Patria disaster

The Patria sinking in Haifa harbor

The Patria was a ship that sank in Haifa harbor on November 25, 1940, with the loss of approximately 267 lives (over 200 Jews and 50 crew and British soldiers).

Background

Before the decision to exterminate all the Jews in Europe was made in January 1942, the Nazi policy towards the Jews of Europe still allowed for the reduction of their numbers by emigration. Jewish organizations, both mainsteam and dissident, ran operations which attempted to bring Jews from Europe to Palestine contrary to 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, three ships organized by the Committee departed from the Romanian port of Tulcea. The Zionist illegal immigration organization Mossad Le'Aliya Bet had refused cooperation with the plan because of disputes over the passenger list and funding. The three ships were the Milos, the Pacific and the Atlantic. Together they carried about 3600 Jewish refugees from the Vienna, Danzig (Gdańsk) and Prague communities, headed for Palestine.

The Pacific reached Palestinian waters on November 1, followed by the Milos a few days later. They were intercepted by the British navy and taken to Haifa. Warned in advance of the ships' arrival, the British had chartered another ship, the Patria, for the purpose of deporting the refugees to the British-held island of Mauritius. The Patria was a 12,000 ton French passenger ship which had recently been requisitioned by the British following French surrender to Nazi Germany. It was a 27 year old steel-hulled vessel. The refugees from the Pacific and Milos were soon transferred to the Patria. The Atlantic arrived on November 24 and the transfer of its passengers also began.

Disaster

Meanwhile, the Zionist organizations were considering how the deportation plan could be thwarted. A general strike had little effect. The Irgun worked on the idea of hitting the Patria with a torpedo from another boat, but it was never put into action. However, on November 21 a mine was smuggled on board by agents of the Haganah. The officer in charge of the operation was Yitzhak Sadeh, but his authority came from Moshe Sharett (Shertok), who was the leader of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in the temporary absence of David Ben-Gurion, and years later admitted to having approved it personally.

At 9am on November 25, after 130 passengers of the Atlantic had been transferred to the Patria, the mine exploded aboard the ship. The plan had been for the ship to be disabled with few casualties, but in the event the explosion ripped a large hole in the side of the ship and it began to sink rapidly. The majority of persons on board were rescued by British boats that rushed to the scene , but approximately 267 others, including about 50 crew and British soldiers, lost their lives. The Haganah claimed that the ship's side panels were rotten and that the ship would have sunk in deep water anyway and then nobody would have been saved.

Aftermath

The surviving refugees from the Patria, together with the remaining 1560 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 December 9. 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 . Lehi, who split from the Irgun in 1940, criticized Haganah's leadership for not joining in on attacks against the British after a disaster like this.

References

See below for the bibliographic details of sources.

Sources

• Meir Chazan, The Patria Affair: Moderates vs. Activists in Mapai in the 1940s. Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2003), pp61-95.
• B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe.
• R. Israeli & M. N. Penkower, Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945, Routledge 2002, pp54-59.
• 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.
• Shamir, Moshe, Yair, 2001, Zmora Bitan pub. Template:He icon
• History of the Patria vessel
• [3] Some quotations from relevant memoirs.
• Photos of the Patria

See also

• Exodus 1947
• Struma

Further reading

• Ruth Gruber - Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (1999) ISBN 0-8129-3154-8
• David C. Holly - Exodus 1947 (1995) ISBN 1-55750-367-2
• Gershon Erich Steiner - Story of the Patria (1982) ISBN 0-8052-5036-0