Patria disaster
Encyclopedia
The Patria disaster on 25 November 1940 was the sinking by the Haganah
of a French-built ocean liner
in the port of Haifa
, in which 260 people were killed and 172 injured.
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
, because they did not possess entry permits. The deportation was opposed by Zionist
organizations 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 less than 16 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 Monya Mardor, the person who placed the bomb, published a book about his experiences.
made the decision in 1941 to exterminate all the Jews in Europe
, 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 Romania
n 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.
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 David Ben-Gurion
, who had left for the United States on 22 September and did not return until 13 February, 1941.
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. This was secreted next to the inner hull of the ship. At 9 am on 25 November, it exploded. The effect of the explosives had been misjudged and a large hole measuring three meters by two was blown in the side of the ship, which sank in only fifteen minutes.
At the time the bomb exploded, the Patria was carrying 1,770 refugees from the Pacific and Milos and had taken on board 134 passengers from
the Atlantic. Most of these were rescued by British and Arab boats that rushed to the scene However, 260 others – mostly Jewish refugees – were declared missing, 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.
detention camp. Later, after an international campaign, the survivors of the Patria were given permits to remain in Palestine. However, the other 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 a story was put out that the deportees, out of despair, had sunk the ship themselves (the version recounted, for example, by Arthur Koestler
). 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. He recounted, "There was never any intent to cause the ship to sink. The British would have used this against the Jewish population and show it as an act of sabotage against the war effort." He said that it was in the highest interest of the Haganah to fight the sanctions of the White Paper
, and the primary objective was to avoid casualties. The British estimated that 267 passengers of the Patria were missing. 167 bodies were found. Neither the Jewish Agency nor the Haganah could establish how many people succeeded to escape the Harbor and how many had died.
The guilt ridden Monya Mardor continued to work in the Harbor in order to remove suspicion from himself. The Haganah also put up an investigative body to find out why such a relatively small amount of explosives could create such a large hole in the ship. The Haganah investigators concluded that the boat's superstructure was in poor condition, and therefore unable to withstand the pressure of the explosion.
Rudolf Hirsch, a Jewish-German writer who had emigrated to Palestine in 1939, was a close associate of Arnold Zweig
there, and later remigrated with Zweig to East Germany, published a novel about the incident, Patria Israel, in which he also explicitly refers to the account of Mandor .
Haganah
Haganah was a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948, which later became the core of the Israel Defense Forces.- Origins :...
of a French-built ocean liner
Ocean liner
An ocean liner is a ship designed to transport people from one seaport to another along regular long-distance maritime routes according to a schedule. Liners may also carry cargo or mail, and may sometimes be used for other purposes .Cargo vessels running to a schedule are sometimes referred to as...
in the port of Haifa
Port of Haifa
The Port of Haifa is the largest of Israel's three major international seaports, which include the Port of Ashdod, and the Port of Eilat. It has a natural deep water harbor which operates all year long, and serves both passenger and merchant ships. It is one of the largest ports in the eastern...
, in which 260 people were killed and 172 injured.
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
Mauritius
Mauritius , officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the southeast coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about east of Madagascar...
, because they did not possess entry permits. The deportation was opposed by Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
organizations including the underground paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
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 less than 16 minutes, trapping hundreds in the hold. The survivors were subsequently permitted to remain in Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
on humanitarian grounds. Who was responsible and the true reason why the Patria sank remained controversial mysteries until 1957, when Monya Mardor, the person who placed the bomb, published a book about his experiences.
Background
Before the government of Nazi GermanyNazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
made the decision in 1941 to exterminate all the Jews in Europe
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
, 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
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
, 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 Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n port of Tulcea
Tulcea
Tulcea is a city in Dobrogea, Romania. It is the administrative center of Tulcea county, and has a population of 92,379 as of 2007. One village, Tudor Vladimirescu, is administered by the city.- History :...
to Palestine. Their passengers consisted of about 3,600 refugees from the Jewish communities in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, Danzig
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
and Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
.
The Pacific reached Palestinian waters on November 1, followed by the Milos a few days later. The ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
and taken to the port of Haifa. Warned in advance of the ships' arrival, the British Colonial Office
Colonial Office
Colonial Office is the government agency which serves to oversee and supervise their colony* Colonial Office - The British Government department* Office of Insular Affairs - the American government agency* Reichskolonialamt - the German 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
Western Desert Campaign
The Western Desert Campaign, also known as the Desert War, was the initial stage of the North African Campaign during the Second World War. The campaign was heavily influenced by the availability of supplies and transport. The ability of the Allied forces, operating from besieged Malta, to...
, the Colonial Office decided it was less risky to provoke Jewish anger than to risk an Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
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
Harold MacMichael
Sir Harold Alfred MacMichael, GCMG, DSO , was a British colonial administrator.-Early service:MacMichael graduated with a first from Magdalene College, Cambridge. After passing his civil service exam, he entered the service of the British Empire in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan...
, issued a deportation order on 20 November, ordering that the refugees be taken to the British Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...
territory of Mauritius and the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
territory of Trinidad
Trinidad
Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...
.
The refugees were transferred to another ship, the Patria, for the journey to Mauritius
Mauritius
Mauritius , officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the southeast coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about east of Madagascar...
. The Patria was a 12,000 ton passenger ship
Passenger ship
A passenger ship is a ship whose primary function is to carry passengers. The category does not include cargo vessels which have accommodations for limited numbers of passengers, such as the ubiquitous twelve-passenger freighters once common on the seas in which the transport of passengers is...
which had recently been seized by the British following the French surrender
Armistice with France (Second Compiègne)
The Second Armistice at Compiègne was signed at 18:50 on 22 June 1940 near Compiègne, in the department of Oise, between Nazi Germany and France...
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 IrgunIrgun
The Irgun , or Irgun Zevai Leumi to give it its full title , was a Zionist paramilitary group that operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was an offshoot of the earlier and larger Jewish paramilitary organization haHaganah...
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
Yitzhak Sadeh
Yitzhak Sadeh , was the commander of the Palmach, one of the founders of the Israel Defense Forces at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel and a cousin of British philosopher Isaiah Berlin.-Biography:...
, but his authority came from Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett on 15 October 1894, died 7 July 1965) was the second Prime Minister of Israel , serving for a little under two years between David Ben-Gurion's two terms.-Early life:...
, who was the leader of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in the temporary absence of David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion
' was the first Prime Minister of Israel.Ben-Gurion's passion for Zionism, which began early in life, led him to become a major Zionist leader and Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization in 1946...
, who had left for the United States on 22 September and did not return until 13 February, 1941.
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. This was secreted next to the inner hull of the ship. At 9 am on 25 November, it exploded. The effect of the explosives had been misjudged and a large hole measuring three meters by two was blown in the side of the ship, which sank in only fifteen minutes.
At the time the bomb exploded, the Patria was carrying 1,770 refugees from the Pacific and Milos and had taken on board 134 passengers from
the Atlantic. Most of these were rescued by British and Arab boats that rushed to the scene However, 260 others – mostly Jewish refugees – were declared missing, 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.
Aftermath
The surviving refugees from the Patria, together with the remaining 1,560 passengers of the Atlantic, were taken to the AtlitAtlit detainee camp
The Atlit detainee camp was a detention camp established by the British at the end of the 1930s on what is now Israel's northern coast south of Haifa. The camp was established to prevent Jewish refugees, mainly Holocaust survivors, from entering then-Palestine...
detention camp. Later, after an international campaign, the survivors of the Patria were given permits to remain in Palestine. However, the other 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 a story was put out that the deportees, out of despair, had sunk the ship themselves (the version recounted, for example, by Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...
). For years the British believed that the Irgun was probably responsible. Ha-Po'el ha-Tza'ir, a newspaper of the ruling Mapai
Mapai
Mapai was a left-wing political party in Israel, and was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968...
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
Yishuv
The Yishuv or Ha-Yishuv is the term referring to the body of Jewish residents in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel...
, 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. He recounted, "There was never any intent to cause the ship to sink. The British would have used this against the Jewish population and show it as an act of sabotage against the war effort." He said that it was in the highest interest of the Haganah to fight the sanctions of the White Paper
White paper
A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions, and are often requested and used in politics, policy, business, and technical fields. In commercial use, the term has also come to refer to...
, and the primary objective was to avoid casualties. The British estimated that 267 passengers of the Patria were missing. 167 bodies were found. Neither the Jewish Agency nor the Haganah could establish how many people succeeded to escape the Harbor and how many had died.
The guilt ridden Monya Mardor continued to work in the Harbor in order to remove suspicion from himself. The Haganah also put up an investigative body to find out why such a relatively small amount of explosives could create such a large hole in the ship. The Haganah investigators concluded that the boat's superstructure was in poor condition, and therefore unable to withstand the pressure of the explosion.
Rudolf Hirsch, a Jewish-German writer who had emigrated to Palestine in 1939, was a close associate of Arnold Zweig
Arnold Zweig
Arnold Zweig was a German writer and anti-war activist.He is best known for his World War I tetralogy.-Life and work:Zweig was born in Glogau, Silesia son of a Jewish saddler...
there, and later remigrated with Zweig to East Germany, published a novel about the incident, Patria Israel, in which he also explicitly refers to the account of Mandor .
Other sources
- B. Wasserstein, 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.
- History of the Patria vessel
- "The Story of the S/S Patria", by Eva Feld. Some quotations from relevant memoirs.
- Photos of the Patria
Further reading
- Gruber, RuthRuth GruberRuth Gruber is an American journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian and a former United States government official.-Early life:...
(1999). Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation ISBN 0-8129-3154-8 - Friedmann, Ronald (1998). Exil auf Mauritius 1940 bis 1945 ISBN 3932180291
- Friling, Tuvia (2005). Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv leadership, and Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 9780299175504
- Holly, David C. (1995). Exodus 1947 ISBN 1-55750-367-2
- Steiner, Gershon Erich (1982). Story of the Patria ISBN 0-8052-5036-0