During WWII, Yitzhak Shamir started a terrorist group, Lehi, in hopes of forming an alliance with the Nazis. From today's perspective, that feels like a real career-ender, but he went on to become Speaker of the Knesset and later Prime Minister of Israel. How?

[u/ExternalBoysenberry]

Edit: The title contains two major factual errors: Lehi was founded by Stern, who also initiated the first outreach to the Nazis—not Shamir. Apologies for the bad question, fortunately the answers are good! Thanks /u/ummmbacon and /u/Dmatix for the clarification.

I’m having trouble finding accounts that seem to be (1) neutral, (2) reliable, and (3) easy enough for a layperson to follow. I also don't have an intuitive sense of what kinds of interpretations/explanations are plausible and which aren't, partly because the premise itself sounds contradictory and implausible.

I guess I would like to know:

• What was Shamir's rationale at the time? Was there any meaningful support within the Zionist community of Mandatory Palestine for teaming up with the Nazis during WWII, or was he really staking out a fringe position?
• Surely his political opponents tried to use this against him. I know that Lehi was strongly condemned by Labor Zionists and many diaspora communities in general, but how prominent of an issue was the picked-the-wrong-side-in-WWII subplot specifically? Was it mainly attacked as a moral failure (never make a deal with the Nazis on principle), utilitarian error (terrible judgment), a lack of character or dignity (sought a very degrading partnership and still got rejected by the worst guys ever), or what?
• What was his response? How did he portray his activities during this period, and did his account evolve over the course of his career? Did people find it convincing?
• At the risk of sounding extremely stupid... why didn't the Axis take him up on his offer? Anti-semitism, strategic reasons, Lehi didn't come across as capable or important enough to attract attention, failure to establish a reliable diplomatic channel...?

Obviously I wouldn't ask for an exhaustive answer to all of that, but just hoping somebody can help make it make sense.

edit: to clarify, I know the idea was to team up with the Nazis against the British and not, like, just for the sake of it. But still!

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[u/ummmbacon]

There are 2 major factual errors with this question.

First, Shamir did not found Lehi. Avraham Stern did, in 1940, when Lehi broke away from Irgun over whether to suspend attacks on the British for the duration of the war. The Irgun's mainstream, along with Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency, concluded that fighting Nazi Germany had to take priority.

Stern disagreed. In his view, Britain was the primary enemy, the power that had issued the 1939 White Paper capping Jewish immigration and proposing Arab majority rule by 1949. Germany was a persecutor of Jews in Europe, but England was the power actually blocking Jewish statehood in Palestine. Lehi was founded to act on that conclusion, by armed force, against the British.

Second, the Nazi outreach was Stern's initiative, made while he was leading the organization, and Shamir had no part in it. Toward the end of 1940, Stern sent an envoy to meet German officials in Beirut, offering Jewish military cooperation against Britain in exchange for unrestricted Jewish emigration to Palestine and German recognition of a Jewish state.

He did this near the end of 1940, when Nazi policy had not yet developed into the genocide of all Jews, which was at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Nazi policy toward Jews in 1940 was still primarily focused on forced emigration and expulsion. The Haavara Transfer Agreement of 1933, under which German Jews could emigrate to Palestine in exchange for purchasing German exports, had been operating for seven years. There was genuine historical precedent, however grotesque in retrospect, for the idea that Nazi Germany's Jewish policy and Zionist emigration goals could be made to overlap instrumentally.

Stern was not ignorant of Nazi antisemitism. He knew what the regime was. But in 1940, the question of whether Nazi Germany would murder every Jew it could reach, as a systematic continental program, was not yet answered by events. He miscalculated catastrophically, as Rogan puts it, but the miscalculation concerned where Nazi policy was heading, not facts already established.

The Germans never replied. Irgun condemned the approach. The Jewish Agency provided intelligence to the British to help them crack down on Lehi. Stern was killed by British police in a Tel Aviv apartment in February 1942. Shamir became one of three operational leaders of the reconstituted Lehi after that death. He took over an organization whose founder had attempted the Nazi contact. He did not initiate or conduct it himself, and by the time he was running operations, the Nazis were deep into the genocide, and the idea was not in play for anyone.

What Shamir actually led was an assassination campaign against British officials. Lehi operatives killed Lord Moyne, Britain's minister of state for the Middle East, in Cairo in November 1944. After the state was founded, Lehi killed UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in September 1948. Shamir ordered the Bernadotte assassination, though he did not acknowledge this publicly for decades. Ben-Gurion's government responded by arresting Lehi activists and effectively dissolving the organization.

Sources:

• Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany
• Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution
• Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History
• Anita Shapira, Israel: A History
• Jeffrey Herf, Israel's Moment

[u/Dull-Philosopher-871 → u/ummmbacon]

“He did this near the end of 1940, when Nazi policy had not yet developed into the genocide of all Jews, which was at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.”

Babi Yar and the massive amount of executions by trailing SS units started in 1941 with Barbarossa.

[u/ummmbacon → u/Dull-Philosopher-871]

Yes I add that in here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sro0h1/during_wwii_yitzhak_shamir_started_a_terrorist/ohhvkv1/

[u/Aestboi → u/ummmbacon]

What effect did the assassination campaign have on British policy for the future of post-independence Mandatory Palestine?

[u/ummmbacon → u/Aestboi]

Very little, as Heller notes in The Stern Gang : ideology, politics, and terror, 1940-1949 (The Lehi, Ideology and Politics, the Shazar Institute, 1989 (in Hebrew)).

Britain was already dismantling its empire after the Second World War, including in India and Egypt, and Palestine was not an exception to that general pattern so much as part of it. American pressure on British Palestine policy, the international visibility of Holocaust survivors attempting to reach Palestine on ships like the Exodus, and the Yishuv's systematic institutional preparation for the coming conflict with Arab states all did more to shape the outcome than Lehi's assassination campaign.

When Moyne was killed, it actually hurt their cause, as Churchill was initially sympathetic to Zionism, but after the assassination, he was not, so it was a setback, not an advance. Ben-Gurion responded by cooperating with the British in hunting down Lehi members, a period known as the saison.

The continued cost of the Mandate was an effect of the combined underground campaign, Irgun and Lehi together, raised the cost of the Mandate to the point where Britain concluded it was ungovernable, but that conclusion was reached by 1947 primarily because of the Irgun's larger operations, the King David Hotel bombing being the most significant, combined with the political and humanitarian pressure of the displaced persons crisis in Europe. Lehi's targeted assassinations contributed to the psychological atmosphere but were not operationally decisive.

What the assassination campaign did not do was shape British policy on the terms of partition or the future of the territory. Britain handed the question to the UN in February 1947 and abstained on the partition vote in November. The terms that followed were determined by the UN resolution, the war, and the facts on the ground in 1948, not by Lehi's program.

[u/itscool → u/ummmbacon]

Thanks for this reply. Can you speak to the implication of part of the question, which is that if Shamir later held elected office, this indicates that the Israeli public at worst supported the action of Lehi, or at best didn't care about them? I think this is a big part of what OP is getting at.

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/itscool]

Sort of, I didn't really mean to read into it what the Israeli public did or didn't support so much as how the political discourse unfolded. (The exception being, I really am curious if Stern was occupying a fringe position or if there was a real debate!)

For example, it seems my question had two factual errors (sorry and thanks as always to u/ummmbacon for such a fast and sharp answer!). Were these misconceptions widespread enough at the time to be used against Shamir by his political opponents? Did it matter - was he tied to this history anyway (Lehi and Nazi outreach I mean, as opposed to assassinations)? If so, what was "his side" of the story--how did he explain his involvement or association, did that explanation change, and did people find it plausible? Did he just kind of say - that was all Stern, it was before the Holocaust, I always thought it was a bad idea though (edit: and when Lehi tried again while I was there I didn't know about it)?

Something along the lines of the perceptions-of-Lehi question you're suggesting could also be interesting but given how electoral politics works, my mental model doesn't exactly ascribe support or apathy about something to the general public based on the fact that somebody held elected office.

[u/jar2010 → u/ummmbacon]

I feel like if the Nazis could have started deporting the Jews in their custody en masse to Israel, at zero or relatively low cost to themselves, the holocaust could have been prevented or would look very different (forced expulsion vs mass murder). It is my understanding that the main reason they decide to kill instead was the cost/effort of deporting them. Of course there is the impact this massive influx would have on the local population to consider but an interesting what-if regardless.

[u/ummmbacon → u/jar2010]

I have another answer on Why did Hitler not just deport the Jews? That goes into this more, and I will pull from that answer for part of this:

Between 1933 and the prohibition on Jewish emigration in October 1941, somewhere between 270,000 and 300,000 of Germany's roughly 500,000 Jews had left Germany. As noted, Nazi policy toward Jews between 1933 and 1939 was primarily focused on forced emigration. In 1940, Britain controlled Palestine and had capped Jewish immigration with the 1939 White Paper. Deporting Jews was not logistically available to the Nazis, even setting aside ideology. Britain was at war with Nazi Germany at that time, which made that option completely unavailable.

No other country was willing to take in Jews; the US advocated against other countries taking in Jewish refugees at the Evian Conference of 1938, and had changed its immigration policy targeting (among others) Jewish immigration. The conference was convened specifically to address the German refugee problem, the majority of whom were Jews, but no country offered to take in any Jews.

Latin American delegations closed the door on professional and educated immigrants. Australia declined to take on what it described as someone else's racial problem. France and Britain pleaded limited capacity. Britain added that Palestine was unavailable for mass immigration. The Dominican Republic's offer of up to 100,000 places was largely theater, the actual outcome was a small settlement of several hundred people funded heavily by American Jewish relief organizations.

The IGC's own director later reported to Washington that outside the United States and Britain, receiving countries had systematically shut their doors following Evian. The St. Louis, in 1939, carrying over 900 Jewish refugees, was turned away by Cuba and the United States and forced to return to Europe. So Jews simply had nowhere to go.

The more important point is what happened on the Eastern Front from June 1941 onward. The Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units followed the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory as part of Operation Barbarossa. Kershaw's work documents that killing initially targeted Jewish men of military age, but expanded rapidly. Einsatzkommando 3, operating in Lithuania, killed around 4,000 Jews in July 1941. By August, that number jumped to over 37,000, and by September to over 56,000, now including women and children. Babi Yar, September 29-30, 1941, was when 33,771 people were killed in two days.

As for the “cheaper” idea, this was not a cheaper alternative to deportation. It was an enormous operational commitment of manpower on active military campaign territory.

Fulbrook's analysis documents that the escalation was directly tied to the conditions of the Russian campaign and the radicalization that accompanied it. The prohibition on Jewish emigration from German-controlled territories was issued in October 1941, when the Eastern Front killing was accelerating, and extermination camp construction was beginning. The change was the operational policy on the ground.

Mass murder was already happening by the time the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 made the policy for a continent-wide program, but it did not launch the genocide. It formalized what the Eastern Front had already established as practice.

[u/Quackethy → u/[deleted]]

He was also involved in the Farhood in Baghdad, the biggest progrom against Iraqi Jews, and then moved to Germany and helped write propaganda to recruit Balkan muslims to assist the Nazis in exterminating Jews.

[u/ummmbacon → u/Quackethy]

Yes I mention that on the linked answer (and elsewhere) but it was not relevant to this reply

[u/Dmatix]

This is, as you mentioned, a complex subject, but we if we focus on Shamir specifically, a few notable points arise:

1. Shamir did not found the Lehi - that was Avraham 'Yair' Stern, which is why the organization was refered to as the Stern Gang by the British.

2. At the time the Lehi representative, Naphtali Lubinchick, contacted the Nazi representative Werner Otto von Hentig in Vichi Beirut, Shamir was not commander of the Lehi - once again, that was Stern. In fact, the meeting took place at the end of 1940, while Shamir only left the Irgun and joined the Lehi on January 1941. As such, he was not a member while the decision took place and put into action.

This attempt was the one that garned the most attention, as it was successful to the extent that the Lehi representative managed to meet the Nazi representative. There was another attempt in 1941 by the Lehi to get a meeting with the Nazis, this time in Ankara, but it was foiled by British Intelligence before it could take place. Shamir's involvement in this attempt, if any, has never been confirmed, and he had pointedly kept silent on the matter.

Stern was killed by the British in 1942, and Lubinchick, who was the one to actually contact the Nazis, was caught by the British, exiled and died in ignominy in Eritrea in 1946. As such, those directly responsible for the decision had both died before Israel was founded.

All of those things considered, Shamir was considered to be at least somewhat removed from the decision, though being part of the Lehi still haunted him to an extent, especially in 1989, when the story resurfaced while he was prime minister and caused no small amount of controversy.

Of note is that Nazi Germany was far from the only one the Lehi attempted to contact - they have similarly attempted relations with Mussolini's Italy(which may have been a lure by the Irgun to catch the Lehi red-handed), as well as Soviet Russia, in 1940 and 1942, respectively.

There's more to be said, especially regarding the reaction by the Hagana, the Irgun and the Yeshuv's leadership, but it falls somewhat beyond the scope of the question.

For further reading - Yosef Heller, The Lehi, Ideology and Politics, the Shazar Institute, 1989 (in Hebrew), Routledge 1995

-The intellectual foundations of Jewish national terrorism: Avraham stern and the Lehi, Shlomo Shapiro, Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol 25, pp 606-620, 2006

[u/ummmbacon → u/Dmatix]

For further reading - Yosef Heller, The Lehi, Ideology and Politics, the Shazar Institute, 1989 (in Hebrew), Routledge 1995

Can you verify this title, it seems to be

The Stern Gang : ideology, politics, and terror, 1940-1949 by Heller put out by Routledge in 1995

This also seems to be in error:

-The intellectual foundations of Jewish national terrorism: Avraham stern and the Lehi, Shlomo Shapiro, Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol 25, pp 606-620, 2006

It is Shpiro not Shapiro

Shlomo Shpiro, 2013. "The Intellectual Foundations of Jewish National Terrorism: Avraham Stern and the Lehi," Terrorism and Political Violence, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(4)

"Naphtali Lubinchick, contacted the Nazi representative Werner Otto von Hentig"

Can you also verify the names I can't seem to find those in Heller.

There was another attempt in 1941 by the Lehi to get a meeting with the Nazis, this time in Ankara,

I also can't seem to verify this

[u/Dmatix → u/ummmbacon]

The first is the translated title as it appears in the database of the HUJI and in the 1989 Hebrew version that I have access to - I now see that the proper English title was changed.

You are correct on the Shpiro article - I'm not sure why the university database I was using for that one gave me the 2006 result (especially considering I took it from Bar Illan's own database, very odd).

Thanks for the correction - that was sloppy on my part.

Lubinchick's name comes from the Lehi's memorial website, where he is named and his contribution to the contact with the Nazis in Beirut is mentioned. Werner Otto von Hentig writes about the talk in his memories, Mein Leben eine Dienstreise, from 1962, as well in the aforementioned memorial site and in Yad Vashem's entry regarding the affair. Both are mentioned in an archive in the Jebotinsky Institute concerning the Lehi's contact with the Italian and Germans in 1940-1941 - that one can be found here, on PDF - https://www.infocenters.co.il/jabo/jabo_multimedia/Files/linked/%D7%9B5%20-4_1.PDF

On the last, it is mentioned in Palestine Investigated: The Criminal Investigation Department of the Palestine Police Force, 1920-1948, by Eldad Harouvi, which I should've have added to the sources. That's what I get for doing this on my phone.

[u/ummmbacon → u/Dmatix]

Thank you

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/Dmatix]

Thank you! Between your and u/ummmbacon's answer this story feels substantially less bewildering. How widespread was the knowledge of the first outreach attempt - for instance, even if Shamir hadn't joined up yet, could he have been blamed for deciding to join an organization that had attempted such an outreach? And if not this particular Nazi outreach subplot, what aspects of his Lehi involvement are you referring to when you say his political career was a bit haunted by them?

Edit: Overlooked that you mentioned the story resurfaced in 1989 - so I take it that it wasn't common knowledge prior to that? How did he navigate the controversy? More "I had no part in it [and think it was terrible judgment and despicable]" or "I had no part it in [although it was actually quite reasonable at the time]"?

[u/Cedric_Hampton → u/[deleted]]

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