Jewish circles today expressed indignation at a statement made in Frankfort by Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, chief of the UNRRA in Germany, who asserted that a secret Jewish force is seeking to organize a mass-exodus of Jews from Poland to Palestine.
The statement, carried by Reuters, a British news agency, quoted the British general as stating that he had seen “an exodus” of Jews from Poland on Russian trains on a regular route from Lodz to Berlin. All of them were well-dressed, well-fed, healthy and had “pockets bulging with money,” the UNRRA chief and former deputy chief of staff to Gen. Eisenhower, is alleged to have said.
“All of them,” Reuter reports Gen. Morgan as saying, “told the same monotonous story of threats, programs and atrocities in Poland as a reason for their leaving. Morgan reportedly added that a new factor in the U.S. zone – the arrival of a whole carload of Jewish children from Rumania and Hungary – bolstered his belief that “a world organization of Jews was being formed.”
“Gen. Morgan did not know who was financing the movement of stuffing Jewish pockets with Russian-printed occupation marks,” Reuter continues. “He cited the example of a “Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria’ who formerly wrote to him on scraps of paper and were new writing on the finest-engraved stationary.”
The Reuter report states that Gen. Morgan believes that the formation of a “Federation of Former Inmates of Concentration Camps” in Germany would bring German Jews into the movement. “As these Jews were not displaced persons, they did not come under UNRRA jurisdiction,” the dispatch quotes Gen. Morgan as stating further.
Action on the statement was under consideration here today by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, while A.L. Easterman, executive secretary of the World Jewish Congress, issued a strongly-worded protest to the press terming Gen. Morgan’s reported charges “fantastically untrue,” and asserting that they “are designed to influence the findings of the Anglo-American Inquiry Committee.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
