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"Exodus" and Britain's Holocaust shame

The Book "Exodus" by Leon Uris, already successful when published, was made into a popular movie starring Paul Newman.

With Israel approaching its 60th birthday as it happens the captain of the re-named vessel "Exodus" died last week. No less coincidentally, previously unavailable British documents relating to the "Exodus" and Britain's treatment of its mandate of Palestine post WW2 have just been released. They show Britain's conduct as being shameful as it addressed the plight of Holocaust survivors including the "Exodus" shipping Jewish refugees to Palestine.

The Independent reports in "Britain's Holocaust shame: The voyage of the Exodus":

"When British soldiers reached the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in the last days of the Second World War, the survivors of the Holocaust hailed them as saviours.

The troops' gruesome discoveries at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, where piles of skeletal corpses lay amid the camp's death ovens and gas chambers, prompted Britain's political leaders to promise that the world would never forget the suffering of the Jews.

Yet, just two years later, the British government was accused of mistreating thousands of Holocaust survivors, who, when prevented from fleeing to Palestine, had been forcibly sent back to barbed-wire detention camps in Germany, staffed by Germans.

Secret papers released at the National Archives for the first time today reveal the fate of Jewish immigrants aboard the 1947 refugee ship Exodus and the bitter propaganda battle that ensued when Britain used force to return them to Germany.

British soldiers, ordered to storm the transport vessels to which the Jewish immigrants on board Exodus had been transferred, were accused of behaving like "Hitler Commandos", "gentleman fascists" and sadists."

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