Operation Action; Rescue From The Holocaust

viii, 414, [10] pages. Foreword by Menachem Begin. Maps. Illustration. Footnotes. Appendix. Index. Inscribed and dated by the author on the half-title page. William R. Perl (21 September 1906 - 24 December 1998) was a Prague-born American lawyer and psychologist who was the chief interrogator during the Malmedy massacre trial. William R. Perl was born to a textile merchant in Prague on September 21, 1906, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He earned a Ph.D. in law and a master's degree in international business. He became deeply immersed in the growing Zionist movement. Perl established a successful law firm in Vienna after graduating and practiced law there until the Nazi take-over in 1938. Perl was a protégé of the Revisionist Zionist movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky. He participated in the movement during the 1930s as it became increasingly active against the NSDAP. In 1938 he organized "Die Aktion," a circle of young Viennese Zionists dedicated to making Theodor Herzl's dream of an independent Jewish state a reality. Less than a year later, Die Aktion succeeded in landing a number of Jewish immigrants on the coast of then Mandatory Palestine (now Israel). This is believed to have been the first successful landing of such refugees, when almost every other escape route had been closed to them. Perl continued to work with Zionist groups and Greek smugglers, organizing large-scale illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine and prodding reluctant Jewish leaders into doing the same. Perl rescued an estimated forty thousand Jews from Nazi occupied Europe. Operation Action makes an irrefutable case not only against the Nazis, but against the British government, which saw in a Jewish Palestine a danger to their plans for dominance in the Middle East. British intransigency toward Holocaust refugees was abetted, as this book shows, by several celebrated figures in Israeli history. In a new revised and enlarged edition, Operation Action is as exciting as a thriller and much more memorable. From Elie Wiesel,"This provocative, well-informed, compelling book is a must for anyone wishing to understand the complex and often explosive situation in the Middle East." Revised and Enlarged Edition [stated], First Paperback edition [stated].…