decorated Abwehr operative. A veteran of the First World War, in the interwar period Bloch served in a commercial branch of military intelligence that spied on visiting businessmen. He was also half-jewish on his father’s side – what in the pseudoscientific Nazi racial hierarchy was known as a mischlinge or “half-breed.” Despite their precarious position within Nazi society, more than 60,000 half-jews (AKA mischlinge first grade) and 90,000 quarter-jews (mischlinge second grade) served in the armed forces of the Third Reich. These included high-ranking officials such as Field Marshal Erhard Milch, head of the Reich Air Ministry or RLM, and amusingly, certain individuals used by the Reich Propaganda Ministry as examples of “ideal Aryans”. However, many important mischlinge like Milch or Bloch were granted official “German Blood Certificates” confirming them to be true Aryans or simply had their Jewish heritage conveniently ignored.

According to Bryan Mark Rigg, author of the 2006 book Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Admiral Canaris laid out Bloch’s improbable mission in stark terms:

“You’re going to go up to Warsaw and you’re going to find the most ultra-Jewish Rabbi in the world, Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneersohn, and you’re going to rescue him. You can’t miss him, he looks just like Moses.”

Despite his background, Bloch was a fully assimilated Christian and had little affinity towards the Jewish community. Yet he followed his orders dutifully and dispassionately. Along with two assistants, Unterfeldwebel or Sergeant Klaus Schenk and Grefreiter or PrivateJohannes Hamburger, he travelled to Warsaw and began searching the city’s enormous Jewish Ghetto for Rebbe Schneerson. According to Bryan Rigg, it proved a difficult task:

“He would go up to ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, wearing a Nazi uniform with swastikas, and say, ‘I’m looking for the Rebbe.’ And they’d say to him, ‘Yeah, and we want to shave off our beards and join the German army.’ Then they would walk away.”

In late October, Bloch was provided with the Rebbe’s last known address, Bonifraterska 29, only to discover that the building had been destroyed. This information was passed on to Max Rhoade back in New York City, who on November 14 sent a telegram to the International Red Cross in Geneva informing them that:

“German military officer detailed to locate Rabbi Joseph Issac Schneersohn … Schneersohn not apprised officer’s mission. Hope you can devise method of communicating information to Schneerson … detailing of German officer done at request of Schneersohn’s friends … urgent … take advantage opportunity.”

The Red Cross duly dispatched a messenger to Warsaw with a telegram guaranteeing safe passage to Riga for Schneerson and his family and instructing the Rebbe to immediately turn himself in to the Gestapo. The messenger eventually succeeded in locating Schneerson, who had been hiding out in the Warsaw Ghetto under miserable conditions and was in failing health. Reluctantly, Schneerson contacted Major Bloch, who soon arrived at the Rebbe’s hideout. As Schneerson’s grandson Shemaryahu Gurary later recalled:

“It was so overwhelming. As soon as we got to the door they rushed right in. There was primarily one guy, and he used every dialect of German that you could think of. During the time the soldiers were there my grandfather was calm and composed on the outside. He was a sick man and it got to him after a while. He was a very strong personality, but not very strong physically. He was exhausted.”

But Schneerson was far from safe. The Schutzstaffel or SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, intensely distrusted Admiral Canaris and the Abwehr, and sought out any excuse to discredit and dismantle the organization. Bloch thus faced the daunting task of smuggling Rebbe Schneerson and his entourage out of Warsaw without under the noses of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD – the SS Security Service run by the notorious Reinhard Heydrich. This was made especially difficult by the fact that Schneerson and his entourage refused to shave their beards or remove their traditional clothing. Bloch thus decided to take his 19 charges to Berlin to throw the SD off the scent, passing them off as political prisoners. As Shemaryahu Guary remembered:

“We had to go through various military checkpoints. with one person who was our escort. We marveled at his way of handling things…On the train … if a conductor came over, [Bloch] would handle the conversation. The difficulty was making sure nobody kicked us out of the compartment we were in. I remember one episode when an angry German officer came up to us and said, ‘Why are these Jews sitting in the compartment when the officers are in the corridor?’ Bloch had to do quite a bit of explaining, and he did.”

In Berlin, Schneerson and his entourage were taken to the city’s Jüdische Gemeinde or Jewish Community Centre, where they met with the Latvian ambassador to Germany and received their Latvian visas. The next day Bloch escorted the group to the Latvian border, which they crossed without incident. On December 17, Mordecai Rubin wrote to Rabbi Jacobsen in New York that “Rabbi and family arrived well Riga.”

But while the Rebbe and his followers expected swift passage to the United States, they soon ran into political resistance. Breckenridge Long, head of the Visa Section of the State Department, was a rabid anti-semite and refused to grant the group immigration visas. Once again, however, the American Chabad community intervened, with Max Rhoade invoking a 1921 exception to the quota for European immigrants allowing passage to religious ministers with active congregations in the country. In January 1940, Long reluctantly issued the visas, and Rebbe Schneerson left Riga along with his mother Sarah, his wife Chana, his son Berka, his grandson Shemaryahu, and his followers Chaim Hodakov and Nissan Mindel and their families. They left just in time; in October 1939, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union forced Latvia to accept the stationing of 30,000 Red Army troops in their territory, who swiftly deposed and murdered many government officials and installed a puppet government headed by Augusts Kirhensteins. In August 1940, the country was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic while in June 1941 it was invaded by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Barbarossa.

From Riga, Rebbe Schneerson and his entourage travelled by plane to neutral Sweden, landing in Stockholm before sailing to Gothenburg where they boarded the ocean liner SS Drottingholm. Finally, on March 19, 1940, six months after the German invasion of Poland, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, arrived in New York City to great fanfare. The following year, the Rebbe succeeded in extracting his son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Marseille in Vichy France before the borders were closed down.

In 1944, Major Ernst Bloch was ousted from the Abwehr on suspicion of involvement in the July 20 assassination plot. He joined the Volkssturm or national militia and was killed in the spring of 1945 while defending Berlin against the Soviet Red Army. Due to his role in saving Rebbe Schneerson and other Jews during the war, in 2010 Israeli rabbi Baruch Kaminsky and Harvard scholar Dan Orbach petitioned the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations – gentiles like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg who helped protect Jews from Nazi persecution. However, they were unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, Rebbe Schneerson settled in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of New York City and, despite his failing health and the skepticism of his followers, worked tirelessly to build up the Chabad movement and Orthodox Judaism in North America. He founded the first Lubavitcher Yeshiva or seminary in New York City and established numerous printing houses to publish and distribute his own voluminous religious writings and those of his predecessors. In 1948 he established a Lubavitcher village called Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv in the newly-created state of Israel, while the following year he became a U.S. citizen. On account of his failing health, Schneerson arranged for a federal judge to officiate the ceremony at his home rather than travelling to a courthouse. However, Schneerson’s health soon caught up with him, and he died on January 28, 1950 at the age of 69. He was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, with his gravesite, known as “the Ohel”, becoming a popular site of prayer and reflection for Chabad followers and other Jews. His son-in-law and successor as Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, would go on to become a renowned religious scholar and leader in his own right, helping to greatly expand the Chabad Lubavitch Movement around the world. He was even considered by many Chabad adherents to be the jewish Messiah. Menachem Schneerson died in 1994 at the age of 92 leaving no named successor, leading the Chabad community to declare him the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. As a result, his predecessor Yosef Schneerson is often referred to as the Frierdiker or “Previous” Rebbe or sometimes Rayatz – a contraction of Yosef Yitzchak.

Today, Chabad-Lubavitch is among the largest Hasidic movements in the world, boasting nearly 100,000 adherents worldwide and performing humanitarian and religious outreach work in dozens of countries. The survival and thriving of the movement and its dynasty of spiritual leaders owes much to the miraculous rescue of Rebbe Yosef Schneerson from the jaws of the Third Reich – an unlikely mission which remains one of the most obscure and surprising chapters of the Second World War and illustrates the often baffling contradictions that lie at the intersection of ideology, faith, and international diplomacy.

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