Why did Nazis protect rabbi on Kristallnacht?

[IndianaGreen]

Now I have heard it all! Twenty million Soviet citizens died during WWII. Rabbi Kuperstock's collaboration with the Nazis was motivated by petty revenge and delusions that he and his students would be spared the final solution. All of his students ended up at the death camps.

BTW, there is an interesting paragraph at the end of the article about how "Kristallnacht had been planned two months before the second week of November 1939," and how the Jews were blamed for a murder committed by the Nazis. Seems like every year there are new revelations about the Holocaust. The evil that Hitler brought to this world continues to horrify peace loving people everywhere.

Why did Nazis protect rabbi on Kristallnacht?

By Nadav Shragai

On the night between November 9 and 10, 1939 - Kristallnacht - while synagogues across the German Reich were set ablaze and Jews and their property became victims of state-initiated pogroms, a strange sight took place in the heart of Berlin.

German police rushed to 25 Mintz Street, where they used their bodies as shields to protect the synagogue housing the yeshiva headed by Rabbi Avraham Kuperstock from rioters seeking to harm the rabbi, his family, students or property.

This remarkable story was brought to light by Prof. Meier Schwarz, 83, a researcher who lost his entire family in the Holocaust and today runs "Ashkenaz House," a Jerusalem-based organization dedicated to conducting research and preserving the heritage of German Jewry.

Kuperstock and his synagogue were saved thanks to the assistance he provided German authorities during World War II. But his story begins much earlier, in 1914 Warsaw, when the city was still under Soviet control. The Russians were recruiting young people across the region, Jews and Poles alike.

Among those conscripted were some of the rabbi's yeshiva students. Two of them deserted the army, were caught and sentenced to death and were hung by the Russians in the city square to deter other students from following their example. Kuperstock was made to stand beside the gallows while the grim sentence was carried out. The rabbi never forgot the experience and vowed to one day avenge the injustice the Russians had visited upon his yeshiva.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079809.html

[struggle4progress]

1. Since the alleged event occurred seventy years ago, it's strange all links with this allegation

are only few days old. And the Ha'aretz story contains a glaring historical inaccuracy:

The Nazis who spared a Berlin synagogue on Kristallnacht
By Nadav Shragai
... Kuperstock and his synagogue were saved thanks to the assistance he provided German authorities during World War II. But his story begins much earlier, in 1914 Warsaw, when the city was still under Soviet control. The Russians were recruiting young people across the region, Jews and Poles alike. Among those conscripted were some of the rabbi's yeshiva students. Two of them deserted the army, were caught and sentenced to death and were hung by the Russians in the city square to deter other students from following their example. Kuperstock was made to stand beside the gallows while the grim sentence was carried out. The rabbi never forgot the experience and vowed to one day avenge the injustice the Russians had visited upon his yeshiva ... http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079754.html

But the February and October revolutions in Russia did not occur until 1917, and one immediate effect of the October revolution was that Russia withdrew from the Great War by declaring an armistice and sending Trotsky to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate peace with the Central Powers. Thus Warsaw cannot possibly have been under Soviet control in 1914, since the Soviets had not yet come to power

The story also suggests that Kuperstock provided the alleged intelligence to German authorities before the Nazi seizure of power, since it indicates the "special status" already existed: Kuperstock .. had transferred intelligence to the Germans on the Russian fortification system, including secret pathways allowing the bulwarks to be breached ... When President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor in 1933, the rabbi's special status was registered

There may be an interesting story here, but a great deal more information would be required to make much sense of the facts supposedly presented by the Ha'aretz article

[IndianaGreen]

2. Haaretz has changed 'Soviet' to 'Russian' in new version

But his story begins much earlier, in 1914 Warsaw, when the city was still under Russian control.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079809.html

The Imperial Russian army was indeed in Warsaw in 1914:

First battle of Warsaw, 19-30 October 1914

The first battle of Warsaw is sometimes used as an alternative name for the battle of the Vistula River (28 September-30 October 1914), an unsuccessful German invasion of south west Poland in the autumn of 1914. However, it is also used for the second part of that wider battle, the main Russian counterattack from Warsaw.

By 12 October General Mackensen with four divisions was within twelve miles of Warsaw. At the start of the wider battle the Russians had a single army in Warsaw, the Second, while the Fifth Army was moving to the city from the Carpathians.

Outnumbered by three to one, the Germans maintained their offensive for another five days, but on 17 October Hindenburg and Ludendorff were forced to order the retreat. The next day the German Ninth Army began a retreat back towards Silesia.

The Russian pursuit began on 19 October, marking the start of the first battle of Warsaw. The German retreat was skilfully managed. As the German armies advanced they had prepared for a possible retreat, placing explosives on key bridges. Now those bridges were blown, holding up the Russian pursuit. By 26 October the Germans had retreated sixty miles, and by the end of the month they had returned to their starting point. The entire campaign had cost them 40,000 casualties, and left Silesia vulnerable to a Russian invasion.

http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_warsawI_1914.html

This makes this story even more bizarre for the Red Army was most definitely NOT the Tsar's army that Kuperstock had such an unfortunate experience with. Kuperstock was a fool!

[struggle4progress]

3. What do you actually know about Kuperstock, beyond the claims made in today's Ha'aretz article?

Before the Great War, there had been substantial military controversy regarding control of Warsaw: at the time of the August 1914 Russian army occupation, loyalties in the city may have been quite divided. The Russian army apparently suffered from inadequate supply lines, and there were two major 1914 battles for control of the area: the German attack beginning in late September and the subsequent Russian counter-attack. Thus, by the last part of 1914, the situation in Warsaw may have rather unpleasant, and any prior existing pro-Prussian and pro-Russian loyalties may simply have been hardened

To judge the behavior of an individual in this context, one should like to know a bit more than is claimed in a single newspaper report decades later

http://www.earlyaviator.com.nyud.net:8090/archive/image4/WARSAW.jpg
... From August to October, 1914, the Z-4 worked under Hindenburg. Captain Quast would set out with machine guns and the crude bombs of that time. Flying only a few hundred feet over the Russian troops he would engage in a pitched battle in which the soldiers on the ground had a huge target. Once he returned with no less than 300 holes in the gas cells. He bombed the forts at Warsaw and several times accounted for important railway junctions near the Polish city ... The marshal was planning his great offensive of 1915. He requested that as many airships as possible be sent him for the campaign that summer, and in March was given three, my former Sachsen, then under Captain George, the Z-11 and the LZ-34. All three raided Warsaw, Grodno, Kovno and other fortresses, but the Z-11 was wrecked during an emergency landing that May and a few days later the LZ-34 was destroyed while being taken out of a hangar in a cross-wind ...
The Zeppelins
The Development of the Airship, with the Story of the Zepplins Air Raids in the World War
CHAPTER IV
WITH HINDENBURG ON THE EASTERN FRONT
http://hydrogencommerce.com/zepplins/zeppelin4.htm

[IndianaGreen]

4. The Soviet Union was a strong opponent of fascism and nazism

It opposed Mussolini and the Nazis, long before Hitler became Chancellor. It stretches the imagination to have a Jew, much less a rabbi, make a devil's pact with people that had made their murderous intentions known as early as 1925, when Mein Kampf was published. In a way, Kuperstock's actions are even more incomprehensible than the Soviet-German Pact. Stalin could have argued that he signed the pact despite his mistrust of Hitler because he was already worried about Japan, a country that the Soviets had just fought in a short war in the summer of 1939. What was Kuperstock's rationale? Protect the yeshiva? His students were among the murdered during the Holocaust, and Kuperstock himself would have ended up in a death camp had he not died of natural causes earlier.

[struggle4progress]

5. That doesn't really answer my question, since it assumes that the Ha'aretz report is

accurate and ignores some apparent indications in the Ha'aretz report that Kuperstock's alleged cooperation with German intelligence began in the Weimar period prior to the Nazi seizure of power

Absolutely nothing worthwhile is accomplished by denouncing some supposed Rabbi Kuperstock based on a few sentences in a newspaper in 2009: the effort to understand the Shoah must be an effort to understand the Shoah as it actually occurred, not as it might have occurred according to mere rumors seventy years after the fact. What one wants, in a case like this, is to know actual dates of verifiable events, not vague claims. But in fact, there is almost no information that I can find to flesh out the newspaper account, to support the story or to discredit it

[struggle4progress]

6. Here, incidently, is the Ashkenaz House page:

The Protected Rabbi
by Leah Abramowitz
http://www.ashkenazhouse.org/protrabbi.html

According to the story on that page, the rewarded transfer of info about Russian defenses to German intelligence occurred during WWI

<edit: some similar links>
http://www.aish.com/holocaust/people/The_Protected_Rabbi.asp
http://www.zeevgalili.com/english/?p=184

[struggle4progress]

7. So here's another apparent historical inaccuracy in the Ha'aretz tale: "Kuperstock and his synagogue

were saved thanks to the assistance he provided German authorities during World War II." But the site from which Ha'aretz lifted the story indicates such assistance was actually provided during WWI

[provis99]

8. yeah, and even that doesn't make any sense

Why would the Nazis feel any commitment towards a Jew who turned against his country and provided info to Imperial Germany, not Nazi Germany? The Ha'aretz piece and the original article are terrible, and seem to be based on little more than suspicion.

[struggle4progress]

9. From the info I've found, I can't decide what to make of the story. I think you are correct

to think the Nazis themselves would have felt no particular loyalty to someone who had performed some service for imperial Germany. On the other hand, the Nazi seizure and consolidation of power involved not only a sometimes blunt and accurate assertion of their intentions, it also often involved cynical manipulation of existing political factions and considerable efforts to mislead or stupefy their opponents. At one time, the Nazis, who had organized originally around the defeat of imperial Germany, may have found it inexpedient to attack a recognized WWI hero; at other times, they did deliberately attempt to confuse the populations they intended to exterminate about prospects for survival. Without knowing more about the alleged events here, it is difficult to understand much about this story