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A NAZI TRAVELS TO PALESTINE AND TELLS ABOUT IT IN THE ASSAUL

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A NAZI TRAVELS TO PALESTINE AND TELLS ABOUT IT IN THE ASSAULT
by Lenni Brenner
May 3, 2007

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It is only natural that contemporaries should be skeptical when they first hear accusations that Zionists collaborated with Hitler. Israel is constantly at war. The public projects Zionist pugnacity back onto the holocaust era and assumes that the World Zionist Organization opposed Nazism after Hitler came to power in 1933. In fact the opposite is true and it easily documented.

In 1983, London's Croom Helm Ltd. published my first book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.

A London Times review declared that "Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler's." The book attracted similar favorable scholarly comments, worldwide. Naturally specialist interest moved on in the subsequent decades, but today, thanks to the internet, unique visual confirmation of that collaboration has come to my attention and it is presented now to the public.

I related how Kurt Tuchler, a member of the German Zionist Federation Executive,

"persuaded Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein of the SS to write a pro-Zionist piece for the Nazi press. The Baron agreed on the condition that he visited Palestine first, and two months after Hitler came to power the two men and their wives went to Palestine; von Mildenstein stayed there for six months before he returned. ...

Von Mildenstein wrote favorably about what he saw in the Zionist colonies in Palestine; he also persuaded Goebbels to run the report as a massive twelve-part series in his own Der Angriff (The Assault), the leading Nazi propaganda organ (9/26-10/9/34).... To commemorate the Baron's expedition, Goebbels had a medal struck: on one side the swastika, on the other the Zionist star."


I never located the medal. But in 2003 John Sigler, like myself an anti-Zionist Jew, found an image and description in a closed mail-bid coin sale. He bought a bronze version. A silvered token appeared in 2005. Silvering is often done to medals. It is about 1.5" in diameter and is thicker than a coin. There is no doubt re authenticity. John bought his bronze from the same respected coin dealer.

Recently John sent me a photo of the silvered bronze, for which I am very grateful. The Star of David side reads:

Image
EIN NAZI FÄHRT NACH PALÄSTINA -- A Nazi Travels to Palestine.

The Swastika side reads

Image
UND ERZÄHLT DAVON IM Angriff -- And tells about it in Angriff [Attack]

I happily forward it to the internet world, with documentation re von Mildenstein's visit and Zionist collaboration, and the first of the Baron's articles for Goebbel's journal.

Readers will doubtlessly have questions. Queries about the medal should go to John via http://www.onestate.org. Many questions about Zionist collaboration can be answered by going to Zionism in the Age of the Dictators at http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/index.htm

Or readers can contact me at BrennerL21@aol.com. Do that and I'll also tell you how you can get a signed copy of 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. I edited it in 2002. It has von Mildenstein's article and complete texts of many sources quoted in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.

ZIONIST COLLABORATION WITH HITLER, 1933-1939

Werner Senator, a leading German Zionist, once remarked that Zionism, for all its world Jewish nationalism, always politically assimilates to the countries within which it operates. No better proof exists than the adaptation of the German Zionist Federation, the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, to the theories and policies of the new Nazi regime in 1933. Believing that similarities between the two movements – contempt for liberalism, 'volkish' racism and their mutual conviction that Germany could never be the homeland of its Jews – could induce the Nazis to support them, the ZVfD repeatedly solicited the patronage of Adolf Hitler.

Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions. Both Nietzsche's and Gobineau's Antisemitism, therefore, included of course Christianity.

-- Oscar Levy, from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, by Dan Stone


The ZVfD goal became an "orderly retreat," Nazi backing for emigration of at least the younger generation of Jews to Palestine. They immediately sought contact with Nazi elements whom they thought would be interested in such an arrangement on the basis of a volkish appreciation of Zionism. Kurt Tuchler, a ZVfD Executive member, persuaded Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein of the SS to write a pro-Zionist piece for the Nazi press. He agreed on the condition that he visited Palestine first. Two months after Hitler came to power the two men and their wives went to Palestine; von Mildenstein stayed there for six months before he returned to write his articles.

In 1937, in exile in America, rabbi Joachim Prinz candidly described the Zionist mood in the first months of 1933:

"Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealings with the Nazi government. We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews, at which – after the riots and atrocities of the revolution had passed – the new status of German Jewry could be considered. The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!.... In a statement notable for its pride and dignity, we called for a conference." [1]


Both the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith were founded by well-to-do German Jews with a special outlook. Like other European Jews, the Germans immigrated en masse following the political upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century. But unlike their East European counterparts, the Germans clung to their original national identity, and were economically more established. Moreover, many German Jews believed they were so-called Hofjuden, or courtly Jews, and that coreligionists from Poland and Russia were "uncivilized" and embarrassing. The bias was best summarized in a June 1894 German-American Jewish newspaper, the Hebrew Standard, which declared that the totally acclimated American Jew is closer to "Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism of these miserable darkened Hebrews."

Having achieved a secure standing in America, the German Jews organized essentially to protect their position from any "Jewish problems" that might appear. In 1843, in a small cafe on New York's Lower East Side, twelve German Jewish leaders founded B'nai B'rith as a benevolent fraternal organization. By aiding the Jewish poor, they hoped to remove any Jewish welfare burden that could arouse Christian anti-Semitism. In the 1880s, after hordes of impoverished East European Jews flooded America, B'nai B'rith accepted these newcomers as lodge members, but largely to "manage" the East European Jewish presence in the United States.

In 1906, as Czar Nicholas continued his anti-Semitic pogroms, men like Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and Cyrus Adler went beyond philanthropy and constituted the American Jewish Committee. These powerful men would now function as a special lobby concerned with political problems important to Jews. The Committee initially limited its membership to roughly sixty prominent men, led by about a dozen central personalities from the realms of publishing, finance, diplomacy, and the law. As individuals, they had already proven themselves combating hotels and other institutions that discriminated against Jews. Once united as the American Jewish Committee, they waged effective private economic war against the Russian monarchy. Their motives were not based on concern for East European Jews, but rather on a solid opposition to organized Jew hatred anywhere in the world.

-- The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, by Edwin Black


The ZVfD's June 21, 1933 secret memorandum asked if they could

"be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence .... Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one's own tradition....

[A]n answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry.... Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life....

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible....

Our acknowledgment of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group....

We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state.... For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people.

Boycott propaganda, such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways, is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.... Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state." [2]


Talk of 'blut' reached Wagnerian proportions in the August 4, 1933 issue of the Jüdische Rundschau, the ZVfD organ. "Rasse als Kulturfaktor" argued that Jews should not merely accept silently the dictates of their new masters; they had to realize that race separation was wholly to the good:

"We who live here as a 'foreign race' have to respect racial consciousness and the racial interest of the German people absolutely. This however does not preclude a peaceful living together of people of different racial membership. The smaller the possibility of an undesirable mixture, so much less is there need for 'racial protection'.... Only rationalist newspapers who have lost feeling for the deeper reasons and profundities of the soul, and for the origins of communal consciousness, could put aside ancestry as simply in the realm of 'natural history.'" [3]


I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.

-- Gertrude Stein, New York Times Magazine, May 6, 1934


Prior to 1933, German Zionism was an isolated bourgeois political cult. While leftists were fighting the brownshirts in the streets, Zionists collected money for trees in Palestine. Suddenly in 1933 this small group conceived of itself as properly anointed by history to negotiate secretly with the Nazis, to oppose the vast mass of world Jewry who wanted to resist Hitler, all in the hope of obtaining the support of the enemy of their people for the building of their state in Palestine.

That Chamberlain is a strong Anti-Semite adds to the value of the testimony which he bears to the nobility of the Sephardim, the intensely aristocratic Jews of Spain and Portugal, the descendants of the men whom the Romans, dreading their influence, deported westward. "That is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble heads, dignity in speech and in deportment.... That out of the midst of such men prophets and psalmists should go forth, that I understood at the first glance -- something which I confess the closest observation of the many hundred 'Bochers' in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin had failed to enable me to do."

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


They were wholly deluded. No modus vivendi was ever even remotely possible between Hitler and the Jews. Given their failure to resist during Weimar, and given their race theories, it was inevitable that they would end up as Nazism's Jewish jackals.

The Original Semites were the fifth and most important of the seven Atlantean Races, because in them we find the first germ of the corrective quality of Thought. Therefore the Original Semitic Race become the "seed race" for the seven races of the present Aryan Epoch....

The Original Semites regulated their desires to some extent by the mind, and instead of mere desires, came cunning and craftiness -- the means by which those people sought to attain their selfish ends. Though they were a very turbulent people, they learned to curb their passions to a great extent and accomplish their purposes by the use of cunning, as being more subtle and potent than mere brute strength. They were the first to discover that "brain" is superior to "brawn."...

Under the guidance of a great Entity, the Original Semitic Race was led eastward from the continent of Atlantis, over Europe, to the great waste in Central Asia which is known as the Gobi Desert. There it prepared them to be the seed of the seven Races of the Aryan Epoch, imbuing them potentially with the qualities to be evolved by their descendants....now his thoughts were to be turned from the visible Leaders, the Lords from Venus, whom he worshiped as messengers from the gods -- to the idea of the true God, the invisible Creator of the System. Man was to learn to worship and obey the commands of a God he could not see....

Fourfold also are the steps by which man climbs upward to God. First, through fear, he worships the God whom he begins to sense, sacrificing to propitiate Him, as do the fetish-worshipers. Next, he learns to look to God as the giver of all things, and hopes to receive from Him material benefits here and now. He sacrifices through avarice, expecting that the Lord will repay a hundredfold, or to escape swift punishment by plague, war, etc. Next, he is taught to worship God by prayer and the living of a good life; and that he must cultivate faith in a Heaven where he will be rewarded in the future; and to abstain from evil that he may escape a future punishment in Hell. At last he comes to a point where he can do right without any thought of reward, bribe, or punishment, but simply because "it is right to do right." He loves right for its own sake and seeks to govern his conduct thereby, regardless of present benefit or injury, or of painful results at some future time.

The Original Semites had reached the second of these steps. They were taught to worship an invisible God and to expect to be rewarded by material benefits, or punished by painful afflictions. Popular Christianity is at the third step. Esoteric Christians, and the pupils of all occult schools are trying to reach the highest step, which will be generally achieved in the Sixth Epoch, the new Galilee, when the unifying Christian religion will open the hearts of men, as their understanding is being opened now....

To transmute Cunning into Reason proved no easy task. The earlier changes in man's nature had been easily brought about. He could then be led without difficulty because he had no conscious desire, nor mind to guide him, but by the time of the Original Semites he had become cunning enough to resent limitations of his liberty and to circumvent repeatedly the measures taken to hold him in line. The task of guiding him was all the more difficult because it was necessary he should have some liberty of choice, that he might in time learn self-government. Therefore a law was enacted which decreed immediate rewards for obedience and instant punishment for disregard of its provisions. Thus was man taught, coaxed and coerced into reasoning in a limited manner that "the way of the transgressor is hard," and that he must "fear God," or the Leader who guided him.

Out of all who were chosen as "seed" for the new Race, few remained faithful. Most of them were rebellious and, so far as they were concerned, entirely frustrated the purpose of the Leader by intermarrying with the other Atlantean Races, thus bringing inferior blood into their descendants. That is what is meant in the Bible where the fact is recorded that the sons of God married the daughters of men. For that act of disobedience were they abandoned and "lost." Even the faithful died, according to the body, in the Desert of Gobi (the "Wilderness") in Central Asia, the cradle of our present Race. They reincarnated, as their own descendants of course, and thus inherited the "Promised Land," the Earth as it is now. They are the Aryan Races, in whom Reason is being evolved to perfection.

The rebellious ones who were abandoned are the Jews, of whom the great majority are still governed more by the Atlantean faculty of Cunning than by Reason. In them the race-feeling is so strong that they distinguish only two classes of people: Jews and Gentiles. They despise the other nations and are in turn despised by them for their cunning, selfishness and avarice....

Races are but an evanescent feature of evolution. Before the end of the Lemurian Epoch there was a "chosen people," different from the ordinary humanity of that time, who became the ancestors of the Atlantean Races. From the fifth race of those, another "chosen people" was drawn, from which the Aryan Races descended, of which there have been five and will be two more. Before a new Epoch is ushered in, however, there must be "a new Heaven and a new earth"; the physical features of the Earth will be changed and its density decreased. There will be one Race at the beginning of the next Epoch, but after that every thought and feeling of Race will disappear....

[E]xtra care must be taken that as few of the spirits as possible become enmeshed in the fetters of Race. This is exactly what happened to the spirits reborn in the Jewish Race-bodies. They attached themselves so firmly to the Race that they are drawn back into it in successive births. "Once a Jew, always a Jew" is their slogan. They have entirely forgotten their spiritual nature and glory in the material fact of being "Abraham's seed." Therefore they are neither "fish nor flesh." They have no part in the advancing Aryan Race and yet they are beyond those remnants of the Lemurian and Atlantean peoples which are still with us. They have become a people without a country, an anomaly among mankind.

Because of their bondage to the Race-idea, their one-time Leader was forced to abandon them, and they became "lost." That they might cease to regard themselves as separate from other peoples, other nations were stirred up against them at various times by the Leaders of humanity, and they were led captive from the country where they had settled, but in vain. They stubbornly refused to amalgamate with others. Again and again they returned in a body to their arid land. Prophets of their own Race were raised up who mercilessly rebuked them and predicted dire disaster, but without avail.

As a final effort to persuade them to cast off the fetters of Race, we have the seeming anomaly that the Leader of the coming Race, the Great Teacher Christ, appeared among the Jews. This still further shows the compassion and Wisdom of the great Beings who guide evolution. Among all the Races of the Earth, none other was "lost" in the same sense as the Jews; none other so sorely needed help. To send them a stranger, not one of their own Race, would have been manifestly useless. It was a foregone conclusion that they would have rejected him. As the great spirit known as Booker T. Washington incarnated among the Negroes, to be received by them as one of themselves, and thus enabled to enlighten them as no white man could, so the great Leaders hoped that the appearance of Christ among the Jews as one of their own might bring them to accept Him and His teachings and thus draw them out of the meshes of the Race-bodies. But sad it is to see how human prejudice can prevail. "He came unto His own and" they chose Barabbas.

The rejection of Christ by the Jews was the supreme proof of their thralldom to Race. Thenceforth all efforts to save them as a whole by giving them special prophets and teachers, were abandoned and, as the futility of exiling them in a body had been proven, they were, as a last expedient, scattered among all the nations of the earth. Despite all, however, the extreme tenacity of this people has prevailed even to the present day, the majority being yet orthodox. In America, however, there is now a slight falling away. The younger generation is commencing to marry outside the Race. In time, an increasing number of bodies, with fewer and fewer of the Race characteristics, will thus be provided for the incarnating spirits of the Jews of the past. In this manner will they be saved in spite of themselves. They become "lost" by marrying into inferior Races; they will be saved by amalgamating with those more advanced.

As the present Aryan Races are reasoning human beings, capable of profiting by past experience, the logical means of helping them is by telling them of past stages of growth and the fate that overtook the disobedient Jews. Those rebels had a written record of how their Leaders had dealt with them. It set forth how they had been chosen and rebelled; were punished; but were yet hopeful of ultimate redemption. That record may be profitably used by us, that we may learn how not to act....

The Original Semites were set apart and forbidden to marry into other tribes or peoples, but they were a stiff-necked and hard people, being yet led almost exclusively by desire and cunning, therefore they disobeyed the command. Their Bible records that the sons of God married the daughters of man -- the lower grades of their Atlantean compatriots. They thus frustrated the designs of Jehovah and were cast off, the fruit of such cross-breeding being useless as seed for the coming Race.

These cross-breeds were the progenitors of the present Jews, who now speak of "lost tribes." They know that some of the original number left them and went another way, but they do not know that those were the few who remained true. The story of the ten tribes being lost is a fable. Most of them perished, but the faithful ones survived, and from that faithful remnant have descended the present Aryan Races.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel


Economic collaboration began in August 1933 with the Ha'avara (Transfer) agreement between Berlin and the World Zionist Organization. Jews could put money into a German bank. It was used to buy export items which were sold by the WZO, usually but not exclusively in Palestine. When the emigres arrived there, they received payment for the goods that they purchased, after they had been sold.

Ha'avara's attraction remained the same throughout its operation. It was the least painful way of shipping Jewish wealth out of Germany. However the Nazis determined the rules, and by 1938 average users lost between 30% and 50% of their money. Nevertheless, this was three times, and eventually five times, better than losses endured by Jews whose money went to other destinations. [4]

Some 60% of all capital invested in Palestine between August 1933 and September 1, 1939, the beginning of WW II, went through Ha'avara. In addition, Britain set an annual Jewish immigrant quota, using the country's weak economic absorptive capacity to limit their number; but "capitalists" bringing in over $5,000 were allowed in over quota. The 16,529 capitalists were an additional source of immigrants. Their capital gave Palestine artificial prosperity in the midst of the worldwide Depression.

The WZO solicited new customers for Germany in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Zionists exported oranges to Belgium and Holland using Nazi ships. [5] By 1936 the WZO began to sell Hitler's goods in Britain. [6]

In 1937, the Labor Zionist Haganah, the WZO's underground military arm under the British mandate, negotiated directly with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS Security Service. Haganah agent Feivel Polkes arrived in Berlin on February 26, 1937. Adolf Eichmann, von Mildenstein's protege, was his negotiating partner. The Eichmann-Polkes conversations, in a report by Eichmann's superior, were in SS files captured after WW II.

"Polkes is a national-Zionist. He is against all Jews who are opposed to the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine. As a Haganah man he fights against Communism and all aims of Arab-British friendship.... He noted that the Haganah's goal is to reach, as soon as possible, a Jewish majority in Palestine. Therefore he worked, as this objective required, with or against the British Intelligence Service.... He declared himself willing to work for Germany in the form of providing intelligence as long as this does not oppose his own political goals. Among other things he would support German foreign policy in the Near East. He would try to find oil sources for the German Reich without affecting British spheres of interest if the German monetary regulations were eased for Jewish emigrants to Palestine." [7]

Berlin didn't take up the Haganah offer, but patronage of Zionism continued. The SS was the most pro-Zionist Nazi element. Other Nazis even called them "soft" on Jews. Von Mildenstein, the head of the SD's Jewish Department, studied Hebrew. Maps on his office walls showed rapidly increasing strength of German Zionism. [8]


An interesting footnote to history is the revelation of the cozy relationships which developed between top Nazi officials and the founders of the Zionist terrorist network, Haganah and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, in the closing days of the Second World War. The Zionists were working to drive the British out of Palestine; the Nazis were also at war with England, which gave birth to the most curious political alliance of the twentieth century. One of the leading advocates of working with the Abwehr, German Intelligence, was one Yitzhak Shamir, now Premier of Israel. After the war, the Zionists employed many former Nazis to help set up their military opposition to the British. The leader in this alliance was the veteran of the old Stern Gang of terrorists, which was now the Irgun Zvai Leumi, none other than Menachem Begin. One of Begin's proteges was a young woman named Mathilde J., as she was known in terrorist circles. She was born in Switzerland after her father left Italy because of "poor economic conditions," no political ideology there. The present Mrs. Krim is described by Current Biography as a "geneticist" and a "philanthropist." She has been the resident biologist at the American Cancer Society for many years. In her younger days, she joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, marrying a fellow terrorist in a show of solidarity. She soon became a favorite of Begin, and divorced her husband. It was Begin who was asked by a grinning Mike Wallace on the program "Sixty Minutes," "Did you really introduce terrorism into the politics of the Middle East?" Begin answered emphatically, "Not just the Middle East -- the whole world." He was referring to the worldwide terrorist operations of Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence group which is entirely financed by the CIA with American taxpayers' funds.

-- "Murder by Injection -- The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against America," by Eustace Mullins


In May 1935, SD chief Reinhardt Heydrich wrote an article, "The Visible Enemy," for Das Schwarze Korps, the SS official organ: "The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years.

The course of Jewish history has provided for a peculiar artificial selection of the morally higher section: by banishments, by continual withdrawals to the Diaspora -- a result of the poverty and oppressed condition of the land -- only the most faithful (of the better classes) remained behind, and these abhorred every marriage contract -- even with Jews! -- in which both parties could not show an absolutely pure descent from one of the tribes of Israel and prove their strict orthodoxy beyond all doubt. There remained then no great choice; for the nearest neighbours, the Samaritans, were heterodox, and in the remoter parts of the land, except in the case of the Levites who kept apart, the population was to a large extent much mixed. In this way race was here produced. And when at last the final dispersion of the Jews came, all or almost all of these sole genuine Jews were taken to Spain. The shrewd Romans in fact knew well how to draw distinctions, and so they removed these dangerous fanatics, these proud men, whose very glance made the masses obey, from their Eastern home to the farthest West, while, on the other hand, they did not disturb the Jewish people outside of the narrower Judea more than the Jews of the Diaspora. -- Here, again, we have a most interesting object-lesson on the origin and worth of "race"! For of all the men whom we are wont to characterise as Jews, relatively few are descended from these great genuine Hebrews, they are rather the descendants of the Jews of the Diaspora, Jews who did not take part in the last great struggles; who, indeed, to some extent did not even live through the Maccabean age; these and the poor country people who were left behind in Palestine, and who later in Christian ages were banished or fled, are the ancestors of "our Jews" of to-day. Now whoever wishes to see with his own eyes what noble race is, and what it is not, should send for the poorest of the Sephardim from Salonici or Sarajevo (great wealth is very rare among them, for they are men of stainless honour) and put him side by side with any Ashkenazim financier; then will he perceive the difference between the nobility which race bestows and that conferred by a monarch.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them." [9]

In 1934, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was presented with a "Situation Report – Jewish Question" by his staff. The vast majority of Jews still considered themselves Germans and were determined to stay. As force couldn't then be used, for fear of international repercussions, the way to break down their resistance was to instill distinctive Jewish identity amongst them by promoting Jewish schools, athletic teams, art and music, and Hebrew. Combined with Zionist occupational retraining centers, this would induce them to abandon their homeland. Nazi policy was therefore to increase support for Zionism, so that Jews would see that the way to ward off worse trouble was to join the movement.

Zionists were still persecuted as Jews. But within that framework it was possible to ease the pressure. On January 28, 1935, the Bavarian Gestapo circularized the regular police that henceforward:

"members of the Zionist organizations are, in view of their activities directed towards emigration to Palestine, not to be treated with the same strictness which is necessary towards the members of the German-Jewish organizations [assimilationists]." [10]


Prinz sorrowfully admitted that

"It was very difficult for the Zionists to operate. It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a 'more Zionist behaviour.'" [11]


The Rundschau was banned on at least three occasions between 1933 and November 1938, when the regime finally closed down the ZVfD's headquarters after Kristallnacht. After 1935 Labor Zionist emissaries were barred from the country. But even then Palestinian Zionist leaders were allowed to enter for specific meetings. Arthur Ruppin was granted permission to enter Germany on March 20, 1938, to address a mass indoor Berlin rally on the effects of the post-1936 Arab revolt in Palestine. Zionists had far less trouble than their assimilationist rivals, and Communists were sent to concentration camps while the Rundschau was hawked in Berlin's streets.

Today's Zionists can't claim that their predecessors were duped by Hitler. They conned themselves. His theories on Zionism, including the Jews' alleged inability to create a state, had been there, in plain German, since publication of his Mein Kampf in 1926. They convinced themselves that, as racists against mixed marriage, believing that Jews were aliens in Germany, Hitler would see them as the only "honest partners" for a diplomatic detente. [12]

Nor can it be claimed that the WZO collaborated to save Jewish lives. After the 1938 Kristalnacht pogrom, London, hoping to ease pressure for increased Jewish immigration into Palestine, proposed that thousands of children be taken into Britain. But David Ben-Gurion, later Israel's first Prime Minister in 1948, denounced the plan on December 7, 1938:

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel." [13]


Five days later he warned the WZO Executive:

"If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the United States, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestinian problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism." [14]


_______________

Notes:

1. Joachim Prinz, "Zionism under the Nazi Government," Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p. 18

2. Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-5

3. "Rasse als Kulturfaktor," Jüdische Rundschau (August 4, 1933), p. 392

4. Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety, p. 212

5. "Reflections," Palestine Post, (November 14, 1938), p. 6

6. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, p. 129

7. David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics 1889-1945, Bar-Ilan university, Appendix (German): Geheime Kommandosache Bericht, pp. 301-2

8. Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head, p. 333

9. Ibid and Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, pp. 193-4

10. Kurt Grossmann, "Zionists and Non-Zionists under Nazi Rule in the 1930s," Herzl Yearbook, vol. VI, p. 340

11. Prinz, Ibid

12. Jacob Boas, The Jews of Germany: Self-Perception in the Nazi Era as Reflected in the German Jewish Press 1933-1938, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Riverside, (1977), p. 111

13. Yoav Gelber, "Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42)," Yad Vashem Studies, vol. Xll, p. 199

14. Ari Bober (ed.), The Other Israel, p. 171