Leopold von Mildenstein, by Wikipedia

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Leopold von Mildenstein, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Thu Apr 12, 2018 9:34 pm

Leopold von Mildenstein
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/12/18

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Leopold von Mildenstein
Nickname(s) LIM
Born November 30, 1902
Prague
Died November 1968
Allegiance Germany
Service/branch SS
Rank Officer
Other work Writer, press officer

Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein (30 November 1902 – November 1968) was an SS officer of the 1930s and 1940s who is remembered as a leader of the Nazi Party's support during the 1930s for the aims of Zionism.

He sometimes worked as a writer and used the pen name LIM (his initials). In English he has sometimes been called a "Baron" although his rank of Edler meant "nobleman" and has no exact equivalent; perhaps the nearest translation is "Esquire".

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Baron Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein

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Baron Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein at their daughter Edda von Mildenstein's wedding to Harald P. Milz

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Baron Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein at their daughter Edda von Mildenstein's wedding to Harald P. Milz

After the Second World War, Mildenstein continued to live in West Germany, where he joined the Free Democratic Party and was elected to its Press Committee. In 1956, he went to Egypt to work for a radio station, and after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 he claimed immunity as an intelligence agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency, a claim which was neither confirmed nor denied. Nothing was heard of him after 1964, when he published a book on cocktails.

Life

Born in 1902 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, Mildenstein belonged to the lowest tier of the Austrian nobility and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He trained as an engineer and joined the Nazi Party in 1929, receiving the membership number 106,678.

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Membership card from the Nazi Party

In 1932 he joined the SS, becoming one of the first Austrians to do so.

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A letter of appointment as an SS officer

According to his former SS colleague Dieter Wisliceny, from the First World War until 1935 Mildenstein visited the Middle East, including British-administered Palestine, several times.[1][2]

On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany.

Mildenstein had taken an early interest in Zionism, even going so far as to attend Zionist conferences to help deepen his understanding of the movement. He actively promoted Zionism as a way out of the official impasse on the Jewish question: as a way of making Germany Judenrein (free of Jews). Some Zionists, whose movement had grown tremendously in popularity among German Jews since Hitler came to power, co-operated. On 7 April 1933, the Juedische Rundschau, the bi-weekly paper of the Zionist movement, declared that of all Jewish groups only the Zionist Federation of Germany was capable of approaching the Nazis in good faith as "honest partners".[3][4] The Federation then commissioned Kurt Tuchler to make contact with possible Zionist sympathisers within the Nazi Party, with the aim of facilitating emigration to Palestine, and Tuchler approached Mildenstein, who was asked to write something positive about Jewish Palestine in the press. Mildenstein agreed, on condition that he be allowed to visit the country in person, with Tuchler as his guide. So, in the spring of 1933 a party of four set out from Berlin, consisting of Mildenstein, Tuchler, and their wives. They spent a month together in Palestine,[1][5] and Mildenstein began to write a series of articles for Der Angriff, a Nazi Party newspaper in Berlin which Joseph Goebbels had founded in 1927 and still controlled. Mildenstein himself remained in Palestine for a total of six months before his return to Germany as an enthusiast for Zionism. He even began to study Hebrew.[6] In August 1933 Hitler's government and German Zionists entered into the Haavara Agreement [Transfer Agreement], which encouraged emigration by allowing Jews to transfer property from Germany to Palestine.

On his return to Berlin, Mildenstein's suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. From August 1934 to June 1936 Mildenstein worked in the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, in Section II/112, in charge of the Jewish Desk, with the title of Judenreferent (Jewish Affairs Officer). This title meant that he was responsible for reporting on "Jewish Affairs" under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.[7]

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Dr. Kurt Tuchler and Gerda Tuchler indicate here that they love Heydrich (heart)

During those years, Mildenstein favoured a policy of encouraging Germany's Jewish population to emigrate to Palestine, and in pursuit of this policy he developed positive contacts with Zionist organizations. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist provision, allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.[1][5]

Adolf Eichmann, later one of the most significant organizers of the Holocaust, believed that his big break came in 1934, when he had a meeting with Mildenstein, a fellow-Austrian, in the Wilhelmstrasse and was invited to join Mildenstein's department.[8][9] Eichmann later stated that Mildenstein rejected the vulgar anti-semitism of Streicher. Soon after his arrival in the section Mildenstein gave Eichmann a book on Judaism by Adolf Boehm, a leading Jew from Vienna. [10]

When Eichmann first went to work for von Mildenstein, the fervent philo-Zionist gave him Herzl's Judenstaat. He liked it. He was also fond of Adolf Bohm's Die Zionistische Bewegung (The Zionist Movement) and once, in Vienna, he recited an entire page of it by heart during a meeting with some Jewish leaders, including the mortified Bohm. He had even studied Hebrew for two and a half years, although, he conceded, he never really spoke it well.

-- Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by Lenni Brenner


Between 9 September and 9 October 1934 the Nazi Party newspaper Der Angriff published a series of twelve pro-Zionist articles by Mildenstein under the title A Nazi Goes to Palestine. In honour of his visit, the newspaper issued a commemorative medallion, with the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other.[1][5]

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A Nazi Travels to Palestine

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der Angriff: A Nazi Travels to Palestine

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Ein Nazi fahrt nach Palastina [A Nazi Travels to Palestine]

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Baron Leopold von Mildenstein gazing from the ship at impish little Jews at the shore

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Swastika in der Angriff

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Jewish pioneers plowing the land

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Map designed to mark the advance of Zionism in German Jewry

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Jewish pioneers fulfilling the Zionist dream of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine

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Jewish pioneers fulfilling the Zionist dream of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine

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Jewish pioneers fulfilling the Zionist dream of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine

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Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein and Gerda Tuchler stop in Venice on their way to Palestine

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Dr. Kurt Tuchler, Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein, and Gerda Tuchler

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Baron Leopold von Mildenstein, Gerda Tuchler, Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein, and Dr. Kurt Tuchler

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Dr. Kurt Tuchler, Gerda Tuchler and Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein

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Gerda Tuchler and Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein

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Baroness Gerda von Mildenstein and Gerda Tuchler drinking lemonade

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The Mildensteins and Tuchlers travel in Palestine

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Baron von Leopold Mildenstein at the wheel

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Hitting the dusty roads of Palestine

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Photographing the Locals

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Photographing the Locals

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Jewish pioneers

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Holy site

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Readers of der Angriff get a special bonus: a copper medallion. On one side, the symbol of the Jews --

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and on the other, the Nazi swastika.

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An unidentified article about the Nazi who travels to Palestine, by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren --

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in this publication

In the summer of 1935, then holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer, Mildenstein attended the 19th Congress of the Zionist Organization in Lucerne, Switzerland, as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation.[11] Mildenstein's apparently pro-Zionist line was overtaken by events, and after a dispute with Reinhard Heydrich in 1936 he was removed from his post and transferred to the Foreign Ministry's press department. He had fallen out of favour because migration to Palestine was not proceeding at a fast enough rate. His departure from the SD also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East, written by another "expert" on Jewish matters who had been invited to join Section II/112 by Mildenstein himself, Eichmann.[1][12] Mildenstein was replaced as the head of his former section by Kuno Schroeder.[13] Later in December 1939, Eichmann was made chief of the Jewish Department Referat IV B4 of the RSHA, which the SD became a part in September, 1939.[14][15]

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A CV in Baron Leopold von Mildenstein's own handwriting: 1935 to ’36: Head of department at the SD, the secret service; 1937: A trip abroad, just like his daughter Edda said. But oops. 1938: Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, where he spent seven years as a department head. So von Mildenstein didn’t quit the party.

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From 1938 to 1945, Mildenstein served in Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda as a department head

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Mildenstein did not quit the party

As Germany moved into the Second World War, Mildenstein continued to write propaganda articles and books. After the war, his "Around the Burning Land of the Jordan" (1938)[16] and "The Middle East Seen from the Roadside" (1941)[17] were placed on the list of proscribed literature in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the German Democratic Republic.

Like the Haavara Agreement [The Transfer Agreement], Mildenstein's visit to Palestine in 1933 and the medal to commemorate it have been used to argue that there was a relationship between Nazism and Zionism.[1]

Post-war

Mildenstein visited the United States in 1954, having been granted a visa to do so at the request of the government of West Germany. In January 1956, he asked the U.S. Embassy in Bonn to help him obtain an exchange grant for journalists, although he was not one. By then a member of the Free Democratic Party, in May 1956 he was elected to its Press Committee. In December 1956, a CIA report from Cairo confirmed that he had been employed by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdul Nasser to work for its Voice of the Arabs radio station.

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The Daily Mail, December 10, 1956: The Nazis behind the Egyptian propaganda war: Goebbels men help Nasser -- Four Goebbels-trained Nazis are the brains behind the torrent of lies, abuse and powers endlessly ... Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs radio station

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Baron Mildenstein, formerly chief of the Near East Bureau of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry; Dr. Werner Wietschekle, said to be a meticulously perfect Arabist; Johann von Leers, Orientalist and historian, of Jena and Brelau universities, who sent some …

In June 1960, soon after the capture of Eichmann by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960, Mildenstein announced that he had had an operational relationship with the CIA and as a former U.S. intelligence agent claimed immunity from prosecution. This relationship was neither confirmed nor denied by the CIA.[18]

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Transcript of Adolf Eichmann's interrogation: He's talking about who was there: Goering, Goebbels, and Mildenstein

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Transcript of Adolf Eichmann's interrogation: He regarded Mildenstein as his master. Later he realized that Mildenstein looked into the future, that he knew more than all of his superiors put together.

Mildenstein was still living in 1964, when he published a new book on the mixing of cocktails, including some non-alcoholic ones,[19] but after that no more was heard of him until he died in November 1968.[20]

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Der Spiegel: 19. Dezember 1966

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Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf: Die Geschichte der SS / Von SPIEGEL, edited by Heinz Hohne

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FRIENDS OF THE ZIONISTS: VON MILDENSTEIN

In 2011, the Israeli director Arnon Goldfinger, a grandson of Mildenstein's companions the Tuchlers, produced a film called The Flat,[21] in which Mildenstein's friendship with his grandparents is discussed at length. Goldfinger's film showed that his grandparents had kept in touch with the Mildensteins after the war. He interviewed Mildenstein's daughter, and details of Mildenstein's life are revealed in the film. Looking into the German National Archives, Goldfinger states that Mildenstein joined the Ministry of Propaganda under Goebbels in 1938 and that he later worked as a press officer for Coca-Cola in West Germany until the public Eichmann hearings of 1961, in which Eichmann named him as "the specialist for the Jewish affairs."

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Baron von Mildenstein in 1962 at his 60th birthday party as Press Officer at Coca-Cola

References

• Jacob Boas, 'A Nazi Travels to Palestine', in History Today, vol. 30, issue 1, pp. 33–38
• Magnus Brechtken: 'Madagaskar für die Juden: Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1883-1945' ("Madagascar for the Jews: anti-Semitic ideas and political practice, 1883-1945") (Munich, 1998), p. 171 onwards
• Saul Friedländer, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden ("The Third Reich and the Jews") (Bonn, 2006), p. 77
• Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Owl Books, 1994; German edition, Hamburg, 1995)
• H. G. Adler, The Jews in Germany (1969)
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1970)
• Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (1975)
• G. L. Mosse, German and Jew (1970)
• Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1983)[22]
• Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (2002) — includes the full text of one of Mildenstein's articles for Der Angriff[22]
• Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Cassel & Co, 1990, reprinted 2001), ISBN 978-0-304-35839-7

Notes

1. Jacob Boas, "A Nazi Travels to Palestine" in History Today, Vol. 30, Issue 1 (1980), pp. 33-38
2. Pascal Bruckner, Steven Rendall, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), p. 68
3. 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
4. "Revelations". just-another-inside-job.blogspot.it. Retrieved 24 November 2015.
5. Yad Vashem studies, Vol. 37, part 1, p. 134
6. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, (1983), p. 45, online edition at marxists.de, accessed 27 March 2011
7. Max Williams, Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography: Volume 1 (2001), p 61.
8. Anna Porter, Kasztner's Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust (2008), p. 94: "His first big break, as he saw it later, presented itself in 1934, when he was told to report to Second Lieutenant Leopold von Mildenstein at 102 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. Von Mildenstein ran the SD "Jews Section," or Section II/112. A fellow Austrian with an easy manner, von Mildenstein took an interest in teaching Eichmann the basics of his department."
9. Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, Cassel & Co, London, (2001) [1990], p. 198
10. Serge Klarsfeld, Joseph Billig, Georges Wellers, The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (1978), p. 12
11. Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich & the Palestine Question (2000), p. 61
12. Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (2001) [1990], pp. 198, 199, 275
13. Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler's Bureaucrats: the Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (2005), p. 20
14. Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (2001) [1990], p. 334
15. Adrian Weale, Army of Evil: A History of the SS (2012), pp. 140-144
16. Stollberg, Berlin, 1938
17. Union, Stuttgart, 1941
18. Richard Breitman, U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis, pp. 342-343
19. Mix mit und ohne Alkohol (Munich: Copress-Verlag, 1964, 93 pp., illustrated by Walter Tafelmaier), reviewed in Libreria svizzera, Volume 22 (1964), p. 700: "Leopold von Mildenstein: MIX MIT UND OHNE ALKOHOL, 96 Seiten mit vielen farbigen Illustrationen Mehrfarbiger animierter Einband."
20. K[arl] S[eeger]: "Dipl[om]-Ing[enieur] Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein †" in Sportjournalist Jg. 18 (1968), H. 11, page 16
21. Eyelet Dekel, The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger at midnighteast.com
22. Lenni Brenner, A Nazi Travels to Palestine and Tells About It in The Assault, article dated 3 May 2007 at ucc.ie, accessed 30 March 2011

External links

• Itay Ilnai, ‘A Nazi travels to Palestine’: A swastika and Star of David on one coin, Ynetnews
• Leopold von Mildenstein, Mix mit und ohne Alkohol, illustrated page online
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Re: Leopold von Mildenstein, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:50 am

The Order under the skull
by Heinz Hohne
Der Spiegel
19/12/1966

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10. Continuation

The anti-Jewish policy of the SS


On November 11, 1941, Felix Kersten wrote down: "Himmler is very depressed today." He comes from the Führer's office and I treat him. "After much urgency and questions about what he lacks, he explains that they plan to destroy the Jews. "

It was the first time that Himmler's intimus learned of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Kersten ("I was appalled") wants to have spoken out sharply against the terrible plan, but the otherwise so talkative Himmler behaved remarkably reserved.

Shortly thereafter, Kersten took a fresh start. On the 16th of November he found himself: "Over the last few days I have tried again and again to come back to Himmler, to the lot of the Jews." Against all custom he only silently listened to me. "

Only a year later, on November 10, 1942, Himmler became more talkative. Himmler: "Oh, Kersten, I did not want to destroy the Jews, I had completely different ideas, but this Goebbels has the whole thing on his conscience."

Then: "Years ago I received the order from the Fuehrer to remove the Jews from Germany, and they were to take their fortune as well as their movable goods. I started the action: until the spring of 1940, Jews could leave Germany undisturbed, then Goebbels won."

Kersten: "Why Goebbels?"

Himmler: "Goebbels took the position that the Jewish question could only be solved with the complete annihilation of all Jews, and as long as one Jew lives, he will always be an enemy of National Socialist Germany."

The conversations with Himmler, recorded by the diligent journalist Kersten, contradict the image which many of Himmler's contemporaries and especially posterity have made about the genesis of the cruellest action in the enlightened 20th century.

The extermination of European Jewry is so inextricably linked to the history of the SS; indeed, it will presumably remain the only act that people will remember in centuries, when the name of the SS falls, that the - erroneous - idea imposes itself Perpetrators of the biggest mass crime in history were also his authors.

The first Gestapo leader, Rudolf Diels, thought after the war that the Final Solution was "written in the minds of Himmler and Heydrich in 1942"; Paul Schmidt, the former foreign affairs chief interpreter, is also convinced that the final solution was planned "by the Heydrich, Himmler, Streicher" group.

Even historians have accepted such judgments. The historian Leon Poliakov, who lives in France, believes that Heydrich was the first NS official to project the destruction of the Jews even before the outbreak of war, and Poliakov's American colleague Henry A. Zeiger claims that it was only on Heydrich's suggestion to kill every Jew in Europe Hitler and Goering 1941 the final solution decided.


These interpretations are not based on concrete evidence. They are based on the idea that the men who exterminated millions of Jews in an orgy of blood and sadism could not have become ordinary people overnight -- in other words, that the plan to exterminate Jews was in the hearts and minds of the SS must have existed before the order was issued to realize it.

However, there are indications against this, from which it can be concluded that the murder of the Jews was born outside the SS leadership:

- By the spring of 1941, the presumed date of Hitler's Final Solution decision, there was no document of any SS organization that provided for the physical annihilation of European Jewry.

- In his infamous memorandum on the "Treatment of Foreigners in the East" of May 1940 Himmler rejected "the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people out of inner conviction as un-Germanic and impossible".

What makes the thesis of Himmler's intellectual authorship completely questionable is the indubitable fact that Hitler's resolution to the Final Solution destroyed a different conception that had been attached to the Schutzstaffel for years. The SS concept was called: expulsion of Jews from Germany, euphemistically called emigration.

How mercilessly this original Jewish policy of the SS was pursued - a thought was alien until the outbreak of war: the idea of ​​physically destroying Jews.

Since the Schutzstaffel had become the main instrument of the leader dictatorship, authoritative men of the SS preferred a treatment of the Jews, which stood out in some nuances of the primitive demagogic anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.

Of course, the SS was also under the spell of the inhuman doctrine, which declared Judaism to be a kind of counterrace, the epitome of evil, robbing the Germans of their Nordic bloodthirstiness, and to which the slogan of the highest party leader Buch applied: "The Jew is not a human being, He is a rottenness. "

For the SS, anti-Semitism was an unshakable truth of faith in the years of the economic crisis, when the expropriated sons of that peasant and petty bourgeoisie had flown into the SS, who had convinced anti-Semitism that the Jews were the real cause of the economic disaster.

The young bourgeois sons in the SS-Rock shared the slightly socialist anti-Semitism of their fathers, but for their thinking a refined kind of anti-Semitism was even more decisive: the social Darwinism, whose advocates believed the laws fixed by the British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) The natural selection of animals due to the struggle for existence allowed them to be transferred to the field of state policy.

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


As in no other organization of the NSDAP, the Black Order was rife with the modified conviction inherited from Darwin that by selection one could preserve and improve the valuable species of a people. For the racial mystics of the SS there was only one valuable species: the Nordic Germanic race.

This politically applied biology gave a new meaning to Darwin's concept of the struggle for existence. What in the Englishman was still a free-ruling nature, the social Darwinists wanted to establish artificially and arbitrarily with the coercive means of the authoritarian state: the right of their stronger and better race, to eliminate the lower kind.

The goal of every social policy of civilized states reversed. It no longer seemed a natural task of the state to protect other minorities, the weak and the disadvantaged; all that remains is to strengthen the "good blood" and eradicate the allegedly lifeless elements.

Nations were for the SS theorists no longer grown beings, but - as the historian Buchheim formulated - "unrationally planted and planted by weeds plantations in which once had to be created by isolating the asocial, the 'ferment of decomposition' harmless made precious elements multiply and let inferior ones ".

Already the Social Darwinists had - long before the SS - put the concept of race at the center of their considerations. The biologist Wilhelm Schallmayer proposed a "fertility selection" in 1903; through racial hygiene control of the bride and groom, prohibition of marriage and sterilization of the inferior, one could achieve that the good race prevails.

Here was also the point where the economically arguing anti-Semitism combined with the racist social Darwinism to the anti-Semitism, which was characteristic of the world view of the Schutzstaffel. The Jewish man sank in the SS optics to the bow-legged symbolic figure of the inferior, against which the good race must assert itself.

In a standard lecture for SS units ("Judaism") it was circulated in 1936: "The Jew is a parasite, and where he thrives the peoples die." From ancient times to the present day, the Jew literally has all his peoples killed and exterminated as soon as he had the power ... If we excrete the Jews from our national body, that is an act of self-defense. "

But how should one "excrete" the Jews? This was the central issue for the anti-Semites, and the spirit was divided over it in the National Socialist camp. The young intellectuals, who sat mainly in the command posts of the SD, clearly showed a horror of the primitive recipes of the partisan anti-Jewish course.

For a long time, of course, they only knew what they did not want. They did not want the "Stürmer methods", those of the Gauleiter Julius Streicher and his weekly paper "Der Stürmer" driven, mixed economic and sexual hatred and envy motives, which ultimately amounted to mobilize the lowest instincts against Jewish people and the Deny Jews the right to live.

The SD intellectuals, who wanted to be just as radical as "reasonable" National Socialists, just saw this form of anti-Semitism as an "anti-Semitism that harms us," as a headline in the "Black Corps" said. The incitement of the road against Jews seemed to the SD leaders a folly of brown primitives; who - so they reasoned - the shop windows Jewish business would affect the reputation of the new Germany in the world, without even advancing the solution of the Jewish question by one step.

"The National Socialist Movement and its State," one could read in the "Black Corps" on June 5, 1935, "energetically oppose these criminal machinations." The Party does not tolerate their struggle for the nation's most sacred goods into street baptisms Damage to property. "

The men of the SD were too intelligent to appreciate the low anti-Semitic propaganda of the party. Had it been up to them, they would have had the mass of anti-Jewish propaganda stamped. They wanted to solve the so-called Jewish question in a cold-rational way. Her red pencil fell victim to many products of the National Socialist Jewish delusion.

Not even the Protocols of the "Elders of Zion," the ironclad armor of any anti-Jewish propagandist, found favor with the SD censors

Hochmuth-Verlag is concerned with harmless products, "apart from the fact that reference is also made to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," was found on 21 July 1938 SS-Oberscharführer Herbert Hagen, the Jew expert of the SD, and the SD The leader of Mildenstein simply called the protocols "nonsense".

On the brochure published by the National Publishing House of the Nazi Party, Rudolfs wrote: "In his zeal, the author also sees the work of Judaism, where a natural and spiritual development was effective, even without the influence of Judaism to any effect ... would have led. "

The SD reviewers could not be prevented by a squad of influential Nazi officials from refusing too clumsy anti-Semitic rashes. The most notorious product from the Julius Streicher camp, the youth book "The Toadstool" of the "Sturmer" editor-in-chief Ernst Hiemer, received highest praise. NS-Verlagsherr Amann: "belongs in the hand of every German boy and girl." SA-chief of staff Lutze: "This work (is) in its uniqueness suitable ... enlightening in the Jewish question to act." Gauleiter Wächtler: "Guarantees also for the future right behavior of German man towards Judaism."

The SD-Hauptamt, on the other hand, commented dryly: "The view of the numerous assessors can not be joined, since the book is not even stylistically perfect apart from the factual and thus here E. (= in our opinion) is not suitable for teaching children. "

The unmistakable discomfort of the SD elite, however, remained largely inarticulate until in the summer of 1935, the later SS Untersturmführer Leopold Edler von Mildenstein began to formulate an SS-owned Jewish policy. Heydrich had become aware of the native Prague by the report on a trip to Palestine, which had been published by the trained engineer and Globetrotter Mildenstein in the fall of 1934 in the Berlin "attack". Mildenstein described in a completely sober way the future prospects of a Jewish Palestine.

The Untersturmfuhrer was as anti-Semitic as his awkward Adlatus Adolf Eichmann or the SD chief department head Reinhard Höhn, who in 1929 in a book called anti-Semitism a "contaminating hate speech". Edler von Mildenstein was allowed to call himself a friend of prominent Zionist leaders, he was a regular visitor to Zionist congresses, where he had come up with the idea that linked him to the Zionists: that only the emigration to Palestine could solve the Jewish question.

He had the illusion that Nazi anti-Semitism could promote this emigration. The SS should help in this, because Mildenstein knew that the SS leadership was critical of the largely arbitrary, uneven Jewish policy of the NSDAP.

The party had never been able to conclude how anti-Semitism was put into practice. Hitler avoided any concrete evidence of anti-Semitic legislation in "Mein Kampf", and Nazi racial expert Achim Gercke considered it "premature in all respects to draw up plans" in 1933.

Alfred Rosenberg made do with the formula that the Jews should be excluded as "a nation living in Germany," but out of leading positions in politics, culture and the economy. And the SS-Standartenführer Dr. Conti, later Reichsgesundheitsfuhrer, even declared that the new Germany condemned all racial hatred, Jews represented "not an inferior, but a different kind of race" dar.

Such statements reflected the views of various anti-Semite groups in the party, of which there were at least three:

a Volkish group around Hermann Goering, who wanted to oust Jews from their political and cultural life, but at the time wanted to allow them limited participation in the economy;

- a group of pornographic-neurotic enemies of the Jews around Julius Streicher;

- a group of fanatical racial theorists who wanted to erase all traces of Jewish life in Germany; Spokesman: Reichspropagandaminister Goebbels. From the history of the suffering of German Jews after 1933 it can be seen which anti-Semitic group each determined the course against the Jewish Germans:

In the first months after the Nazi takeover Streicher's anti-Semitism dominated the anti-Jewish measures of the regime. The bloody riots against Jews in March 1933, the boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April, the elimination of Jewish officials, doctors and lawyers, the first Aryanization of Jewish shops, the expulsion of Jewish people from bathing establishments, concert halls and art exhibitions - all this unmistakably stems from the hatred of the Jews Streicher.

In 1934, the terror against the Jews abruptly ebbed. The command took over somewhat more moderate anti-Semites. The Jewish fellow citizens took new courage, they hoped so confidently that the "Volkischer Beobachter" reported on May 9, 1935, almost 10,000 of the Jews who had fled from Germany had returned.

In 1935, hostility towards the Jews became more ruthless. This time Joseph Goebbels set the tone: "We do not want the Jews any more!"

The living space still left to the German Jews decreased visibly. On Berlin's Kurfürstendamm there were violent riots against Jewish citizens. Wehrmacht and labor service were blocked for Jews, new signs appeared: "Jews unwanted" - and in the end stood the most shameful paragraphs in German justice history, the Nuremberg Laws, which declared German Jewry to be a pariah group and any intercourse between Jews and non-Jews a state crime.

One year later, however - in 1936 anti-Semitism became more tolerant. The ongoing campaign of defamation against the Jews continued, but by that time, four-year-plan chief Hermann Göring had gained influence through great powers, and he was clearly reluctant to drive the Jews out of the economy altogether.

SS SS Untersturmführer Leopold von Mildenstein wanted to put an end to this game of anti-Semite groups in the NSDAP and solve the Jewish question in the only way that, in his opinion, could ensure a reasonable and lasting settlement: through the emigration of all Jews.

The idea was not new; However, their realization failed again and again due to the reluctance of other countries to accept Jews in large numbers. The SD leadership was therefore to deport the Jews of Germany into the country, which the SS leaders and Zionists both regarded as the homeland of the old and new Jews - Palestine.

Late in 1945, a New York Times writer summarized the effect of America's wartime immigration policies: "The United States, once the haven of refuge for the oppressed peoples of Europe, has been almost as inaccessible as Tibet." He was, of course, exaggerating -- but not by much.

-- The Abandonment of the Jews: American and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, by David S. Wyman


Leopold von Mildenstein's Palestine plan contained a difficulty. Only a minority of German Jews expressed the desire to emigrate to Palestine. Desperately held the mass of Jewish Germans, despite defamation and terror in their homeland.

In addition to that majority, however, a small group of Zionist spokesmen wished to redirect the traditional German-patriotic thinking of German Jews. For them, the rise to power of National Socialism was by no means a catastrophe, but a historic opportunity to realize Zionism: the restoration of a Jewish state and a Jewish national feeling.

They were strangely fascinated by the victory of the German anti-Semites, in which they saw at the same time a defeat of Western-enlightened Judaism, which consistently held nothing of Zionism and preferred to blossom in non-Jewish host communities. It almost sounded like triumph when the Zionist "Jewish Rundschau" (Berlin) proclaimed after Hitler's accession to the government: "A Weltanschauung has collapsed, we do not want to lament it, but think of the future."

On January 30, 1933, the Zionists seemed to enjoy a happy turning point in Jewish history, the beginning of a return of "the Jew to his Judaism." The sentence was written in a scripture by the young rabbi dr. Joachim Prinz ("We Jews"), in which Hans Lamm, the chronicler of German Jewry in the Third Reich, discovered "a peculiar, almost apologetic interpretation of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism".

Prince wrote that there was "no escape from this Jewish question". The Jewish question is a fact; emancipation forced the Jew to "anonymize and deny his Jewishness" without benefiting him. Because: "This anonymity created in the people who recognized the Jew despite all this, the tension of foreignness and mistrust."

But which path leads out of this Jewish tragedy? Only one, the way to Palestine. Prince: "No hiding-place holds us any longer." We want to replace assimilation with the new: the confession of the Jewish nation and the Jewish race."


What a temptation for the Zionists, with the help of the National Socialists, to win over the German Jews for their idea, which had been denied them in the humane democratic climate of the Weimar Republic! Where Zionists and National Socialists elevated race and nation to standards of all things, a common bridge had to be found.

The "Jewish Rundschau" had already declared it openly on June 13, 1933: "Zionism recognizes the existence of the Jewish question and wants to solve it in a generous, constructive manner, for which it wants to win the support of all peoples, the Jew-friendly as well as the anti-Semitic because, in his opinion, this is not a matter of sentimentality, but only of a real problem that all peoples are interested in solving."

And just at this point put the considerations of SD leaders. A fantastic plan had taken possession of it: the SS had to make the German assimilation Jews again "conscious" Jews, had to promote the "dissimilation" so that as many Jews felt the urge for Palestine - the only country that (then) Jewish immigration hardly limited.

The Untersturmführer von Mildenstein established in the SD-Hauptamt a Jewish department, which got the official title II 112, and opened an era of SS-own Jewish policy, which pleased Hans Lamm, "to take or pretend a pro-Zionist attitude."

The new SS policy was revealed in the columns of the "Black Corps," whose anti-Jewish attacks suddenly halted before the "sober, completely unsentimental Jews" of Zionism. "The time should not be too far away, in Palestine its sons, lost for more than a millennium, can resume," predicted the SS organ. "Our wishes, combined with state benevolence, accompany them."

The SD promoted Jewish emigration to Palestine, although for the time being only the Gestapo and the Reich Ministry of the Interior were formally responsible. From 1933 to 1936, 24,000 Jews had emigrated to Palestine: the SD now increased its pressure on Jews willing to emigrate.

Head of Division of Mildenstein promoted the retraining camps maintained by Zionist organizations, in which young Jews were prepared for agricultural use in the Kibuzzim Palestine. He closely followed the work of the Zionists. In his presentation he had large maps designed to mark the advance of Zionism in German Jewry.

Among the observers of Zionism was a young SS man who had been transferred to the Mildenstein section. He had often struck SS leaders by the grotesque, dedicated manner in which he met every superior: Adolf Eichmann. The Scharfuhrer Eichmann, born 1906 in Solingen, moved with the family to Upper Austria, formerly a buddy in a mine; Electric salesmen and salesmen in oil, accidentally into the Reich and after short service with the SS-Verfügungstruppe entered the SD, it had become the rule to see in each SS leader a higher being. He tirelessly jumped into a comfortable position when superiors entered his room, and that was not a few.

Nothing in Eichmann's life suggested antisemitic roots. As he had long been inconclusive, whether he should join a Masonic lodge or the SS, he hardly knew what to think of Jews. He no longer had prejudices against Jews as other comrades, rather less: To his relatives counted several Jews, he kept a Jewish girlfriend, he owed Jews his leisurely career in business life.

Nevertheless, under Mildenstein's tutelage, he quickly became an antisemitic expert. He was soon an indispensable helper of the Juden-Referats, while Mildenstein, whose unorthodox nature displeased Himmler's staff, left the SD main office after ten months of service and later joined the Foreign Office.

In Section II 112 Eichmann received the subject area "Zionism", and he was able to convince so convincingly with Hebrew vocabulary and Zionist terms that spread in the SD Main Office rumor Eichmann was an old Palestinian German with precise knowledge of land and people.


In this work, Eichmann and the successor of Mildenstein, the journalist and SS Oberscharfuhrer Herbert Hagen, who had since retired, had first discovered the dilemma that was driving SS promotion of Zionist emigration: on the one hand, they wanted to let all Jews go to Palestine; Possibility of creating a strong Jewish state there.

Head of Unit Hagen saw it this way: "It goes without saying that Germany can by no means approve of the formation of such a state monarchy, otherwise the day on which all of its stateless Jews would obtain Palestinian citizenship would then be represented as a so-called minority demand from the German Government. "

Since Hagen and Eichmann did not want to suggest, as later the solitary SD leader Otto Ohlendorf, to grant the Jews a minority status, they had only the vague hope that Palestine's mandate - England - would never allow the founding of a Jewish state. But could one be sure of that? The SD decided to monitor the Zionist organizations even more closely.

Hagen and Eichmann were not content to control the Zionists in Germany. If they wanted to get serious information about the chances of founding a Jewish state, they had to invade the headquarters of the Zionist movement. An old friend of Mildenstein offered them a chance. The merchant Otto von Bolschwingh, a member of the party, advocate of the SD and long-time exporter in Haifa, maintained relations with a group of Palestinian Germans who supplemented their coffers with intelligence services. Among them was Dr. Reichert, the correspondent of the German news bureau (DNB) in Jerusalem.

Reichert, in turn, was in contact with one of the senior men of a Zionist secret organization who, like hardly any other institution (apart from the British Intelligence Service), occupied the imagination of the SD: the Hagana.

Eichmann had already mentioned about them in 1936: "All the parties and associations summarized in the ZO (Zionist World Organization) are overseen by a central defense and surveillance agency, which plays an extremely important role in Jewish political life, which bears the name Hagana '(The Secret People). " It is not only the military self-protection organization of the Jewish settlers, it also maintains a widespread spy network.

The secretary of the same secret army was Feivel Polkes, born in Poland on September 11, 1900, who occasionally received some fees from DNB-Reichert. He held the rank of commander in the Hagana, he was - as Hagen registered - "the leadership of the entire self-protective apparatus of the Palestinian Jews".

II 112 expressed interest in the Hagana commander, and in February 1937 Polkes made his way to Berlin. On February 26, Adolf Eichmann welcomed his Jewish guest in Berlin, twice - the one time in the wine restaurant "Traube" at the Zoo - hosted the SS-Hauptscharführer the Hagana man, on the second May Polkes returned the favor: He invited Eichmann to Palestine.

Of course, the messenger from Palestine was no ordinary agent. He was concerned with this, he explained to Eichmann, to reinforce the Jewish immigration to Palestine, so that the Jews in their old homeland would become overweight to the Arabs; For this purpose he worked together with the secret services of England and France, he also wanted to cooperate with Hitler Germany.

"He would, inter alia, actively support the German foreign policy interests in the Middle East ... if the German foreign exchange regulations for the emigrating to Palestine Jews are loosened," reported Eichmann's speech on 17 June 1937.
He will probably have been absorbed gradually, that Polkes not from had come to Berlin on his own initiative - behind him was obviously the immigration policy of the Hagana.

On September 26, 1937, punctually at 8.50 clock Eichmann and Hagen boarded a D-train to consolidate the cautious approach between the Schutzstaffel and Hagana. SD chief Heydrich had allowed to follow the invitation of the Pole to Palestine.

The two messengers were barely disguised; Eichmann traveled as editor of the "Berliner Tageblatt", Hagen as a student. On October 2, the ship "Romania" with the two SD men on board in the port of Haifa, but the Arab Jews opponents disturbed the concept of the German Jews opponents: At the end of September, Arab nationalists had unleashed a rebellion that the British mandate force forced to impose the siege and to block the borders of the country.

The SD men had to meet with Polkes in Cairo. The Hagana commander agreed, as Hagen reported in a report to Heydrich, with a monthly fee of £ 15 and agreed to provide the first information.

Hagen held the opinion of the Polke: "The German radical Jewish policy is shown to be very pleased in national Jewish circles, because so that the existence of the Jewish population in Palestine so increased that in the foreseeable future with a majority of Jews against the Arabs in Palestine could be expected."


Admittedly, Adolf Eichmann considered the yield of the Palestine excursion to be "a meager result". Himmler and Heydrich, however, thought that the work of their Zionism expert was so promising that half a year later, after the invasion of Austria (1938), they gave it direction the Jewish emigration initially in Austria transferred.

For the first time, the SD was also formally involved in Jewish politics. Eichmann, Untersturmfiihrer since January 1938, had been appointed Jewish officer of the Inspector of the Security Police and the SD in Vienna. His mission: to accelerate Jewish emigration by all means.

Until then, emigration had been unevenly operated by the Nazi authorities. Now Eichmann used the compulsion of the security police and harassed the Jews so that the emigration amounted to an expulsion.
The new Untersturmführer succumbed to a frenzy of organization: he had suddenly discovered that he could plan and command.

The Eichmann came up with an idea: he wanted to eliminate the confusion of police-state and party offices, which were all involved in the emigration of Jews, and to summarize all those involved - authorities and representatives of Jewry. For the Jewish forced immigrant, only one place should be responsible, "a running band, in front are the first document on it and the other papers, and back then would have to drop the passport" (Eichmann).

The assembly line became the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration", under Eichmann's direction in an old Viennese Rothschild palace. Prince Eugen Street 20/22, settled down. With Eichmann came the coworkers who would later become messengers and commanders of the genocide: the brothers Hans and Rolf Günther, Franz Novak, Alois and Anton Brunner, Erich Rajakowitsch, Stuschka, Hrosineck - cold-blooded and tireless strategists of the Jews expulsion.

With the means of blackmail, Eichmann's central office set in motion the Jewish exodus. Since the majority of Austria's 300,000 Jews were destitute and did not possess the minimum capital demanded by the immigration countries ("Vorzeigegeg"), and the currency-weak Nazi regime rigorously refused any financial aid, the richer Jews were forced to subsidize the extract with their assets.

In Austria, the aryanization of Jewish property, from which the Nazi leaders hoped to raise funds for armament and Jewish emigration, began on schedule. 25,000 Nazi commissioners seized Jewish private property -- the complete elimination of a group of people began.

Using such methods, Eichmann was able to report success rates to Berlin easily. By the late autumn of 1938, the central office had deported 45,000 Austrian Jews, and in just under 18 months 150,000 Jews had been expelled from the land of their fathers.

But Eichmann's policy of cold forced emigration could only succeed as long as the SS technocrats managed to keep open the borders of the immigration countries and the coffers of the Jewish relief organizations through a quiet process of expulsion. But this defeated the extremists of the party, which - in any case detested by the interference of the SD in the Jewish policy -- in the summer 1938 initiated a new Hetzkampagne against the Jewry.

Julius Streicher's "striker" made the beginning. In the columns of the paper the demand was made again and again that it was high time to drive the Jews out of their remaining economic positions. The "striker" constantly called on the countries of Europe to unite to fight against the Jews and to seal their borders against the "world enemy No. 1" -- those limits that Eichmann tried to keep open for his emigration transports.

In vain Eichmann tried to slow down the Hetzblatt. At the end of May 1938, the Untersturmfuhrer in Vienna attacked "Sturmer" editor-in-chief Hiemer, explained to him the emigration practice of the SS, and held him "for about two hours as a seminal lecture" (Eichmann).

Eichmann also invited Streicher to come to Nuremberg in order to "reach a different line of the 'striker' on this occasion, Eichmann wrote in a memorandum. The effort was in vain. A two-page article by Hiemer on Judaism in Vienna revealed to Eichmann's chief executive Hagen "how hard we have failed with our view that only in this way could a conversion be achieved."

On June 28, 1938, Hagen wrote to Eichmann: "The most wonderful piece seems to me to be when the (Hiemer) to the quite pleasing fact that many Jews in Vienna return to their Judaism, adds the following parenthetical remark: 'To one Religion that recognizes the teachings of the Talmud as the supreme law of the Talmud, permitting all crimes against the Gentile.' When I hear such a thing, I take it up to my head: what are they supposed to do? Perhaps the 'striker' will contribute to the radical solution of making them shorter by a head so that they do not even fall for the pleasing thought can confess to being Jews again."

The relationship between SD and Streicher deteriorated so much that Heydrich ordered Eichmann to unload himself at Streicher. Obersturmbannfuhrer Six stated: "(Heydrich) wants SS Untersturmfuhrer Eichmann to evade the invitation (Streichers) for the time being by saying that he has just gone on vacation."

A few weeks later, an even more dangerous adversary, the Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, joined the opponents of the SS Jewish policy. He had been waiting for a long time for a chance to get the regime's Jewish policy under control; his propaganda apparatus was already ready to trigger a new wave of anti-Semitic measures.

A sniper war between the anti-Semitic leaders of Germany and Poland further helped the minister: On October 6, 1938, the Polish government issued a decree annulling all Polish passports unless they had been endowed with a special note available only in Poland were.

The Foreign Office in Berlin immediately suspected the Warsaw government would like to get rid of the many Polish Jews in Germany with one blow. The Nazi regime responded in its own way.

On October 28, Sipo chief Heydrich had 17,000 Polish Jews arrested, locked in railway carriages and transported to the German-Polish border. During the night of October 29, 1938, the victims of the first Jewish mass deportation of the Third Reich were driven across the border. They were reluctantly received by the Polish border authorities.

Between the fronts of German and Polish policemen also the Hanoverian master tailor Grünspan wandered around. In Paris, 17-year-old Herschel Grünspan heard of his father's martyrdom. On November 7, he bought a revolver and shot with five shots the Third Secretary of the German Embassy in Paris. Ernst vom Rath, down.

The assassination of a German diplomat by a Jew was just an event Joseph Goebbels had been waiting for. His propaganda machine began to rage.

The "Volkischer Beobachter" wrote on 8 November: "It is clear that the German people will draw their conclusions from this new act." Kurhessen and Magdeburg-Anhalt were already rallying Nazi-controlled demonstrators and devastating Jewish shops in the districts of Kurhessen and Magdeburg-Anhalt.

Goebbels seemed happy the hour: On November 9, gathered in Munich's Old Town Hall, Hitler's oldest comrades in memory of their beer cellar putsch in 1923. Who in the party rank and name had appeared there -- there was only one needed flaming Goebbels speech to drive the party formations into the final battle against the Jews.

What followed was the Berliner Volkswitz, referring to the millions of shattered windows of Jewish shops, christening the Kristallnacht. It has gone down in history as a night of shame: a regime commanded people to organized pogroms.
But for the inner story of Hitler regime means the Reichskristallnacht something else. It is a lesson of National Socialist rule. Like the Röhm affair and the Blomberg-Fritsch scandal, it reveals the chaotic, structureless system of government called the Führer State. And she has left a footnote full of gruesome irony: The final redeemers of the later years were opponents of the Goebbels coup.

For: In the action of November 9, 1938, an element of the party-internal uproar against the dominant role of the SS in the Jewish policy became visible. It was no coincidence that Himmler and Heydrich first heard of the action when it was long under way -- under the leadership of the Reich Propaganda Minister.

Goebbels had traveled to Munich on 9 November with the apparent intention of inciting the Old Fighters into a bloody pogrom. A new message from Paris promoted his plan: No sooner had the Altnazis settled in the Old Town Hall for dinner, then the news was submitted, Ernst vom Rath had died at 16.30 clock.

"Hitler was greatly impressed by this and refused to speak what he always did," testifies Munich's police chief, the SS leader Freiherr von Eberstein. Hitler and Goebbels put their heads together; Eberstein considered the conversation to be an "extremely haunting conversation".

No doubt: at this moment the decision must have fallen. However, the head of state Hitler was not allowed to be associated with the pogrom; Goebbels took over only the role of the director. The dictator left the hall, whereupon the celebrity leader made a non-verbal and omnipresent speech, which must be counted among the masterpieces of Nazi demagoguery.

"This speech was extremely inflammatory, and it was apparent from her that Goebbels intended to start an action," recalled later the Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach. Everybody heard something else: the one order not to hinder actions against Jews, the other the order to actively stage pogroms, the third the order to light synagogues, the fourth the order to drive the Jews out of the cities.

But what exactly had Goebbels said? Only this: He, Goebbels, had reported to the Fuhrer that in some districts anti-Jewish actions had already taken place. The Fuhrer then decided that such demonstrations were neither to be prepared nor organized by the party, as far as they were spontaneous and did not oppose them.

He did not say more. But the Old Fighters rushed to the phones and sent alarm orders to their units out in the country. At last they were allowed to feel themselves masters of the Jewish question, at last the party was able to assert its right to have a say. At last the SA saw the hour come to step out of its shadow role.

The official conductors of Nazi Jewish politics, however, did not suspect what was brewing. Hermann Göring, who was commissioned with the solution of the Jewish question, rolled uninformed back to Berlin on a night train, while Himmler and his guide wanted to drive to the swearing-in of SS recruits in front of the Feldherrnhalle and Heydrich in a room of the Munich hotel "Vier Jahreszeiten" sat with comrades.

The head of the German security police was "completely surprised" by the Goebbels anti-Jewish action, as later the Gestapo-Justitiar Dr. Werner Best said that he had accompanied his boss Heydrich to the Munich traditional meeting of Nazi celebrities. Best: "I was with him when a synagogue went up in fire a few meters from the hotel we were in."

Heydrich and his companion were still puzzling over the background of the synagogue attack, as she cleared at 23.15 clock a call the Stapo control center Munich. The Fuhrer on duty at the control center reported: The Gaupropagandaleitung had just informed Munich-Upper Bavaria that there had been ordered Jewish pogroms in which the secret state police could not intervene. The caller asked for instructions.

The Sipo boss did not know any. He sent immediately the group leader Karl Wolff, boss of the personal staff Reichsführer SS, with the information just received to the Reichsführer. It was 11:30 pm when Wolff met his boss in Hitler's private apartment in the outer Prinzregentenstrasse.

No one seemed more astonished at the action of the Jews than Adolf Hitler. The unsuspecting SS boss later admitted Minutes: "When I asked the guide, I had the impression that he knew nothing of the events." But Adolf Hitler quickly recovered from his alleged surprise. He ordered that the SS should stay out of the action, that the Gestapo only had Jewish property and provided for the personal protection of the Jews.


Heydrich waited for the arrival of his boss, to learn how the SS should behave to the Goebbels coup. Finally, at 1:00 am on 10th November, Himmler arrived in the "Four Seasons". He gave his orders to Heydrich and the assembled upper-section leaders of the General SS.

Heydrich said in a flash telex to all the Gestapo and SD offices: "Jews' shops and homes may only be destroyed, not plundered, and the police are instructed to oversee the execution of this order and arrest raiders." Care should be taken in commercial streets to "ensure that non-Jewish businesses are protected against damage", and that "foreign nationals -- even if they are Jewish -- are not likely to be molested."

But no sooner had Himmler issued his orders than his anger broke over the adversary Goebbels. He recognized from the beginning what the pogrom of 9 November meant: a crossfire against the cold-rationalistic Jewish policy of the SS, an attack on the primacy of the SS in all questions of Jewish emigration.


Himmler had Untersturmführer Luitpold Schallermeier, Wolff's personal assistant, come in and dictated a note at 3 o'clock, which he sealed in an envelope. Himmler: "I suspect that Goebbels has launched this action in his toughest period of effort in power and in his stubbornness right now in the hardest foreign policy time."

Like Himmler, other SS leaders also disliked the company of Dr. Ing. Goebbels. Otto Ohlendorf, the later head of the Inland SD, was "deeply outraged" by the pogrom, according to the testimony of an unpolitical student friend. Group leader Wolff confessed to the Indian politician Hafiz Khan that Germany had lost "a moral battle", and police chief Eberstein, who forbade any involvement of his SS units, felt "this whole action was extremely indecent".

Was that all that the SS took as a token of their protest? It was all or almost everything.

Only the Fama, of course, attributed to Himmler a stronger gesture of protest. The Prussian Finance Minister Popitz heard Himmler had told Hitler that he could not obey his orders, and an SS man named Günther Schmitt told former ambassador Ulrich von Hassell that the Reichsfuhrer had "disapproved of the pogrom" and therefore detained the barracks for two days ordered".

Himmler even collected material about the devastation and looting of Goebbels incited mobs to prove his leader the futility of the Goebbels coup and to demand the removal of the opponent from all State offices.

As the result of the damage was present, Himmler prepared for an open fight against Goebbels. On November 11, Heydrich registered an interim result: 815 shops destroyed, 29 department stores demolished, 171 houses destroyed, 76 synagogues devastated and another 191 set on fire, 36 Jews murdered, 36 seriously injured, 174 looters arrested.


The cautious Reichsfuhrer SS was looking for an ally against the powerful celebrity boss. He found him in Hermann Goering, who also found his competence in Jewish politics touched by Goebbels.

After receiving the first pogrom messages, Goering had rushed to the Reich Chancellery and asked Hitler to stop the action immediately. Goering's arguments were similar to Himmler's, they were of non-humanitarian nature, the trustee for the four-year plan was only interested in the material losses. Goering: "I'm tired of these demonstrations!"

Hitler defended his Minister of Propaganda lame, while Göring fueled the fight against Goebbels. Himmler also accused Goebbels of having inflicted immeasurable damage to the Reich through the irresponsible pogrom abroad.


The fight against Goebbels reached its peak on November 14th. For this day, the Gdansk League Commissioner Carl J. Burckhardt had made an appointment with the Reich Minister of Propaganda. When the guest appeared in the Ministry, he was directed to be received later. Burckhardt soon realized why.

The League Commissioner learned from the Polish ambassador to Berlin, Lipski, that the Reich Cabinet had "formed a spontaneous movement against Goebbels," and from a "direct source" (Burckhardt) the Swiss learned that "the current cold position of the Propaganda Minister had been demanded".

On the 13th of November the fight was still undecided, but on the morning of the next day Hitler voted for his body-propagandist. At about 11 o'clock the dictator let himself be driven to the private apartment of Goebbels and expressed his trust in him. In the evening Berlin and the world learned about it: Hitler showed himself together with Goebbels in a performance of the Schiller-Theater.

Thoughtfully Burckhardt traveled back to Gdansk. There he found the note Himmler had called and urged him to come immediately to the Reich capital. The SS chief had not given up the fight against Goebbels yet: the argument could still ignite that Goebbels had damaged German foreign policy.

To be sure, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had already leapt to the side of the propaganda chief and had certified to him that there could be no question of damaging the foreign policy interests of the Reich. Only Burckhardt, the confidant of all those Nazi leaders whom the man of the League of Nations regarded as adversaries of the radical note in the policy of Adolf Hitler, could help in this situation.

When Burckhardt finally arrived at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Himmler had already resigned. Instead of the Reichsführer SS, Gruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff received the visitor. Unfortunately, his boss was ill, Wolff reported that the events of the past week had burdened Himmler's nerves too much. But: The Reichsführer condemn the pernicious methods against the Jews.

"The inner situation in this country has become unbearable, something must happen," said Wolff. The person in charge was "Mr. Goebbels, who exerts an insignificant influence on the Fuhrer". "We were hoping to hunt him down because of the propaganda he was making about the Czechs crisis, and this time we definitely believed we were safe, but once again the Fuhrer saved him, and this can not go on 'One will have to act.'


Burckhardt retreated in confusion. He did not yet know that the invitation to Berlin was only the rearguard action of a battle which Himmler had lost to Goebbels.

However, Goebbels also had to pay a high price. He remained at his post, but he was no longer allowed to interfere in the Jewish question. Hitler had decreed that Goering alone was responsible in this area for "centrally summarizing the decisive steps," as Goering described in Brown German.

That meant in practice: even stronger harassment of German Jewry, complete repression from the economic life and above all continuation of the emigration policy of the SD. On January 24, 1939 Heydrich received the Goering order to promote the emigration of Jews by all means.

Heydrich copied now on the imperial scale, what Eichmann had preexercised in Austria. In Berlin, a "Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration" was created, in which, according to the Viennese model, all Reich authorities and the compulsory representation of German Jews ("Reich Association of Jews in Germany") participated in the exodus of the Jews.

The head of the Reich Central was Heydrich assumed as chief of the security police, who in turn appointed a director, the SS-Standartenführer Heinrich Müller, chief of the Department II in the Secret State Police. With new pressures, the Jewish leaders were driven to provide their followers for emigration.

Heydrichs and Müllers Reich Central was initially record numbers. In 1939, 78,000 Jews of the Old Reich (1938: 40,000) left the country of Adolf Hitler. Under the pressure of Eichmann, who had meanwhile established another central office for Jewish emigration in Prague, almost 30,000 Jews vacated the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.


Heydrich's emigration experts never missed an opportunity to transport Jews out of the country. They even got involved with a Zionist secret organization, which wanted to realize in their own way what Eichmann and Hagen planned in 1937 together with their Jewish confederate Feivel Polkes: the mass emigration of German Jews to Palestine.

The plan had thwarted the British mandate power. After bloody clashes between Arabs, Jews and the mandate in the fall of 1937, the British government had begun to curtail Jewish immigration into the Holy Land.

Against England's new immigration policy was formed a Zionist resistance group, behind which was not least Hagana, who also belonged to Eichmann confederate Polkes. In 1937, in the room of the powerful Hagana leader Eliahu Golomb, a secret organization was formed, which called itself "Mossad le Allyah Bet", office for immigration.

The Mossad established in Europe a network of shop stewards who secretly directed Jewish immigrants to Palestine on small ships. The men of the Hagana leader Golomb were also unsentimental enough to bring Jews to Palestine with the help of the SS and to risk what the British publicists Jon and David Kimche call the "pact with the devil".


Around the time of the Kristallnacht, two commissioners of the Mossad, Pino Ginzburg and Moshe Auerbach, drove to the empire of Adolf Hitler to offer their help in the emigration of the Jews to the lords of the Black Order. The two Mossad men proposed to accelerate the Zionist retraining program for Jews who wanted to emigrate and to send the Jews to Palestine.

The SD attacked and allowed the Mossad to grant, especially as the emigration numbers shrank more and more. II 112 held on June 15, 1939 as "goals of German Jewish policy": "Promote emigration with all forces immigration of Jews more difficult. All emigration plans, wherever promote."

The SD had to be grateful to anyone who placed German Jews abroad. To be sure, the Jewish exporters of the SS were allowed to cooperate with the Zionists in open sight. The Foreign Office Joachim von Ribbentrops was a fierce opponent of all Jewish emigration to Palestine, and the foreign organization of the NSDAP intrigued against the incomprehensible assistance of the SS in building a Jewish state.

In a circular to all diplomatic missions and consulates of the Reich on January 25, 1939, the Foreign Ministry expressed the view of the Israeli opponents: Instead of enabling world Jewry to "gain power under international law," a continued "fragmentation of Judaism" was the goal of the German politics. The German emigrant transports of the Mossad -- that was the oral condition of the SD -- were by no means allowed to name Palestine as the country of destination.

Commissioner Pino Ginzburg moved to the Zionist headquarters in Berlin Meineckestraße and began to put together transports. Heydrich demanded that the Ginzburg organization supply 400 Jews every week and transport them by sea to Palestine; the Reichszentrale later even set up a German-Greek shipowner, whose ships soon turned out to be scavenger-savvy soul vendors.

Planner Golomb in Palestine procured better means of transport; At first he had to content himself with boats that could only hold 50 passengers, then he provided ships for 800 people. But still missing the Mossad people in Germany the money to finance these projects.


After all, Ginzburg had his first contingent in March 1939. It included 280 emigrants, as the country of destination of the Reich Central was called winking Mexico. The 280 united with a group organized by Moshe Auerbach in Vienna and all went aboard the "Colorado" in the Yugoslav port of Susak. In the sea area around Corfu, the immigrants were taken by another Mossad ship, the "Otrato" and brought to Palestine.

From action to action, the Jewish transports of the Mossad ran smoother, increasing the number of emigrants. In the summer, the "Colorado" with 400 other immigrants set sail, shortly followed by the launching of Holland "Dora" with 500 refugees.

England fought bitterly against the illegal immigrants. The British Navy transferred a destroyer fleet to the coast of Palestine and ordered increased aerial surveillance, while British coastal security agents were stationed in European coastal cities to avoid emigration.

England's colonial minister was able to report some victory over the helpless immigrants among the opposition's boos. On July 21, 1939, he reported in the House of Commons that British forces had captured 3507 illegal immigrants within two months. In June, the "Astir" was inflicted with 724 Jews, in August, the Royal Navy stopped five ships with 297 German Jews, shortly after a ship with 800 people. But some came through, so in late August the "Parita" with 850 illegal immigrants.

The harder the British authorities responded, the more helpful was Heydrich's Reichszentrale. In midsummer she authorized Ginzburg to direct his ships to Emden and Hamburg, so that the emigrants could leave Germany directly. For October 1939 Ginzburg had already chartered four ships, a total of 10,000 Jews were to leave on the direct way.


Adolf Hitler's World War II put an end to the involuntary SS-Zionist partnership and destroyed the last great opportunity to save German Jewry.

At the same time this meant the end of the autonomous Jewish policy of the SD. Nothing was more significant than the fact that the Jewish question now came within the exclusive sphere of competence of the Gestapo, which measured political problems only with the coarse unity of police-state thinking, and even more rigidly than the SD restricted human beings to function To be state ally.

The men of the Gestapo were commanding officers from the reeducation school of Reinhard Heydrich, pupils of the cult of the ruling class, who not infrequently compensated for the lack of National Socialist piety by official overzealousness. For them, the Jewish question was merely a sector of state security whose boundaries and requirements determined political leadership.

This subaltern thought could hardly have been more aptly embodied than in Hauptsturmfuhrer Adolf Eichmann, who was soon to head the Gestapo's own Jewish policy.


NEXT STEPS

The destruction of Russian Jewry: deployment of the four Einsatzgruppen - command issue in Pretzsch - the assistance of the Wehrmacht - 1.4 million Jews liquidated - Gauleiter Kubes resistance

Jew pursuer Himmler, masseur Kersten

Were the perpetrators ...

... also the authors of the greatest crime in history ?: Expatriate Jews in front of Berlin travel agency. 1939

"Striker" editor Streicher

In the eyes of the SD ...

Strings-sheet "The Striker"

... harmful anti-Semitism

Jewish boycott in Berlin: faith in the good blood

Zionist friend of Mildenstein

In as many Jews as possible ...

Zionist leader Prince

... awaken the urge to Palestine

Jewish emigrants at embarkation. Return of the lost sons

Jewish Referent Eichmann

Camouflaged to Haifa

Vom Rath assassin Grünspan

Five shots in Paris ...

... followed a night of shame: verdigris victims of the council

Ruined synagogue in Munich (November 9, 1938): After the first murders ...

... a joint visit to the theater: Jews persecutor Hitler, Goebbels, Göring

Mossad agent Ginzburg

To strengthen Zionism ...

Hagana leader Golomb

... A deal with the Devil

Illegal landing of Jewish immigrants of the "Parita" on the Palestinian coast: winking

called Mexico

By Heinz Höhne
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Re: Leopold von Mildenstein, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sat Apr 21, 2018 6:22 am

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis [Excerpt]
by Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali and Robert Wolfe
© Richard Breitman, Norman J. W. Goda, Timothy NaftaIi, Robert Wolfe 2005

Leopold von Mildenstein

Before the Israeli capture of Eichmann, Leopold Eduard Stephen von Mildenstein was more a West German embarrassment than an American one. After leaving the Jewish Affairs Department in 1937, he joined Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, where he spent the war designing virulent anti-Allied and anti-Semitic tracts primarily for use among Arabs in the Middle East. [21] After the war, he parlayed his experience with Goebbels into an attractive resume for jobs in marketing. Coca Cola's West German unit hired him as its press secretary. Mildenstein spoke excellent English, having lived in New York City between November 1923 and April 1925, just after completing his university studies in Germany. He also maintained superb contacts among the German political elite. Despite his Nazi past, Mildenstein was a respected member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the libertarian political party that was popular among the country's business class. In May 1956, he was elected deputy chairman of the press committee of the FDP. [22]

Mildenstein wanted to establish a relationship with the U.S. government, probably with the CIA itself. He had visited the United States in July 1954. At the request of an unidentified "foreign government"-probably the West German government-Mildenstein was granted a U.S. visa despite his known wartime affiliation with the SS. In January 1956, Mildenstein himself approached the political officer at the U.S. embassy in Bonn for help in securing a U.S.-sponsored exchange grant for journalists. Although told by the State Department that "his Nazi background" plus the fact that he "was not an active journalist" made him ineligible for the grant, Mildenstein continued to visit the U.S. Embassy. [23] Finally, in May 1956, following his election to the FDP's press committee, he told a U.S. foreign service officer that he had "useful and valuable info[rmation] ... which he [was] willing to exchange for unspecified consideration." [24]

Mildenstein's interest in serving as a U.S. agent reached the CIA, and the station in Frankfurt opted to consider him as a potential "operational contact." Frankfurt requested traces-a search for any relevant information-on Mildenstein from other CIA field stations and the headquarters in Washington. The local CIA officers already understood the nature of the man they were considering. Mildenstein was an "unsavory type," they cabled Washington, "and probably has [a] continuing relationship with [a foreign government]." Nevertheless, a certain foreign government official who provided this information believed that Mildenstein was the type of man "with whom [a] coldly calculated business relationship" could be maintained "without undue operational effort." [25]

There was little activity following this request. The CIA station in Stuttgart advised Frankfurt that Mildenstein had been a prewar propaganda agent for Goebbels in the Middle East, where he also wrote articles for the Nazi press. It also noted some evidence that he had been in the SS and "possibly [the] SD," but there were no specifics. The trace request drew no other CIA comment on his SS past, let alone any reference to the Jewish Affairs Department. Headquarters, it seems, had nothing to add. In any case, the CIA station in Frankfurt decided not to pursue the case any further.

Mildenstein next turned up in Egypt working for the government of Gamal Abdul Nasser. In December 1956, the Turkish press reported that he had been hired by Egypt's powerful "Voice of Arabs" radio station along with other former associates from Goebbels' organization. [26] Mildenstein's experience in inciting the Arabs against Jews in the Second World War was highly prized in Egypt. This was confirmed by a CIA report from Cairo, which listed him among a group of influential former Nazis who were shaping the actions of the Nasser government. [27]

It seems unlikely, given the released information, that the CIA recruited Mildenstein in Egypt or anywhere else following its brief dalliance with him in the summer of 1956. It was therefore with some surprise that the CIA learned in June 1960 that Mildenstein was seeking immunity as a U.S. intelligence agent. CIA Frankfurt, whose personnel had changed since the last time that Mildenstein had been of any interest, cabled Washington to find out whether he should be protected. "No indication [of] Kubark [CIA] interest since [redacted] 15 June 1956," Washington replied, and "unless further information is available [in the] field[,] no current HQS interest exists." [28] There remains the possibility that another U.S. intelligence service did have some contact with Mildenstein. If this happened-and Mildenstein was not simply blowing smoke in June 1960 to save his hide-then it was probably in Egypt, where the U.S. military attache in Cairo was in contact with some of the former SS officers who were serving the Egyptian government. [29]

The CIA had reason to be concerned that Mildenstein claimed an operational relationship to weather the storm that followed the capture of Eichmann, but it had no reason to be surprised. CIA headquarters knew very well that the Agency had hired Nazis even more odious than Mildenstein.
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