In Memory of Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl:
Torah Sage and Hidden Hero of the Holocaust

Part Two: Selected time-line of events relating to encryptions in the five Books of Moses, from Cracking the Bible Code

Nonetheless, such secret studies took but third place in Rabbi Weissmandl's heart. Well before them stood studies of the Torah itself, and the preservation of the Jewish people in the face of the greatest destruction they ever endured in their 3,500 year history. When the Nazis arrived, Rabbi Weissmandl dropped everything to organize the most audacious rescue schemes of the Holocaust. He established and led an underground network that stretched all across occupied Europe, smuggling both individuals and information back and forth, hidden from Nazi eyes. This is one page of a code he developed for communicating with other cells of rescuers.

Two men escaped from the "labor camp" at Auschwitz and made their way to Rabbi Weissmandl. They brought with them the first map of the Camp--and confirmation of Weissmandl's worst fears: many of the "concentration camps" were not for resettlement and forced labor of the Jews at all: they were, in fact, death camps where the final plan for annihilation of the Jews was already well under way. Rabbi Weissmandl arranged to have the map and the dreaded information placed in Allied hands. He pleaded to have the rail lines to Auschwitz bombed.

The Allies declined to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, stating that it was unlikely to be effective and was too costly. Only in 1996 was it revealed that they actually feared that an attack on Auschwitz would tip their hand to the Nazis: that is, to the fact that the Allies had cracked the vaunted Axis war-code, "Enigma." It was perhaps also inconceivable to the Allies that the Nazis would believe that they had learned of the Holocaust from Rabbi Weissmandl instead.

In the meantime, for more than two years, Rabbi Weissmandl desperately bargained for the lives of Jewish men, women and children in face to face negotiations with the Nazi overlords of Eastern Europe. Dieter Wisliceny (left), and later Alois Brunner (right), both reported his offers to Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler who approved of the exchanges. Rabbi Weissmandl's plan was direct: He raised money wherever he could to ransom as many people as possible, as many as 50,000 in a two-year period. Eventually he developed the "Europa Plan," a scheme to rescue, at the last moment, between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 people. No one would provide the funds.

Finally, when he was convinced that no more money was forthcoming, Brunner had Rabbi Weissmandl, his wife and all his little children arrested and placed on a cattle train to Auschwitz. In the most agonizing decision of his life, the Rabbi sawed his way out of the car. His wife and children, who could not follow his leap from the speeding train, perished in the death camp. Rabbi Weissmandl made his way to a secret bunker in Slovakia, and from there to Switzerland where he was arrested. Only last minute interventions secured his release. His only possessions were two volumes of the Talmud and Rabbenu Bachya's commentary. Grief tortured him to the end of his days. After the war he settled in America, re-established his school of Jewish learning that the Nazis destroyed in Slovakia, and resumed his studies of Torah. Students helped reconstruct a tiny fraction of his lost decryptions. Though he was often urged to devote himself to these, he considered the education of his orphaned students of far greater value.

The decryption techniques of the ancient Kabbalists led directly to the distinctive mathematics and statistical principles that made the atomic bomb possible. These same techniques produced the modern science of code-cracking, brought to its highest level by the Allied effort to defeat the Axis powers. The U.S. Congress was informed shortly after the war that the art of cryptology was perhaps the most important single asset of the entire war effort. After the Allied victory, Dieter Wisliceny was brought to trial at Nuremburg. Alois Brunner escaped to the Middle East.

Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl died in 1958. Twenty-five years later, his investigations into the hidden Code in the Torah would be taken up by scientists in the nation of Israel, reborn after 1,900 of exile.

Front plate from R. Weissmandl's last book, Toras Chemed ("Torah of Delight"), published posthumously by his students.
Page from Toras Chemed showing one of the codes he found relating to the holiday of Succoth ("booths").

Images from The Unheeded Cry, by Abraham Fuchs. Mesorah Publications, 1988