“The Rebbe and the German Officer”, a 56-minute documentary detailing the rescue of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn and his family from Nazi-occupied Warsaw, aired last night on Israeli television. The story of the Rebbe’s rescue by Major Ernst Bloch, a German soldier of Jewish decent, was retold by Jerusalem based director Larry Price through a mix of source material and video interviews.

After the German invasion of Warsaw in 1939, the Rebbe went into hiding. Though the full magnitude of the Second World War and the destruction of the European Jewry in the Holocaust were unknown, the danger of remaining in war-torn Europe was understood by all. An ad-hoc committee of Chabad chasidim in the United States began to apply political pressure to bring the Rebbe out of occupied Poland. In an effort that brought in Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, the State Department and President Roosevelt, contact was made with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of Abwehr. Canaris, though a high-ranking German official, was worried about Hitler’s policies. Seeking to keep America out of the war, and prevent the invasion of Poland from mushrooming into a world war, Canaris accepted the mission. Sending Bloch along with two other soldiers of Jewish decent, he instructed them to look for a “rabbi who look[ed] just like Moses.” After much difficulty, Bloch managed to locate the Rebbe and, along with his 20 member party, successfully bring them to Berlin

From Berlin, the Rebbe and his entourage made contact with Latvian diplomats, who brought them to Riga - and from there to America.

According to Rabbi Eliezer Zaklikofsky, editor of Out of the Inferno: The Efforts That Led to the Rescue of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch from War Torn Europe in 1939-40, “No matter how one approaches the Rebbe’s rescue,  the choreography of details needed to bring him to safety is nothing less than miraculous.”