(JTA) — Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky had devised a scheme to kill Hitler and a number of high-ranking officials, according to a British colonel’s diary.
In a special report, Ynet wrote that according to Richard Henry Meinertzhagen’s "Middle East Diary, 1917-1956," Jabotinsky visited the colonel in 1939 with a plan to kill a number of high-ranking Nazi officials, so Hitler and other senior officials would gather at their funeral. Jabotinsky planned to fill one of the coffins with explosives and, as the Nazi officials congregated around the grave, have the grave digger set off the bomb.
Meinertzhagen, then an adviser at the War Office in London, brought the plan to the Foreign Office.
“The Foreign Office frowned,” he wrote in his diary, “and the Nazis were saved.”
July 12 was the 70th anniversary of Jabotinsky’s death according to the Jewish calendar.
Jabotinsky, a Russia native, was a founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa and a delegate in Zionist congresses. He founded the Revisionist Zionism, a nonreligious, nationalist faction of the Zionist movement. He also was an early leader of the Irgun, a militant underground organization that fought to found the State of Israel.
Meinertzhagen, although supporting a more moderate line of Zionist ideology, said in his diary that the State of Israel was founded because of Jabotinsky’s Irgun.
Jabotinsky died on Aug. 4, 1940, and his body was later brought to Israel and buried on Mount Herzl.
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