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Patria disaster
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The Patria disaster occurred on 25 November 1940 when the Patria, a French-built ocean liner, sank in Haifa harbour after a bomb carried covertly on board exploded, killing 260 people, and injuring another 172. At the time of the sinking, the Patria was carrying around 1,800 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe who were being deported by the British to Mauritius and Trinidad because they did not possess entry visas (whose issuance had been restricted after the publication of the White Paper of 1939) for Mandate Palestine.
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The Patria disaster occurred on 25 November 1940 when the Patria, a French-built ocean liner, sank in Haifa harbour after a bomb carried covertly on board exploded, killing 260 people, and injuring another 172. At the time of the sinking, the Patria was carrying around 1,800 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe who were being deported by the British to Mauritius and Trinidad because they did not possess entry visas (whose issuance had been restricted after the publication of the White Paper of 1939) for Mandate Palestine. The deportation was opposed by Zionist organisations including the underground paramilitary Haganah group, which planted a bomb with the intention of disabling the ship to prevent it from leaving Haifa. However, the Haganah miscalculated the effects of the explosion and the bomb caused the ship to sink in under fifteen minutes, trapping hundreds in the hold. The survivors were subsequently permitted to remain in Palestine on humanitarian grounds. Who was responsible and the true reason why the Patria sank remained controversial mysteries until 1957, when the person who placed the bomb published a book about his experiences.
Background
Before the government of Nazi Germany made the decision to exterminate all the Jews in Europe in July 1941, Nazi policy still allowed for the reduction of Jewish numbers in Europe by emigration. Jewish organizations, both mainstream and dissident, ran operations which attempted to bring Jews from Europe to Palestine in violation of the strict immigration rules imposed by the British Mandate government.
This required cooperation with the Nazi authorities, who saw the opportunity to make trouble for the British as well as to get rid of Jews. The Committee for Sending Jews Overseas was an office that operated under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, organizing emigration of Jews from the Nazi-controlled parts of Europe. In September 1940, the Committee chartered three ships, the Milos, the Pacific and the Atlantic, to transport Jewish refugees from the Romanian port of Tulcea to Palestine. Their passengers consisted of about 3,600 refugees from the Jewish communities in Vienna, Danzig and Prague.
The Pacific reached Palestinian waters on November 1, followed by the Milos a few days later. The ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy and taken to the port of Haifa. Warned in advance of the ships' arrival, the British Colonial Office was determined to refuse entry to the immigrants. With the security situation in the region improving following British successes in the Western Desert Campaign, the Colonial Office decided it was less risky to provoke Jewish anger than to risk an Arab revolt, and that an example would be made to dissuade other potential immigrants from making the attempt. The British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael, issued a deportation order on 20 November, ordering that the refugees be taken to the British Indian Ocean territory of Mauritius and the Caribbean territory of Trinidad.
The refugees were transferred to another ship, the Patria, for the journey to Mauritius. The Patria was a 12,000 ton passenger ship which had recently been seized by the British following the French surrender to Nazi Germany. It was a 27 year old steel-hulled vessel with a crew of 130. As a civilian liner, it was only permitted to carry 805 people (including the crew); after its requisitioning, it was reclassified as a troop transport, permitting it to carry 1,800 people (excluding the crew). However, it still only had enough lifeboats for the original 805 passengers and crew, with the rest having to rely on rafts in the event of an emergency.
The refugees from the Pacific and Milos were soon transferred to the Patria. The Atlantic arrived on November 24 and the transfer of eight hundred of its 1,645 passengers began.
Disaster
Meanwhile, the Zionist organizations were considering how the deportation plan could be thwarted. A general strike had little effect. The Irgun attempted unsuccessfully to place a bomb on the Patria to disable it. The Haganah also sought to disable the Patria, with the intention of forcing it to stay in port for repairs and thus buying time that could be used to pressure the British to rescind the deportation order. The officer in charge of the operation was Yitzhak Sadeh, but his authority came from Moshe Sharett, who was the leader of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in the temporary absence of the imprisoned David Ben-Gurion.
On 22 November agents of the Haganah smuggled a two-kilogram bomb on board the ship, timed to explode at 9 pm that day. It failed to explode, and a second, more powerful, device was smuggled on board on 24 November. At 9 am on 25 November, the bomb exploded alongside the inner hull of the ship. By this time, the Patria was carrying 1,770 refugees from the Pacific and Milos and had taken on board 134 passengers from the Atlantic. The plan had been for the ship to be disabled without causing casualties, but the Haganah had miscalculated the effect of the explosion. The bomb blew a large hole measuring three meters by two in the side of the ship and it sank in only fifteen minutes.
Most of the people on board were rescued by British and Arab boats that rushed to the scene However, 260 others - mostly Jewish refugees - lost their lives, with another 172 being injured. Many of the dead were trapped in the hold of the ship and were unable to escape as the ship foundered. 209 bodies were eventually recovered and buried in Haifa.
Arthur Koestler, who believed that the passengers sank the ship out of despair (the Haganah's role was not publicly known at the time of writing in 1949), wrote about the incident:
"At 9 A.M. on that day the passengers blew up their ship. Over two hundred of them were torn to bits, or drowned a hundred yards from the shore of their promised land. They had reached their journey's end. They were not even threatened with deportation back to Europe; only to a tropical island without hope of return. But these people had become allergic to barbed wire. When a person reaches that stage he is past listening to the reasonable voice of officialdom which explains to him that he should never have escaped, or saved his wife and children, as 'a revival of illegal Jewish immigration at the present juncture' was 'likely to affect the local situation most adversely'."
Aftermath
The surviving refugees from the Patria, together with the remaining 1,560 passengers of the Atlantic, were taken to the Atlit detention camp. Later, after an international campaign, the survivors of the Patria were given permits to remain in Palestine. However, the Atlantic passengers were forcibly deported to Mauritius on 9 December. After the war, they were given the choice of where to go; 81% chose Palestine and arrived there in August 1945.
The role of the Haganah was not publicly revealed and for years the British believed that the Irgun was probably responsible. Ha-Po'el ha-Tza'ir, a newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, unaware that all of the persons responsible were Mapai leaders, lamented that "On one bitter and impetuous day, a malicious hand sank the ship." The article led Ben-Gurion's son Amos to physically assault the newspaper's editor.
Meanwhile, a bitter debate over the correctness of the operation was raging in secret within the Zionist leadership. The decision had been made by an activist faction, without consulting more moderate members according to normal procedure, and this caused serious internal divisions that persisted for many years. An effort was made to enshrine the incident as an icon of Zionist determination, but this was largely unsuccessful. Some leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv, argued that the loss of life had not been in vain, as the Patria's survivors had been allowed to stay in the country. Others declared that the Haganah had had no right to risk the lives of the immigrants, as they had not decided of their own free will to become participants in the underground Jewish conflict with the British authorities.
The Haganah's role was finally publicly disclosed in 1957 when Munia Mandor, the operative who had planted the bomb, wrote an account of his activities in the Jewish underground.
Other sources
Britain and the Jews of Europe. D. Ofer, The Rescue of European Jewry and Illegal Immigration to Palestine in 1940. Prospects and Reality: Berthold Storfer and the Mossad le'Aliyah Bet. Modern Judaism, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1984) 159-181. "", by Eva Feld. Some quotations from relevant memoirs.
See also
Exodus 1947 Struma
Further reading
Ruth Gruber - Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (1999) ISBN 0-8129-3154-8
Ronald Friedmann - Exil auf Mauritius 1940 bis 1945 (1998) ISBN 3932180291
David C. Holly - Exodus 1947 (1995) ISBN 1-55750-367-2
Gershon Erich Steiner - Story of the Patria (1982) ISBN 0-8052-5036-0
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