Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler?s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe

Front Cover
Yale University Press, 2008 M10 1 - 304 pages

When Hitler invaded Warsaw in the fall of 1939, hundreds of thousands of civilians—many of them Jewish—were trapped in the besieged city. The Rebbe Joseph Schneersohn, the leader of the ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews, was among them. Followers throughout the world were filled with anguish, unable to confirm whether he was alive or dead. Working with officials in the United States government, a group of American Jews initiated what would ultimately become one of the strangest—and most miraculous—rescues of World War II.

The escape of Rebbe Schneersohn from Warsaw has been the subject of speculation for decades. Historian Bryan Mark Rigg has now uncovered the true story of the rescue, which was propelled by a secret collaboration between American officials and leaders of German military intelligence. Amid the fog of war, a small group of dedicated German soldiers located the Rebbe and protected him from suspicious Nazis as they fled the city together. During the course of the mission, the Rebbe learned the shocking truth about the leader of the rescue operation, the decorated Wehrmacht soldier Ernst Bloch: he was himself half-Jewish, and a victim of the rising tide of German antisemitism.

A harrowing story about identity and moral responsibility, Rescued from the Reich is also a riveting narrative history of one of the most extraordinary rescue missions of World War II.

 

Contents

Prologue
1
1 The Invasion
3
2 The Lubavitchers and Their Rebbe
16
3 Poland Under the Germans
38
4 A Plan Takes Shape
58
5 The Nazi Connection
69
6 Blochs Secret Mission
76
7 The Search Begins
87
12 Waiting in Riga
130
13 Crossing a Perilous Ocean
147
14 The Rebbe in America
152
15 The Fates of the Rescuers
188
Conclusion
197
Afterword
209
Notes
213
Bibliography
257

8 A Lawyers Work
95
9 The Angel
112
10 The Escape Route
115
11 Flight
122
Acknowledgments
271
Index
277
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