Warrant for Genocide

Soon after the establishment of the State of Israel, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, a secular Jew, urged the chief rabbi of the new Jewish state to lift the excommunication or herem on Spinoza. However, the lifting was refused. After his retirement, Ben-Gurion published an article in Davar, that just as the excommunication declared by Athens on Socrates could not prevent the Greek philosopher from being recognized as first thinker of Hellenic times, so the excommunication of Spinoza by the Jews of Amsterdam could not deny the fact that Spinoza was Jewish. Ben-Gurion urged that the Hebrew University should sponsor the publication of the works of Spinoza to be timed for the 300th anniversary of his excommunication, in 1956. In “Let Us Right the Wrong,” Ben-Gurion referred to Spinoza as “the most original thinker and the most profound philosophy that Judaism has produced in the two thousand years.”[1]

In 1962, David Ben-Gurion outlined with surprising accuracy his vision for the future that placed in context the role of a united Europe in the enduring contest with Russia to achieve World Government:

 The image of the world in 1987 as traced in my imagination: The Cold War will be a thing of the past. Internal pressure of the constantly growing intelligentsia in Russia for more freedom and the pressure of the masses for raising their living standards may lead to a gradual democratization of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the increasing influence of the workers and farmers, and the rising political importance of men of science, may transform the United States into a welfare state with a planned economy.

Western and Eastern Europe will become a federation of autonomous states having a Socialist and democratic regime. With the exception of the USSR as a federated Eurasian state, all other continents will become united in a world alliance, at whose disposal will be an international police force. All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars.

In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.[2]

Disturbingly, the aspirations of the Nazis and Zionists ran in parallel when it came to a mutual desire to promote Jewish emigration from Germany. Ultimately, in spite of its gruesome consequences, it was the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews that created the worldwide condemnation that lent international support when the United Nations granted the founding of the State of Israel in 1947, on the land originally promised in the Round Table’s Balfour Declaration to Lord Rothschild, not only as a final solution of the Jewish Problem, but a crucial step in gathering Israel together in the land of Zion in preparation for the advent of the Messiah.

Historian Norman Cohn characterized The Protocols—which were disseminated through the efforts of the Aufbau—as Hitler’s “Warrant for Genocide.” Among the many accounts of the origin of the Protocols was that they were presented by Zionist leader Theodor Herzl himself at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. A major source for the Protocols was Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), which was referred to as Zionist Protocols in its initial French and Russian editions.[3] Herzl recognized that it would not be possible to convince Jews to move to Palestine, except to compel them. As further revealed by a documentary in Hebrew titled, Herzl and Zionism, Herzl wrote in his diary of adopting a dastardly plan of exploiting anti-Semitism by fueling fears that the Jews secretly controlled the world, in order to help create circumstances so inhospitable in Europe that most Jews would see no alternative but to buckle to the will of the Zionists. As Herzl recorded in his diaries a portrayal of Jewish influence as put forth in the Protocols:

It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not wish to bring about the impoverishment of the countries that we leave. At first they must not be given large fees for this; otherwise we shall spoil our instruments and make them despicable as ‘stooges of the Jews.’ Later their fees will increase, and in the end we shall have only Gentile officials in the countries from which we have emigrated. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.[4]

According to Nahum Sokolow, who was secretary general of the World Zionist Congress from 1931 to 1935, and who wrote a Hebrew translation of The Sayings of Jacob Frank, “Hitlerism enables us to convert all Jews to Zionism.”[5] The idiocy of Nazi anti-Semitism was that, it wasn’t just an elite few Jewish criminals who were perceived to have been responsible for the plot outlined in The Protocols, but the problem was supposedly Jews as a “race,” who were seen as by nature deviant and pernicious. Therefore, the only solution to the age-old “Jewish Question” was the Final Solution, though the tragic reality was that it was largely millions of poor, innocent Jews from the ghettos who were condemned for execution. While the Aryan race theory is typically identified with anti-Semitism, it is a theory associated with the Sabbateans. As Abraham Duker has pointed out, anti-Semitism was also characteristic among the Frankists, who rejected other Jews’ adherence to the Bible and resented the persecution they were made to endure:

The Frankists were also united by less positive aspects, namely dislike of the Jews who forced them into conversion and thus cut them off from their near and dear ones as well as hatred of the Catholic clergy which had its share in this drastic step… The task of raising a new generation under such condition of double Marranoism was indeed a difficult one and required much cooperation and close-mouthedness. Kinship and the close social relations have made Frankism to a large extent a family religion, that has continually been strengthened by marriage and by economic ties through concentration in certain occupations.[6]

In 1912, Chaim Weizmann—the author of the Balfour Declaration who served as president of the Zionist Organization and who would become the first president of Israel—told a Berlin audience that “each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews.”[7] In his discussion with Balfour in 1914, Weizmann added that “we too are in agreement with the cultural anti-Semites, in so far as we believed that Germans of the Mosaic faith are an undesirable, demoralizing phenomena.”[8]

Weizmann was aware of the full extent of Balfour’s anti-Semitism, as Weizmann wrote of Balfour that, “He told me how he had once had a long talk with Cosima Wagner [wife of Richard Wagner] at Bayreuth and that he shared many of her antiSemitic postulates.”[9] Weizmann reported to the Zionist Congress of 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission, a British Royal Commission of Inquiry, appointed in 1936 to investigate the causes of unrest in Mandatory Palestine, which was administered by Great Britain:

The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” …From the depths of the tragedy I want to save… young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world… Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it.[10]

The height of the collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis took place in the summer of 1933, with the drafting of the Transfer Agreement, or Haavarah, to allow German Jews emigrating to Palestine to retain some of the value of their property. One of the Nazis’ main goals for negotiating with the Zionists was to weaken the Jewish boycott of German goods. The boycott movement, headquartered in the United States, began with the famous rally sponsored by the American Jewish Congress (AJC) under crypto-Sabbatean Rabbi Stephen Wise in Madison Square Garden, New York, on March 27, 1933. In I932, cognizant of the Nazi’s rising power, Wise had summoned international Jewish leaders to Geneva for a World Jewish Conference, as the first step in forming a World Jewish Congress (WJC), to deal with the welfare of Jews outside Palestine. However, Wise struggled to gain the support of either American or German Jews, who insisted Hitler was no real threat to German Jewry, and demanded that foreign Jewish groups keep out of Germany’s domestic affairs.[11]

Nevertheless, as pointed out by Edwin Black, in The Transfer Agreement, Wise himself struggled with the choice of opposing the Nazis and support Jewish settlement in Palestine. On September 6, 1933, Wise said in a speech two days before the Second World Jewish Conference:

Once again the Jewish people seems called upon to play a great role in history, perhaps the greatest role in all the ages of its tragic history. Once again the Jewish people are called upon to suffer, for we are the suffering servants of humanity. We are called upon to suffer that humanity and civilization may survive and may endure. We have suffered before. We are the eternal suffering servants of God, of that world history which is world judgment.

We do not rebel against the tragic role we must play if only the nations of the earth may achieve some gain, may profit as a result of our sufferings, and may realize in time the enormity of the danger they face in that common enemy of mankind which has no other aim than to conquer and destroy. We are ready if only the precious and the beautiful things of life may survive. This is once again the mission of the Jews.[12]

As David Ben-Gurion stated callously, referring to the Holocaust: “What Zionist propaganda for years could not do, disaster has done overnight.”[13] Ben-Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 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 Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.”[14] In 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise had written a letter in which he opposed any change in US immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge: “It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws.”[15]

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate the condition of European Jews, said in a speech made in 1943:

When they come to us with two plans—the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land—I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once again no![16]

Eerily, the term “holocaust” is derived from the Greek word holókauston, used by the Hellenized Jews of the Second Temple period to refer to an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole (olos) animal is completely burnt (kaustos). Most problematic for the Sabbateans was the fact that Orthodox Judaism disagree with the nationalistic interpretation of Zionism due to their adherence to the teachings of the Torah, where it is believed that the nation of Israel should only be created after the messiah’s return. While Frankists commanded conversion to Christianity and the reversal of Jewish law, those Sabbateans and Frankists who remained within Judaism fought for a rejection of conservative or rabbinical Judaism and the Talmud.[17] The Sabbateans therefore invented the term “Orthodox Judaism,” to suggest that their novel heretical interpretations were just an evolution of the true faith.[18] And in fact, as noted by the authors of a documentary in Hebrew titled, Herzl and Zionism, “the Zionists used religious terminology to make the observant Jews enthusiastic about the Zionist concept, while their actual intention was a state which would defy every principle of the religion.”[19]

Orthodox Judaism is fundamentally anti-Zionist, seeing the ideology of Zionism as diametrically opposed to the teaching of the Torah. As well, Orthodox Jews have continued to oppose the Zionist administration of the State of Israel—with its emphasis on militarism and nationalism—as destructive of the Judaic way of life. The majority of the victims of the Holocaust were religiously Orthodox Jews—the dreaded enemies of the Sabbateans.[20] It is estimated that they numbered between 50 to 70 percent of those who perished.[21]

Self-Hatred

Herzl, despite his opposition to anti-Semitism, expressed a severity of criticism towards the Jews that rivalled the worst anti-Semites.  The term “anti-Semitism” is itself problematic and ultimately manipulative. It implies that criticism of the Jewish people is directed at them as a race, rather than as a religion or a culture. That, somehow Jewish identity and “race” are inextricable. Therefore, Jews who are critical of Judaism or other Jews are supposedly “self-haters.” The specific terms “self-hating Jew” came into use developing from Herzl’s polemical use of the term “anti-Semite of Jewish origin,” in the context of his rejection of his project of political Zionism. The origins of terms such as “Jewish self-hatred” lie in the mid-nineteenth century feuds between German Orthodox Jews of the Breslau seminary and Reform Jews. Both accused the other of betraying Jewish identity, the Orthodox Jews accused the Reform Jews of identifying more closely with German Protestantism and German nationalism than with Judaism.[22]

Herzl published article entitled Mauschel (“Kike/Sheeny/Yid/Ikey”), published in 1897, not long after the conclusion of the First Zionist Congress. It is often considered to be emblematic of an antisemitic strain of thinking within Zionism, and as a virulently anti-Semitic diatribe or screed.[23] Herzl believed that there were two types of Jews, Jiden (“Yids”) and Juden (“Jews”), and employed the term Mauschel as a label for any Jew who opposed his Zionist solution to the Jewish Question. According to Herzl, “no true Jew can be an anti-Zionist; only Mauschel is one.”[24] A Mauschel, Herzl explains, “is a distortion (Verzerrung) of human character, something unspeakably low and repugnant.”[25] The pulpits of synagogues should be cleared of rabbis who are critical of Zionism. The opponents of Zionism should be treated as the enemies they are, the “motley crew” of profit-seekers, Jewish financiers, with skeletons in their closets, blackmailing Jewish journalists who accept bribes to coverup wrongdoings, Jewish lawyers who serve a shady clientele, along with corrupt politicians and businessmen.[26] Elsewhere in his writings, Herzl described opponents of the Zionism he was proposing as Schädlinge (“Jewish vermin”).

Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895 – 1989), considered the “the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century,” criticized the tendency of the Jewish community to view their history through the lens of persecution, suffering, and anti-Semitism, what he referred to as “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Baron repeatedly urged his readers and students to focus instead on the achievements of Jewish society and culture. Baron conceded that, “modern anti-Semitic movements” employed “racial anti-Semitism” to validate “the permanence and immutability of the Jewish group by virtue of blood and descent regardless of individual religious beliefs and observances.” At the same time however, Baron expressed concern about those Jewish groups, including representatives of both Reform Judaism and Zionism, who embraced an “exaggerated historical picture” characterized by “extreme wretchedness.” With regards to Zionism in particular, these efforts were part of larger scheme, “to reject the Diaspora in toto, on the grounds that a ‘normal life’ could not be led by Jewry elsewhere than on its own soil.”[27]

Herzl himself imagined the Promised Land as a place where stereotypical Jews with their hooked noses, red hair and bow-legs could live free from being despised.[28] As explains Annie Levin, “Zionists accepted the 19th century view that anti-Semitism–in fact all racial difference–was a permanent feature of human nature. For this reason it was pointless to struggle against it. The solution for Jews was to form a state and convince the European world that Jews belonged to the class of the "superior" colonizers, not to that of the colonized.”[29] In The State of the Jews, Hertzl wrote:

The unthinking might, for example, imagine that this exodus would have to take its way from civilization into the desert. That is not so! It will be carried out entirely in the framework of civilization. We shall not revert to a lower stage, we shall rise to a higher one. We shall not dwell in mud huts; we shall build new, and more beautiful, more modern houses, and possess them in safety… We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism… [Europe] would have to guarantee our existence.[30]

According to Levin, “The writings of Herzl and his colleague, Max Nordau, are littered with descriptions of European Jews as parasites, social diseases, germs, aliens. They were frustrated and bewildered that most Jews wanted to assimilate and live in their countries of birth.”[31] Jewish elites in the West, who had assimilated the secular principles of the Enlightenment, were committed to their nations, and concerned with displays of Jewishness and Jewish nationalism, and were prone to echo mainstream stereotypes about the poverty, dirtiness and superstitiousness of the Eastern Jews, or Ostjuden.[32] Eastern Jews, who represented 75% of the Jewish population at that time, figure frequently in early Zionist texts as an impoverished population that was both physically and morally “degenerate.”[33] Large-scale pogroms swept through Russia from 1881 to 1884 which coincided with burgeoning influx of the displaced rural poor into cities. The waves of immigration stirred xenophobic reactions in countries to the west, and in particular disturbed the established Jewish middle class communities were prone to many of the negative stereotypes about traditional Jews found among the non-Jewish communities.[34]

Israeli historian Anita Shapira remarked, “Anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes did nourish, to some degree, the thought of Zionist public opinion makers.”[35] The Jewish anti-Zionist writer Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936) regarded antisemitism as the “essence” of the Zionist movement and characterized Jewish supporters as “Jewish antisemites.”[36] In his 1908 novel Der Weg ins Freie (“The Road into the Open”), Arthur Schnitzler has one character say: “I myself have only succeeded up to the present in making the acquaintance of one genuine anti-Semite. I’m afraid I'm bound to admit,… that it was a well-known Zionist leader.” In 1915, Pinhas Felix Rosen (1887 –  1978), who rose to be Israel’s first Justice Minister, wrote in a field report on Ostjuden published in Der Jüdische Student that the great lesson for young Jewish Zionists fighting on the eastern front, on experiencing disillusionment at what they observe of Jewish life there, was that Palestine was one large “institute for the fumigation of (all) Jewish vermin.”[37] Always active in Zionist circles, working as chief of staff to Chaim Weizmann, Rosen was Chairman of the Zionist Federation of Germany from 1920 to 1923, and eventually migrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1926 where he practiced as a lawyer and helped create the Central European Immigrants Association.

Mischlinge

As outlined by Klaus Polkehn in “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941,” the Spring after Hitler was named Chancellor on January 30, 1933, witnessed the beginning of a period of cooperation between Zionists and the Nazis to increase the outflow of German Jewish immigrants to Palestine. However, as Polkehn noted, the Zionist authorities succeeded in keeping this cooperation a secret for a long period, made possible by the fact that the archives, in which the pertinent documents related to these events are kept under lock and key, and only made available for scholarly research.

Mark Rigg, author of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, has revealed that a surprisingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or “partial-Jews” (Mischlinge) in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Numerous “exemptions” were made in order to allow a soldier to stay in the service or to spare his family or other relatives from incarceration or extermination. Hitler’s own signature can be found on many of these “exemption” orders. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was far higher than previously suspected, being perhaps as many as 150,000 Jewish men who served in the Nazi regime, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. Rigg noted two field marshals and two full generals, eight lieutenant generals, and five major generals were Jews or of partial Jewish descent.

According to Jean Robin, there are reports that Thule Society member Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the racist theories of the Nazis, known as Ariosophy, was also a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[38] As detailed by French historian Charles Novak, a number of Sabbateans descendants were found in the Nazi army, including the families of von Oppenfield, formerly Oppenheimer. As Abraham Duker noted, given the extent of their assimilation into Christian societies, “It is not by accident that the Nazi encyclopedia, Sigilla Vrei had nothing to say about the Frankists. Evidently the Nazi genealogists preferred to leave them alone, fearful that such revelations might embarrass many persons of importance.”[39]

Other Sabbatean descendants also included general Erich von Manstein (1887 – 1973), whose original name was Manstein von Lewinski, as well as SS war criminal Ernst Bieberstein, whose real name was Szymanowski.[40] Biberstein was a defendant at the Einsatzgruppen Trial during the Nuremberg Trials. He was charged with having executed some two to three thousand people, many of whom were stripped of valuable articles, gassed, and left in a mass grave. Biberstein was also present at executions where victims were made to kneel at the edge of a pit and killed with a submachine gun. Manstein was a German commander of the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s armed forces during World War II, whose strategy Hitler chose for the invasion of France of May 1940. Manstein gave testimony at the main Nuremberg trials of war criminals, and prepared a paper that, along with his later memoirs, helped cultivate the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht,” the myth that the German armed forces were not culpable for the atrocities of the Holocaust.[41]

Manstein faced Manstein faced seventeen charges at Nuremberg, including maltreatment of prisoners of war, co-operation with the Einsatzgruppe D in killing Jewish residents of the Crimea. During the Crimean campaign, Manstein was indirectly involved in atrocities against the Soviet population, especially those committed by Einsatzgruppe D, one of several SS groups that had been tasked with the elimination of the Jews of Europe. Captain Ulrich Gunzert, shocked to have witnessed Einsatzgruppe D massacre a group of Jewish women and children, went to Manstein to ask him to do something to stop the killings. Gunzert states that Manstein told him to forget what he had seen and to concentrate on fighting the Red Army.[42]

The prosecution used an order Manstein had signed on based on the Severity Order that had been issued by Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, which called for the elimination of the “Jewish Bolshevik system” and the “harsh punishment of Jewry.” Manstein believed that Bolshevism and Jews were inextricably linked, that there was a global conspiracy led by the Jews, and that in order to stop the spread of communism it was necessary to remove the Jews from European society. His order reads in part:

Jewish Bolshevik system must be wiped out once and for all and should never again be allowed to invade our European living space… It is the same Jewish class of beings who have done so much damage to our own Fatherland by virtue of their activities against the nation and civilisation, and who promote anti-German tendencies throughout the world, and who will be the harbingers of revenge. Their extermination is a dictate of our own survival.[43]

Although he was of mixed Jewish and ethnic German ancestry, Emil Maurice (1897 – 1972) was an early member of the Nazi Party and a founding member of the Schutzstaffel (SS), to whom Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf, along with Rudolf Hess. Maurice Hitler’s personal friendship dated back to 1919 when they were both members of the German Workers Party (DAP). Maurice led the SA stormtroopers in fights that were known to break out with other groups during those early days.[44] In 1923, Maurice also became a member of the Stoßtrupp (“Shock Troop”), a small separate bodyguard dedicated to Hitler’s service, who along with the SA and several other paramilitary units, took part in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch. In the aftermath of the putsch, Hitler, Hess, Maurice and other Nazi leaders were incarcerated together at Landsberg Prison. Maurice became Hitler’s permanent chauffeur in 1925, and when he informed Hitler that he was having a relationship with Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal, Hitler forced an end to the affair. Although Himmler considered Maurice to be a serious security risk given his “Jewish ancestry,” in a secret letter written by Hitler in 1935, Maurice and his brothers, who were informally declared “Honorary Aryans” and allowed to stay in the SS.[45]

Erhard Milch (1892 – 1972), the son of Jewish pharmacist Anton Milch, was a German field marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Nazi Germany following World War I.[46] In 1935, an investigation that followed rumours that his father was a Jew was halted by Hermann Göring, who produced an affidavit by Milch’s mother that his true father was her uncle Karl Brauer, admitted not only to adultery but also incest.  Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate.[47] After the war, Milch was convicted of responsibility for slave labor and fatal medical experiments during the Milch Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The sentence was commuted by John J. McCloy, High Commissioner of Germany, to 15 years of imprisonment in 1951. McCloy chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank (1953–60), a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from (1946–49), and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1954-70), where he was succeeded by David Rockefeller. Milch was paroled in June 1954.

Göring once reprimanded an aide for an anti-Semitic remark about one of his dinner guests and said, “I’ll decide who is and who is not a Jew.”[48] Göring retained Milch as his Luftwaffer adjutant, shielded Ilse Ballin, a Jewish woman who treated him when he was wounded in Beer Hall Putsch, gained Vollarier (“full Aryan”) status for synthetic fat inventor Arthur Imhausen, protected art dealer Kurt Walther Bachstitz, the Jewish wife of half-Jewish sons of General Bernhard Kuhl, part-Jewish Baroness Elisabeth von Stengl, half-Jewish female test pilot Melitta Schenck von Stauffenberg, Prussian Theater director Gustav Grundgens, and several his wife Emmy’s Jewish theatrical friends. At the request of Britain’s Queen Mary, the mother of the Duke of Windsor, he granted safe passage to Baron Louis de Rothschild of Vienna, the brother of Eugène Daniel von Rothschild who with his wife Kitty were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.[49]

At the Nuremberg Trial, Göring testified: “I had no desire to see the Jews liquidated. I just wanted them out of Germany.”[50] Göring spoke to his brother Albert Göring (1895 – 1966) and others of building an independent Jewish state the size of Lichtenstein near Warsaw. In contrast to his brother Hermann, Albert was opposed to Nazism and helped Jews and others who were persecuted in Nazi Germany. In 2016, Albert’s daughter told the BBC that her mother said that Albert told her that her lover, the Jewish doctor von Hermann Epenstein, who served as surrogate father to the children, was his father.[51]

Albert regularly went to Hermann’s Berlin office to seek his help on behalf of a Jewish friend or political prisoner. In 2010, Edda Göring, the daughter of Hermann, said of her uncle Albert in The Guardian, “He could certainly help people in need himself financially and with his personal influence, but, as soon as it was necessary to involve higher authority or officials, then he had to have the support of my father, which he did get.”[52] Albert and his sister Olga pleaded for Hermann to intervene on behalf of Archduke Josef Ferdinand of Austria, the last Habsburg Prince of Tuscany, then detained at Dachau concentration camp. “Hermann was very embarrassed. But the next day the imprisoned Habsburger was free,” Albert recollected to his old friend Ernst Neubach. As Albert became ever more bold in his attempts, the Gestapo compiled a large file against him. Although four arrest warrants were issued in his name during the war, through his brother’s influence, he was never convicted. The brothers met for the last time in May 1945, in a transit jail in Augsburg. Albert spent two years in prison, unable to convince his interrogators of his innocence. One report reads: “The results of the interrog­ation of Albert Göring, brother of the Reichsmarschall Herman [sic], constitutes as clever a piece of rationalisation and ‘white wash’ as SAIC [Seventh Army ­Interrogation Center] has ever seen.”[53]

Another Jewish Nazi was Walter Hollaender, colonel (1914 – 1979), was a British-born New Zealand soldier who became an Unterscharführer in the British Free Corps (BFC), a unit of the Waffen-SS made up of British and Dominion prisoners of war who had been recruited by Germany. The BFC was originally known as the Legion of St George. The idea for the British Free Corps came from John Amery, a British fascist, son of the serving British Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, whose mother was a Hungarian Jew converted to Protestantism, was an original member of Milner’s Kindergarten, and had helped draft the Balfour Declaration. John Amery left Britain permanently to live in France after being declared bankrupt in 1936, where he met Jacques Doriot, founder of the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), and with whom he travelled to Austria, Italy, and Germany to witness the effects of fascism in those countries. Amery joined Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and was awarded a medal of honor while serving as an intelligence officer with Italian volunteer forces. He actually worked for Franco as a liaison with French synarchist Cagoule and gun-runner.[54] After the Spanish war, Amery settled in France. Amery travelled to Berlin in 1942, and proposed to the Germans the formation of a British volunteer force to help fight the Bolsheviks. Adolf Hitler was impressed by Amery and allowed him to remain in Germany as a guest. Amery was charged with high treason by the British and was hanged seven months after the war ended.

Leading members of the BFC included Thomas Haller Cooper, Edwin Barnard Martin, Frank McLardy, Alfred Minchin and John Wilson, who later became known among the renegades as the “Big Six.” Cooper, a former member of the British Union of Fascists, was also promoted to SS-Unterscharfuhrer in 1941. It has been stated that “the circumstantial case is compelling” that Cooper was involved in the Holocaust.[55] After being captured, Courlander was interviewed by British military intelligence, and told them that Hitler had told BFC members that if Britain was defeated, the former King Edward VIII would replace George VI on the throne and Oswald Mosley would become the Prime Minister.[56]

Hitler described purported Frankist, Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942), Himmler’s second in command, as “the man with the iron heart.”[57] According to Israeli historian Shlomo Aronson, a legend circulated in Germany that Heydrich was of Frankist descent from his mother’s side.[58] In March 1945, Hermann Schmitz, the Chief Executive Officer of I.G. Farben, told Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, “Germany will have a poor image problem this time. Much worse than after the First World War. It can all be placed on the doorsteps of Goering, Himmler, and Heydrich. Goering and Himmler thought up the Final Solution for the Jews, and Heydrich made it a fact.”[59]

Heydrich was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a main architect of the Holocaust. Heydrich was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks carried out by SA stormtroopers against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November, 1938. As early as 1932, rumors were spread by Heydrich’s enemies of his alleged Jewish ancestry. Admiral Canaris said he had obtained photocopies proving Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry, though these photocopies never surfaced.[60] Nazi Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan claimed Heydrich was not a pure Aryan.[61] Gregor Strasser passed the allegations on to the Nazi Party’s expert on racial matters, Achim Gercke, who investigated Heydrich’s genealogy. Gercke insisted that the rumors were baseless and reported that Heydrich was “…of German origin and free from any colored and Jewish blood.”[62] Nevertheless, Heydrich privately engaged SD member Ernst Hoffmann to further investigate and dispel the rumors.[63]

Labor Zionism

For many years, Labor Zionism or socialist Zionism was the most significant tendency among Zionists and Zionist organizations. Labor Zionism is the left-wing of the Zionist movement. Unlike the “political Zionism” founded by Herzl and advocated by Chaim Weizmann, Labor Zionism did not believe that a Jewish state would be created simply by appealing to the international community or to a powerful nation such as Britain, Germany or the Ottoman Empire. Rather, Labor Zionists believed that the Jewish state could only be created through the efforts of the Jewish working class settling in the Land of Israel and constructing a state through the creation of a progressive Jewish society with rural kibbutzim and moshavim.

The Labor Zionists, maintains Zeev Sternhell, in The Founding Myths of Isreal, maintained that the movement's synthesis of socialism and nationalism was its main historical achievement and its claim to uniqueness among labor movements.”[64] Major theoreticians of the Labor Zionist movement included Moses Hess, whose 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question argued for the Jews to settle in Palestine as a means of settling the national question. Continuing from the work Hess, Ber Borochov (1881 – 1917), helped form the Poale Zion party, a movement of Marxist–Zionist Jewish workers founded in various cities of Poland, Europe and the Russian Empire in about the turn of the twentieth century after the Bund rejected Zionism in 1901. According to Poale Zion, a Jewish proletariat would come into being in the Land of Israel, and would then take part in the class struggle. Poale Zion was active in Britain during the war, and influential on the drafting by Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson of the Labour Party’s War Aims Memorandum, recognizing the “right of return” of Jews to Palestine, a document which preceded the Balfour Declaration by three months.[65]

Another Zionist thinker, A.D. Gordon (1856 –1922) was an early member of the Hibbat Zion movement and made aliyah to Ottoman Palestine in 1904. Although formerly an Orthodox Jew, Gordon rejected religion later in his life. Students of his writings have found that Gordon was greatly influenced by Russian author Leo Tolstoy, as well as by the Hassidic movement and Kabbalah. Many have also found parallels between his ideas and those of his contemporary, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the spiritual father of Religious Zionism. In The Founding Myths of Israel, Ze’ev Sternhell contends that Gordon was a proto-fascistic figure who, “in his rejection of the materialism of socialism, employed the classic terminology of romantic, völkisch nationalism.”[66] Sternhell argues that the ideologues of Labour Zionism realized early on that the two objectives were irreconcilable, and that the pursuit of egalitarianism was really only ever a “mobilising myth,” in the sense of George Sorel, “a convenient alibi that sometimes permitted the [Zionist] movement to avoid grappling with the contradiction between socialism and nationalism.”[67]

Gordon’s teachings attracted Haim Arlosoroff, the former friend of lover of Joseph Goebbels’ wife Magda.[68] Arlosoroff was also a close friend of Chaim Weizmann. At the age of only twenty-four, Arlosoroff was elected to the Zionist Action Committee at the Zionist Congress in 1923. Turning down a university position, he left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine in 1924. In 1926 he was chosen to represent the yishuv at the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1930, Arlosoroff was influential in unifying the two major Zionist socialist political parties, the Poale Zion and the Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker). Initially, two labor parties were founded by immigrants to Palestine of the Second Aliyah (1904–1914): the pacifist and anti-militarist Hapo'el Hatza'ir party and the Marxist Poale Zion party, with Poale Zion roots.

The Poale Zion Party had a left wing and a right wing. In 1919, the right wing, including Ben-Gurion and anti-Marxist non-party people, founded Ahdut HaAvoda. In 1930 Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapo'el Hatza'ir fused into the Mapai party, which included all of mainstream Labor Zionism. Through the Mapai's political influence, Arlosoroff received election as a member of the Zionist Executive at the 1931 Zionist Congress. In addition, he was named Political Director of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a prominent position which he filled until his 1933 assassination. Mapai was also responsible for the founding of Hashomer and Haganah, the first two armed Jewish groups which secured the people and property of the new and emerging Jewish communities. By the early 1930s, David Ben-Gurion had taken over the party, and had become de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine (known as the Yishuv). It was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1930 and 1940.

Labor Zionism grew in size and influence and eclipsed “political Zionism” by the 1930s both internationally and within the British Mandate of Palestine where Labor Zionists predominated among many of the institutions of the pre-independence Jewish community Yishuv, particularly the trade union federation known as the Histadrut. At the end of 1921 David Ben-Gurion was elected as Secretary of the Histadrut. Already at the third Ahdut Ha'avoda convention, which took place in Haifa in December 1922, Ben-Gurion, as the head of the Histadrut, made a declaration of the intentions to which he adhered throughout his life: “We must clearly decide on the starting point from which we can judge our work in this country… It is not by looking for a way of ordering our lives through the harmonious principles of a perfect system of socioeconomic production that we can decide on our line of action. The one great concern that should govern our thought and work is the conquest of the land and building it up through extensive immigration. All the rest is mere words and phraseology [parperaot umelitzot]…[69]

Zionist Federation of Germany

It was a fact that in the opening years of the Hitler regime, the Nazi leaders favored Zionists over non-Zionists, and Zionists themselves proclaimed that of all Jewish groups, only they could approach the Nazis in good faith, as “honest partners.”[70] As German Jews were overwhelmingly non or anti-Zionist, the Zionists believed that Hitler's assumption of power would encourage a flow of immigrants to Palestine. Joachim Prinz, who was a committed Zionist, described Hitler’s takeover as the “beginning of the Jew’s return to his Judaism.”[71] In the face of the mounting fascist threat of the rise of the Nazis, Prinz wrote: “No hiding place hides us any longer. Instead of assimilation, we wish for the recognition of the Jewish nation and the Jewish race.”[72] The Jüdische Rundschau, the official organ of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVFD), wrote on June 13, 1933:

Zionism recognizes the existence of the Jewish question and wants to solve it in a generous and constructive manner. For this purpose, it wants to enlist the aid of all peoples; those who are friendly to the Jews as well as those who are hostile to them, since according to its conception, this is not a question of sentimentality, but one dealing with a real problem in whose solution all peoples are interested.[73]

As German Jews were overwhelmingly non or anti-Zionist, with this fascist support, the leaders of the ZVFD were for the first time able to take a leading position. At the time, the persecution of the Jews had already culminated in a large pogrom on April 1, 1933, that encompassed all Germany. When, during a session of the Eighteenth Zionist Congress, on August 24, 1933, the condition of German Jews was to be discussed, the Congress Presidium moved to prevent the discussion. The fascists rewarded the Zionists for their “restraint” and allowed the ZVFD to proceed with their work unhindered. The Nazi’s nevertheless turned against other non-Zionist Jewish organizations. On March 1, 1933, the SA occupied the central office of the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (CV), who had been strong opponents of the Zionists, and closed it. In the autumn of 1933, the Reich Deputation of German Jews, in which participated all the large Jewish organizations, including the CV and the ZVFD, was founded, but not at the behest of the Nazi authorities. Its stated aims were: “The Reich Union has as its goal the promotion of the emigration of all Jews.”[74]

After 1933, the Nazis permitted the Zionists to continue with their propaganda. While the newspapers published by the Communists or the Social Democratic Party or the trade unions and other progressive organizations were banned, the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau was allowed to appear. Winfried Martini, the then correspondent in Jerusalem of the Deutsche Ailgemeime Zeitung who, according to his own testimony, had “close personal ties with Zionism,” remarked later on the “paradoxical fact” that “of all papers, it was the Jewish press that for years retained a certain degree of freedom which was completely withheld from the non-Jewish press.”[75] He added that, in the Jüdische Rundschau views critical of the Nazis were published without reprisals. Only after 1933 was a ban on selling the paper to non-Jews imposed. The freedom of activity for the Zionists included the publishing of books. Until 1938, many publishing houses, including the Jüdische Verlag and the Schochen-Verlag in Berlin were permitted to publish Zionist literature unhindered. Thus, the works of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Arthur Ruppin were allowed to appear.

Thule and Afbau member Alfred Rosenberg wrote: “Zionism must be vigorously supported so that a certain number of German Jews is transported annually to Palestine or at least made to leave the country.”[76] SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favored over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had referenced the Zionist flag and stated that the Jews were forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the German national colors but were permitted to display the “Jewish colors,” the current flag of the state of Israel featuring the Start of David.[77] Ernst Herzfeld also reports that in the last months of 1936 the Gestapo acted more leniently towards Zionists than towards “assimilationists.”[78] The Israelitisches Familienblatt of March 21, 1935, cited authoritative Nazi sources urging favoritism towards pro-emigration groups like the Zionists.[79]

Transfer Agreement

Shortly after Zionist and Golden Dawn member Samuel Untermyer’s return to the US from Germany in 1933, articles appeared on the front page of newspapers in London and New York declaring that “Judea declares war on Germany.” This resulted in an effective boycott of German goods in many countries, adversely impacting German exports. The boycott partly inspired the beginning of economic collaboration between fascists and Zionists, in what came to be known infamously as the Haavara or Transfer Agreement, signed in signed on August 25, 1933, with the support of the ZVFD.[80] The negotiations were handled in Berlin by the then chief of the political department of the Jewish Agency, Chaim Arlosoroff.[81] The agreement provided for a Jewish emigrant to pay the minimum sum of around a thousand pounds sterling into the German account of the Haavara at the Wassermann Bank in Berlin or at N.M. Warburg in Hamburg. With this money, the Jewish importers could purchase German goods for export to Palestine, while paying the equivalent value in Palestinian pounds into the Haavara account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Palestine. When the emigrant arrived in Palestine, he received from his account the equivalent value of what he had paid in Germany. The agreement was a major factor in making possible the migration of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine in 1933-1939. Zionist sources maintain that a sum of 139.6 million Reichsmarks were transferred from Germany to Palestine.[82]

News of the Transfer Agreement produced an uproar of criticism at the Eighteenth Zionist Congress in Prague. Samuel Untermyer hypocritically complained: “It is simply inconceivable that we should ever become parties to such an unholy compact.”[83] However, after deliberations, the conference voted on September 3, 1933, not only to adopt the agreement, but to abandon its idea of an organized, world-wide boycott of German goods, to avoid risking devaluing the Reichsmark that would have led to a reduction of Palestine’s purchasing power.[84] In support of the emigration to Palestine for the Haavara agreement, the Zionists established their own Palestine Shipping Company, which bought the German passenger ship “Hohenstein,” formerly the former the Polynesia owned by the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The ship was renamed the “Tel Aviv” and sent to Palestine at the beginning of 1935, while flying the swastika. The captain of the ship, Leidig, was a registered member of the Nazi Party. Hitler, as is seen in a memorandum of the Political Trade Department of the Foreign Office, dated January 27, 1938, decided that the Haavara procedure should be maintained, despite the risk of losing the support of the Arabs against the British.[85]

During the early period of the Nazi domination in Germany, the Zionists held a direct line to its instruments of repression like the Gestapo and the SS. Before 1933, the Zionist official, Leo Plant, already “had a connection” with the head of the Gestap Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Hermann Göring. Plant apparently even had the secret telephone number he could call Diels anytime.[86] As Polkehn surmises, although the details of these contacts are kept secret at the Yad-Vashem archives in Jerusalem, “it is to be supposed that it was through these contacts that a meeting was arranged between the then Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring and the leaders of German Jewish organizations.”[87] The meeting took place on March 26, 1933, and included Kurt Blumenfeld, the secretary general of the ZVFD. Blumenfeld opposed the Anti-Nazi boycott saying “The boycott harms German Jews first and foremost. The boycott has no favorable results for us.”[88]

Blumenfeld was also a good friend of Martin Heidegger’s Jewish girlfriend Hannah Arendt. In 1929, Arendt married the Jewish philosopher Günther Stern, a fellow student of Heidegger, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. The ZVFD persuaded Arendt to use her access to the Prussian State Library to obtain evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in Prague. As this research was illegal at the time, Arendt and her mother were arrested by the Gestapo. They were released served eight days and fled to Paris, where Arendt befriended Stern’s cousin, Walter Benjamin and also the Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, who was a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre.[89]

The Zionists also rejected attempts to save the German Jews which did not have as their aim the settlement of the Jews in Palestine. When in 1933 a number of countries refused to take in Jewish refugees from Germany, the President Roosevelt called for a world conference on refugees to convene in the Swiss town of Evian, between June 6-15, 1938. The conference failed when the participants refused to take in Jewish refugees. Instead of raising objections, the Zionist leaders tabled a motion at the beginning of the conference calling for the admission of 1.2 million Jews into Palestine. They were not interested in other solutions and, as Christopher Sykes later commented: “'They looked on the whole thing with indifferent hostility from the very beginning… the truth of the matter was that what was being attempted in Evian in no way conformed with the idea of Zionism.”[90]

Revisionist Zionism

The Transfer Agreement was controversial both within the NSDAP and in the Zionist movement.[91] Opposition came in particular from the mainstream US leadership of the World Zionist Congress, in particular Abba Hillel Silver and American Jewish Congress president Rabbi Stephen Wise, who with other leaders of the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933 argued against the agreement, narrowly failing to persuade the Nineteenth Zionist Congress in August 1935 to vote against it. The Revisionist newspaper in Palestine, Hazit Haam published a sharp denunciation of those involved in the agreement as “betrayers,” and shortly afterwards one of the negotiators, Haim Arlosoroff was assassinated. The right-wing Revisionist Zionists and their leader Vladimir Jabotinsky were even more vocal in their opposition.

And yet, Jabotinsky, the then leader of the Revisionists, who maintained good relations with the Nazis, was also accused of attempting to seek a close relationship with Hitler’s Germany. Revisionist Zionism was the chief ideological competitor to the dominant socialist Labor Zionism. Jabotinsky advocated a “revision" of the “practical Zionism” of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann which was focused on individuals settling Palestine. Jabotinsky’s main demand was the creation of Greater Israel, which the Revisionists equated to the whole territory covered by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, including Transjordan. In 1935, after the Zionist Executive rejected Jabotinsky’s political program, Jabotinsky resigned from the World Zionist Organization. He founded the New Zionist Organization (NZO), known in Hebrew as Tzakh.

While the majority group in the Zionist movement, like the Labour Zionists, carefully camouflaged their contacts with the Nazis, and spoke out publicly against them, the right wing of Zionism, the Revisionists, the forerunners of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi and the later Herut party in Israel, had openly expressed their admiration on many occasions before 1933 for people like Hitler and Mussolini. For example, in a trial held in Jerusalem in 1932 when the lawyer Cohen, a member of the Revisionist party, declared in defending the perpetrators of outrages in the university : “Yes, we entertain great respect for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany. Without him it would have perished four years ago. And we would have gone along with Hitler if he had only given up his anti-Semitism.”[92] For a time, Mussolini had supported the Revisionists and permitted them to establish a school for training navy soldiers in Italy. In 1932, Jabotinsky made the proposal that the mandate over Palestine should be handed to Italy because Mussolini would be more amenable to furthering the cause of the Jewish state than the British.

The Revisionists were allowed to continue their political activities in Germany. In July 1933, the Zionist paper Davar published an article by David Ben-Gurion which contained a strong charge : “…Just after Hitler’s accession to power in Germany, when the persecutions of Jews and Marxists were at their height, Mr. Vladimir Jabotinsky arrived in Berlin and in a public address incited against Marxists and Communists in Zionism and in Palestine.”[93] Jabotinsky could also not dispute the fact that the Revisionist paper Hazit Haam, appearing in Palestine, “was allegedly treating this movement [NS] with a pronounced slant of sympathetic understanding. The editors of the paper… he was told, though aware of Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism, saw in National Socialism elements of a genuine movement of national liberation.”[94] Nonetheless, even The members of the Revisionist youth organization Brit Trumpeldor “was adapting itself to certain features of the Nazi regime,” and was the only non-NS organization in Germany to receive from the National Socialists the permission to wear uniform.[95]

In 1936, Jabotinsky prepared the so-called "evacuation plan", which called for the evacuation of 1.5 million Jews from Poland, Baltic States, Germany, Hungary and Romania to Palestine over the span of next ten years. The emigration would include 750,000 Jews from Poland, with 75,000 between age of 20-39 leaving the country each year. The same year he toured Eastern Europe, meeting with the Polish Foreign Minister, Colonel Józef Beck; the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy; and Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu of Romania to discuss the evacuation plan. In 1938–39, the scheme gained the support of the Polish government, which seemed to be ready to intervene with the British government and raise the problem of Jewish mass emigration at the League of Nations. However, Jewish public opinion overwhelmingly opposed the plan as playing into the hands of “antisemitic governments.”[96]

Judenreferat

According to Polkehn, evidence exists pointing to preparations then underway for cooperation between the Zionists in Palestine and the SS. At the end of World War II, the British and French set up a joint “Occupied Enemy Territory Administration” in what had been Ottoman Syria. The British obtained a mandate from the League of Nations in June 1922, allowing them to administer parts of the old Ottoman Empire, which had been in control of the Middle East since the sixteenth century, “until such time as they are able to stand alone.”[97] Under the mandate period, both Arab and Jewish nationalist movements arose that competed against each other and against the governing British authorities matured into the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 and the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, a paramilitary campaign carried out by Zionist terrorist groups against British. The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAI), the official governing body of Palestine’s Jewish community during the Mandate.

Not long after the Nazi seizure of power, Der Angriff by Joseph Goebbels, carried a travel report by Baron Leopold von Mildenstein, titled “A Nazi travels to Palestine,” which positively presented Zionist colonization of Palestine. Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.[98] Mildenstein remained in Palestine for a total of six months before returning to Germany as an ardent supporter of Zionism, and even began to study Hebrew.[99] 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 SD, in Section II/112, in charge of the Jewish Desk, with the title of Judenreferat (Office for Jewish Affairs, under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.[100] The Judenreferat which was in charge of Nazi policy towards the Jews until 1938, as formulated in the official organ of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps: “The time may not be far distant when Palestine once again receives the sons whom it lost a thousand years ago. Our wishes along with the good will of the stale accompany them.”[101] 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.[102]

Though the Zionist leaders who had “discreetly advised” Mildenstein during his trip to Palestine continued their contacts with the SS and SD, few details are known about these contacts, as the records are highly classified.[103] One of the few documents available is a memorandum by Professor Franz Six, dated June 17, 1937, which bears the classification “Secret Matter for the Command,” containing information about a visit to Berlin of Feivel Polkes, a commander of the Zionist underground army, the Haganah. SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Hagen, who succeeded Mildcnstein as director of the Judenreferat, claimed in his papers that Polkes held the “leadership of the whole self-defense apparatus of the Palestinian Jews.”[104]

Polkes stayed in Berlin from February 26 to March 2, 1937, holding several meetings with SD agents representing the Nazi regime, two of whom were with SS-Hauptscharfuhrcr Adolf Eichmann, who had by then taken up work at the Judenreferat. Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party in 1932. Eichmann was accepted into the SD in 1934 and assigned to the sub-office on Freemasons, organizing seized ritual objects for a proposed museum and creating a card index of German Freemasons and Masonic organizations. He prepared an anti-Masonic exhibition, which proved to be extremely popular. Visitors included Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Baron Leopold von Mildenstein.[105] Mildenstein invited Eichmann to join the Judenreferat at its Berlin headquarters.[106] Eichmann was assigned to study and prepare reports on the Zionist movement and various Jewish organizations. He even learned a smattering of Hebrew and Yiddish, gaining a reputation as a specialist in Zionist and Jewish matters.[107] Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer (head squad leader) in 1936 and was commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) the following year.

Here, Polkes offered to collaborate with the German regime telling Eichmann that he was interested above all in “accelerating Jewish immigration to Palestine, so that the Jews would attain a majority over the Arabs in his country. For this purpose, he worked together with the secret services of England and France and he also wanted to cooperate with Hitler's Germany.”[108] The SS immediately provided Polkes with the instructions put forth by Six: “Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country.” Six added: “Such a measure lies entirely in the German interest and it is already being put into effect by the Gestapo.”[109]

Polkes invited Eichmann to visit the Jewish colonies in Palestine. However, rather than admit the notorious murderer of the Jews was at one time invited as a guest of the Haganah, Zionist writers reversed the blame and claimed that the purpose of Eichmann’s trip was to make contact with the Palestinian rebels, or even to conspire with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, also known as “Hitler’s Mufti.” The inventor of this myth was the well-known Zionist Simon Wiesenthal.[110] A travel report found in SS-chief Heinrich Himmler’s secret archives reveal that Eiehmann and Hagen left Berlin on September 26, 1937, in the guise of editors of the Berliner Tageblatt. arriving in Haifa on October 2, 1937, on the ship Romania. As the British authorities refused them entry, they went on to Egypt where they met not with Al Husseini but with Polkes. Polkes then praised the results of the anti-Semitic terror in Germany: “Nationalist Jewish circles expressed their great joy over the radical German policy towards the Jews, as this policy would increase the Jewish population in Palestine, so that one can reckon with a Jewish majority in Palestine over the Arabs in the foreseeable future.”[111]

In Nazi occupied Vienna, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established and placed under Eichmann’s charge of Adolf. In the early summer of 1938, again in Vienna, Eichmann had met another emissary of the Mossad, Bar-Gilead, who requested permission to establish training camps for emigrants to prepare them for their work in Palestine. After passing on this request to the Nazi headquarters in Berlin, Eichmann granted permission and supplied all the requirements for the establishment of training camps. By the end of that year, around a thousand young Jews had been trained in these camps.[112]

Kastner train

An infamous example of Eichmann’s collaboration with Zionists was that with the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee (ARC), to make an exchange for a number of Jews destined for the gas chambers. From 1941, the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in Nazi terminology was administratively coordinated and organized in this Judenreferat, headed by Eichmann since 1939. Eichmann was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. On September 27, 1941, Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich on March 15, 1939, and assumed control of the territory. Upon his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance. Earlier on July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring gave written authorization to Heydrich to ensure the co-operation of various government departments in the implementation of a “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in territories under German control. The requirement to wear the Star of David with the word Jude was enforced on all Jews over the age of six in the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by a decree issued on September 1, 1941, signed by Heydrich and was gradually introduced in other German-occupied areas. On January 20, 1942, Heydrich chaired a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and SS leaders, now called the Wannsee Conference, to discuss the implementation of the plan.

The ARC was formed by Rudolf Kastner, along with Joel and Hansi Brand, Samuel Springmann, Ottó Komoly, a Budapest engineer, Ernő Szilágyi from the Hashomer Hatzair, and several others. Oskar Schindler, made famous with Steven Spielberg’s move Schindler’s List, became one of the committee’s contacts, smuggling letters and money into the Kraków ghetto on their behalf.[113] In 1935, Schindler joined the separatist Sudeten German Party, which with the rising power of Nazi Party in Germany became a major pro-Nazi force in Czechoslovakia. Although he was a citizen of Czechoslovakia, Schindler became a spy for the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany, in 1936. He was arrested by the Czech government for espionage on in 1938 and immediately imprisoned, but was released as a political prisoner under the terms of the Munich Agreement.[114]

Schindler continued to collect information for the Nazis, working in Poland in 1939 before the invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. In 1939, Schindler acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland, which employed at the factory's peak in 1944 about 1,750 workers, of whom 1,000 were Jews. His Abwehr connections helped Schindler protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. In 1943, Schindler was contacted via members of the Jewish resistance movement by Zionist leaders in Budapest. Schindler travelled there several times to report in person on Nazi mistreatment of the Jews. He brought back funding provided by the Jewish Agency for Israel and turned it over to the Jewish underground.[115] During a visit by Schindler to Budapest in November 1943, the ARC learned that he had been bribing Nazi officers to let him bring Jewish refugees into his factory in Poland, which he was running as a safe haven. This further encouraged the ARC to try negotiating with the SS after the invasion of Hungary.[116]

When the Germans invaded Hungary on Sunday, March 19, 1944, they were accompanied by Eichmann. Wanting to establish contact with the Nazis, the ARC made contact with SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann’s assistants, and a key executioner in the final phase of the Holocaust. During implementation of the Final Solution, his task was the ghettoization and liquidation of several important Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, including those of Greece, Hungary and Slovakia. Following the contact with Wisliceny, Brand received an offer on April 25 from Eichmann to sell him one million Jews, not for money, but for goods from overseas.[117] When Brand asked how the committee was supposed to obtain these goods, Eichmann suggested that he open negotiations with the Allies. Another member of the ARC had a contact in Istanbul with the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAI), so Brand suggested he would travel there. The JAI was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO).  David Ben-Gurion served as the Chairman of its Executive Committee from 1935, and in this capacity on May 14, 1948 he proclaimed independence for the State of Israel. Ladislaus Löb writes that proposals and counter-proposals were exchanged between Istanbul, London and Washington. The JAI and Brand wanted the Allies to string the Germans along in the hope of slowing the deportations.[118]

In Istanbul, Brand was told that Moshe Sharett (1894 – 1965) of JAI was unable to obtain a visa for Turkey. Sharett would become the second Prime Minister of Israel (1954–55), serving for a little under two years between David Ben-Gurion's two terms. The JAI asked Brand to meet Sharett instead in Aleppo. While on the train, Brand was approached by two representatives of Zeev Jabotinsky’s party and the World Agudath Israel Orthodox religious party, who warned him the British were going to arrest him in Aleppo.[119] The British did arrest him, and Brand was taken to Cairo, where he was interrogated for weeks.

The British, Americans and Soviets discussed the proposal. British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister Anthony Eden wrote a memo on June 26 outlining the options. The British were convinced they were dealing with a Himmler ruse, and that Brand’s mission was a “smokescreen” for the Nazis to broker a peace deal without the Soviet Union.[120] On July 11, Prime Minister Winston Churchill put an end to the idea when he wrote of Brand’s mission: “The project which has been put forward through a very doubtful channel seems itself also to be of the most nondescript character. I would not take it seriously.”[121] The British leaked details of Eichmann’s proposal to the media.

Germany’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had apparently known nothing about the proposal. He cabled Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer of the SS to ask about it, and was told that Brand had been sent to Turkey on Himmler’s orders. Eichmann himself said during interrogation after the war that the order had come from Himmler, as did SS officer Kurt Becher, who was appointed Commissar of all German concentration camps, and Chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary, by Himmler. According to Becher, “Himmler said to me: ‘Take whatever you can from the Jews. Promise them whatever you want. What we will keep is another matter.’”[122]

Brand’s failure to return to Budapest was a disaster for the Aid and Rescue Committee. Kastner wrote that on June 9 Eichmann warned him: “If I do not receive a positive reply within three days, I shall operate the mill at Auschwitz.”[123] The order from Berlin had stated: “Deportations will continue in the meanwhile and will not be stopped until Joel Brand returns with a statement to the effect that these matters have been accepted by the Jewish organizations abroad.”[124] Despite the setbacks, Kastner, Hansi Brand and the rest of the ARC secured the release of around 1,684 Jews who were allowed to leave Budapest for Switzerland on 30 June 1944 on what came to be known as the “Kastner train.” Three suitcases of cash, jewels, gold, and shares of stock, amounting to about $1,000 per person were paid to Becher in ransom.[125] After an unexplained detour to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the passengers arrived in Switzerland in two batches in August and December 1944.

The agreement entailed the condition that silence was maintained about the fate of the remaining Hungarian Jews. Kastner moved to Israel after the war, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952. In 1953 he was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator in a pamphlet self-published by Malchiel Gruenwald, a freelance writer. The Israeli government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kastner’s behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted 18 months, and a ruling in 1955 that Kastner had, in the words of Judge Benjamin Halevy, “sold his soul to the devil.”[126] By saving the Jews on the “Kastner train,” while failing to warn others that their “resettlement” was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, Kastner had sacrificed the mass of Jews for a chosen few, the judge said. The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet.[127]

The allegation against Kastner stemmed from his relationship with Eichmann and SS General Kurt Becher (1909 – 1995, and from his having given positive character references after the war for Becher and two other SS officers, thus allowing Becher to escape prosecution for war crimes. Becher was one of the leading negotiators of the deal with the Zionists.[128] After the war, Becher became a prosperous businessman in Bremen. He was the president of many corporations, including the Cologne-Handel Gesellschaft, which did extensive business with the Israeli government.[129] By 1960, he was one of the wealthiest men in West Germany, with estimated assets of US $30 million.[130] He came to public attention once again in 1961 when he served as a witness for the prosecution during the trial in Jerusalem of SS officer Adolf Eichmann.

Nazi Doctors

Hans Eppinger Jr. (1879 – 1946) was an Austrian physician of Jewish descent who performed experiments upon concentration camp prisoners. Eppinger was an internationally known specialist who was sought out by Stalin and the Shah of Iran. Eppinger researched artificially induced states of shock, conducted in cooperation with the Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic under Otto Pötzl (1877 – 1962, one of the most important representatives of the Viennese medical school.[131] One of his lectures at Vienna University led Freud to invite Pötzl to attend the sessions of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.[132] Pötzl joined the society and remained a member until 1933, three years after he had joined the Nazi Party.[133] Eppinger experimented on patients with heart conditions by artificially inducing increase heart rates in order to perform certain tests, where at least two patients were killed.[134] Along with professor Wilhelm Beiglböck, a member of the SA, he performed tests on 90 Romani prisoners at Dachau by providing them sea water as their only source of fluids. Witnesses reported that they had been seen licking the floors they had mopped in an attempt to get some water. The goal of the experiment was to determine if the prisoners would suffer severe physical symptoms or death within a period of 6-12 days.[135] Eppinger discovered that death from dehydration resembles high-speed kidney failure.[136] After the war, Eppinger committed suicide a month before he was to be called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.

Eppinger’s assistant was Erwin Risak (1899 – 1968), of Vienna university’s Medical Clinic III, which under Franz Chvostek (1864 – 1944), this clinic became known as a hotbed of Pan-German nationalist and Nazi agitation. Following the Anschluss, Risak became one of the figureheads of the Nazi Party in the Vienna Medical Faculty, along with figures such as Hamburger, Franz Hamburger, a fervent Nazi ideologue, and the anatomist Eduard Pernkopf (1888 – 1955), a member of the SA. Adolf Hitler awarded Hamburger the Goethe Medal for Art and Science in 1944. Among Hamburger’s recruits was Erwin Jekelius, who later became responsible for the deaths of thousands of psychiatric patients and mentally disabled children. After the outbreak of World War II, Jekelius was drafted into the Wehrmacht through his intimate relationship with Hitler’s sister Paula. Paula asked Hitler for permission to marry Jekelius but he declined.[137]

Jekelius became director of the Spiegelgrund child “euthanasia” clinic and coordinator of the “Aktion T4,” a postwar name for mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. In October 1939, Hitler signed a “euthanasia note,” which authorised his physician, SS officer Karl Brandt (1904 – 1948), and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, to implement the program. The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945. From 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic.[138] Technology developed under Aktion T4 was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, particularly the use of lethal gas to kill large numbers of people, along with the personnel of Aktion T4, who participated in Operation Reinhard, the codename of the secretive German plan in World War II to exterminate Jewish Poles in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland.[139] The charges against Brandt at Nuremberg included special responsibility for, and participation in, Freezing, Malaria, LOST Gas, Sulfanilamide, Bone, Muscle and Nerve Regeneration and Bone Transplantation, Sea-Water, Epidemic Jaundice, Sterilization, and Typhus Experiments.[140]

Risak co-authored a paper with Jekelius’ colleague, Hans Asperger (1906–1980), one of the pioneers in the history of autism and as the namesake of Asperger’s syndrome. According to Herwig Czech, “Although Asperger did not join the Nazis, due to his Pan-Germanic, völkisch orientation, he shared considerable ideological common ground with Hamburger and his network, allowing him to blend in without apparent frictions.”[141] In a Different Key, John Donvan and Caren Zucker reported that in his first public lecture on autism in 1938, Asperger enthusiastically signed letters “Heil Hitler!” Asperger signed a letter of referral effectively condemning a little girl with encephalitis named Herta Schreiber to death in Jekelius’ rehab facility.

Eretz Israel

In its early years, under Jabotinsky’s leadership, Revisionist Zionism was focused on gaining support from Britain for settlement. Later, Revisionist groups independent of Jabotinsky’s direction conducted campaigns of Zionist political violence against the British to drive them out of Mandatory Palestine to establish a Jewish state. Though World War II brought relative calm, the tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat. Opposition to the British intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939, which outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. The Haganah remained cooperative with the British. But the Irgun and Lehi, which split from the Haganah, two small, dissident militias of the right-wing Revisionist movement, launched a rebellion against British rule in 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Lehi, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was founded in August 1940 by Avraham Stern, a former member of the Irgun, which was based on the was based on what was the Revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky. It was initially called the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization, NMO). The Irgun and Stern Gang, later called Lehi, attacked police and government targets but intentionally avoided military ones, to ensure that they would not hinder the British war effort against the Nazis.

On January 11, 1941, Stern proposed a formal military pact between the Irgun and the Nazi Third Reich. The offer, which is contained in a report known as the Ankara document, which is still kept in a locked archive in Britain, tells of contacts the Naval attaché at the German Embassy in Turkey had with emissaries of the Irgun:

The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the drawing up of the New Order in Europe, already in its preparatory stage, would be connected with a positively radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would strengthen to an uncommon degree the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of the entire world.

The cooperation of the Israeli freedom movement would also be in line with one of the recent speeches of the German Reich Chancellor in which Hcrr Hitler stressed that any combination and any alliance would be entered into in order to isolate England and defeat it.[142]

The anti-Semitism and the extermination of European Jews that had already begun prevented Nazis from accepting offer of alliance. But two years later, the lrgun was embarking on terrorist raids against British institutions in the Near East. The leader of the Irgun from 1943 to 1948 was Menachem Begin (1913 – 1992), future Prime Minster of Israel. Begin studied law at the University of Warsaw, and became a disciple of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and joined Betar, the youth wing of the Revisionist Zionism movement. In September 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, in common with a large part of Warsaw’s Jewish leadership, Begin escaped to Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), then eastern Poland, to avoid inevitable arrest. Wilno was soon occupied by the Soviet Union and Begin was arrested by the NKVD, having been accused of being an “agent of British imperialism” and sentenced to eight years in the Soviet gulag. In July 1941, just after Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and following his release under the Sikorski–Mayski agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland, Begin joined the Free Polish Anders’ Army as a corporal officer cadet. He was later sent with the army when it was evacuated to Palestine, where he arrived in May 1942.

The Irgun sought to end British rule by assassinating police, capturing British government buildings and arms, and sabotaging British railways. Starting from the assassination of Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne in 1944, the highest-ranking British official in the region, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as The Hunting Season. Moyne’s daughter-in-law was Diana Mitford, who was first married to his son Brian before leaving him to marry to the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, in 1936 in Berlin, with Hitler and Goebbels as witnesses. From the outbreak of war in 1939, Moyne sought Diana’s internment. File No KV 2/1363 at the PRO, Kew, part of a collection released in 2004, notes that “Diana Mosley was not interned on the outbreak of war, and remained at liberty for some time. There is a Home Office letter of May 1940 explaining the Home Secretary's decision not to intern her at that time, and then correspondence from her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, which seems to have resulted in her detention the following month.”

Moyne had opposed the establishment of specifically Jewish army units in the Middle East, “partly to avoid offending Arab sensibilities.”[143] Although dismissed by Bruce Hoffman as a canard, Lehi apologists hold that Moyne was personally responsible for the deaths of a million Hungarian Jews.[144] Joel Brand of the ARC had reported that during one of the interrogations an Englishman he did not know had asked him about Eichmann’s proposal, then replied “What can I do with a million Jews? Where can I put them?” Brand was later told the man was Lord Moyne. The British released Brand in October 1944, about one month before Moyne's assassination, after which he joined the group Lehi which would commit the assassination.[145] Yitzhak Shamir, a prominent leader of the Irgun, claimed later that Moyne was assassinated because of his support for a Middle Eastern Arab Federation and anti-Semitic lectures in which Arabs were held to be racially superior to Jews. The assassination rocked the British government, and outraged this friend Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister.[146]

The Haganah initially cooperated with the British in suppressing the Irgun. However, After World War II, in August 1945 President Truman asked for the admission of 100,000 Holocaust survivors into Palestine but the British maintained limits on Jewish immigration in line with the 1939 White Paper. The Jewish community rejected the restriction on immigration and organized an armed resistance. The Haganah joined with the Irgun and Lehi in a rebellion which expanded to attacking military targets. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement. The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets. The Haganah attempted to bring Jewish Holocaust survivors to Palestine in a program called Aliyah Bet in which tens of thousands of Jewish refugees attempted enter Palestine by ship. Most of the ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy and the refugees rounded up and placed in detention camps in Atlit and Cyprus by the British.

Irgun’s most notorious attack was the July 22, 1946, bombing Irgun attacked the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, which was housed in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion had agreed that the Haganah could cooperate with Begin’s Irgun in fighting the British, who continued to restrict Jewish immigration. Ben-Gurion initially agreed to Begin’s plan to carry out the King David Hotel bombing, with the intent of embarrassing the British military stationed there rather than killing them. However, when the risks of mass killing became apparent, Ben-Gurion told Begin to call the operation off. Begin refused, and carried out the attack as planned.[147] A total of 91 people of various nationalities were killed and 46 were injured. It was characterized as one of the “most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century.”[148]

The insurgency lasted until the eruption of the 1947–1948 civil war. It broke out after the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution on November 29, 1947, recommending the adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine. British efforts to mediate a negotiated peace between Jews and Arabs had failed as the Jews were unwilling to accept any solution that did not involve a Jewish state and suggested a partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, while the Arabs were adamant that a Jewish state in any part of Palestine was unacceptable and that the only solution was a unified Palestine under Arab rule. In February 1947, the British referred the Palestine issue to the newly formed United Nations. On May 15, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations resolved that the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCP) be created “to prepare for consideration at the next regular session of the Assembly a report on the question of Palestine.”[149]

The Jewish Agency pressed for Jewish representation and the exclusion of both Britain and Arab countries on the Committee, sought visits to camps where Holocaust survivors were interned in Europe as part of UNSCOP’s brief, and in May won representation on the Political Committee.[150] While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council cooperated with UNSCOP in its deliberations, the Arab Higher Committee charged UNSCOP with being pro-Zionist, and decided to boycott it. UNSCOP officials clandestinely met with members of the high command of the Haganah, the main Jewish underground militia. The Haganah officials who attended the meeting, Yisrael Galili, Yigael Yadin, Yosef Avidar, and Ehud Avriel, insisted that the Haganah could repel any Arab attack, including by the surrounding Arab states. UNSCOP also met with Irgun commander Menachem Begin along with Irgun high command members Haim Landau and Shmuel Katz, while in the second meeting they met with Begin and Irgun official Meir Cahan.[151] Jewish Agency representatives such as David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and Abba Eban testified, along with Chaim Weizmann, argued for a Jewish state in Palestine and accepted the principle of partition. In August, after three months of conducting hearings and a general survey of the situation in Palestine, UNSCOP recommended that the region be partitioned into an Arab state and a Jewish state, which should retain an economic union. An international regime was envisioned for Jerusalem.

On May 14, 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” The following day, the armies of four Arab countries—Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq—entered what had been British Mandatory Palestine, launching the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. This led to the establishment of the 1949 cease-fire agreement, with partition of the former Mandatory Palestine between the newborn state of Israel with a Jewish majority, the Arab West Bank annexed by the Jordanian Kingdom and the Arab All-Palestine Protectorate in the Gaza Strip under Egypt. As a result of the war, the State of Israel controlled the area that UN General Assembly Resolution 181 had recommended for the proposed Jewish state, as well as almost 60-percent of the area of Arab state proposed by the 1947 Partition Plan. Israel was admitted as a member of the UN by majority vote on 11 May 1949.

The declaration of independence was followed by the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and the process of absorbing all military organizations into the IDF started. An agreement had been signed between Menachem Begin and Yisrael Galili for the absorption of the Irgun into the IDF. The Irgun had fought the in 1947–48 Civil War and its chief Begin was described as “leader of the notorious terrorist organisation” by British government and banned from entering United Kingdom.[152] In November 1948, when Begin visited the US on a campaigning trip, a letter signed by Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and other prominent Americans and several rabbis was published which described Begin’s Herut party as a terrorist, right-wing organization “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” and accused his group and the Stern Gang of preaching “racial superiority” and having “inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community.”[153] Rabbi Stephen Wise denounced the movement as, “Fascism in Yiddish or Hebrew.”[154] Begin later transformed the Irgun into the political party which later became part of the right-wing Likud, later led by Yitzhak Shamir.

On September 14, 1952, Reuben Shiloach, the first head of Mossad, retired, leaving the organization in the hands of the 40-year-old Isser Harel, who became one the most famous Israeli spymasters. Harel recruited a large number of former Irgun and Stern Gang members, including Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister. Under Harel, Shamir became Mossad’s chief of European operations, a position he held for ten years. Harel became one of Israel’s most powerful figures, heading Mossad and Shin Bet and becoming chairman of the secret services’ co-ordinating committee. Harel continued to pursue Shiloach’s dream of a “peripheral alliance” between Israel and potential non-Arab allies in the Middle East. In 1957, he became friends with the first head of Iran’s notorious intelligence agency, Savak, and later prime minister, Taimur Bakhtiar. A year later, he formed the Trident network with Savak and Turkey’s National Security Services as “a dam to stop the Nasser-Soviet flood.” He also armed and trained Iraqi Kurds, and built bases and airfields in Turkey and Ethiopia, under the cover of the fictitious CIA-funded Reynolds Concrete Company.[155]

Harel personally commanded some of Mossad’s most famous operations, the abduction from Argentina of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, who was subsequently found guilty of war crimes in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem, where he was executed by hanging in 1962. As Polkehn noted, given the extent of the collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, “one reason why the Israeli government was so anxious about holding the trial of Eichmann in Israel and in no other place becomes clear; only in Israel could Zionist contacts with the Nazis be kept out of public view.”[156] Advancing the narrative, Hannah Arendt would later write Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Arendt’s subtitle famously introduced the phrase “the banality of evil.” In part, the phrase refers to Eichmann’s deportment at the trial as he displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job.”

[1] “Ben-Gurion Demands Abolition of 300-year Ban on Spinoza.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (December 28, 1953).

[2] David Ben-Gurion. “Ben-gurion Foresees Gradual Democratization of the Soviet Union.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (January 4, 1962).

[3] Cesare G. De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 47.

[4] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Vol. 1, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, p. 83-84

[5] “They Say.” The Jewish Transcript, Seattle, (December 15, 1933).

[6] Abraham G. Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and From Jewishness to Polishness,” Jewish Social Studies, 25: 4 (1963: Oct) p. 301.

[7] Benyamin Matuvo. “The Zionist Wish and the Nazi Deed.” Issues (Winter 1966/7), p. 9; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.

[8] Chaim Weizmann to Ahad Ha’am, in Leonard Stein (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. VII, p. 81; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.

[9] Meyer Weisgal (ed.). The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. VII, p. 81; cited in Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 37.

[10] Cited in Faris Yahya. Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p.53.

[11] Edwin Black. The transfer Agreement (Dialog Press, 1983), p. 359–360.

[12] Edwin Black. The transfer Agreement (Dialog Press, 1983), p. 359–360.

[13] David Ben-Gurion. Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (New York, 1954), p, 41.

[14] Lenni Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983), p.149.

[15] Ibid, p.149.

[16] Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943.

[17] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 153.

[18] Samson Raphael Hirsch. Religion Allied to Progress, in JMW. p. 198; Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. Judaism: History, Belief, and Practice (Routledge, 2004). p. 264.

[19] Zionism and Herzl: The Antisemitic Side of Zionism.

[20] Dan Stone. The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). p. 18.

[21] Alex Grobman. Battling for Souls: The Vaad Hatzala Rescue Committee In Post-holocaust Europe (KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2004). p. 23

[22] Antony Lerman. “Jewish Self-Hatred: Myth or Reality?” Jewish Quarterly (Summer 2008).

[23] Derek J. Penslar. Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale University Press, 2020).

[24] Penslar. Theodor Herzl, p. 114).

[25] Theodor Herzl. “Mauschel.” In Zohn, Harry (ed.). Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses. Vol. 1. (Herzl Press, (1973), pp. 163–164.

[26] Ibid., pp. 164, 168.

[27] Scott Ury. “Strange Bedfellows? Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Fate of "the Jews’.” American Historical Review, 123, 4 (October 2018), p. 1157.

[28] Michael Burri. “Theodor Herzl and Richard von Schaukal: Self-Styled Nobility and the Sources of Bourgeois Belligerence in Prewar Vienna.” Austrian History Yearbook, XXVIII (1997), p. 241.

[29] Annie Levin. “The hidden history of Zionism.” International Socialist Review, 24 (July–August 2002). Retrieved from https://isreview.org/issues/24/hidden_history/

[30] Arthur Hertzberg. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997), p. 213 and p. 222.

[31] Annie Levin. “The hidden history of Zionism.” International Socialist Review, 24 (July–August 2002). Retrieved from https://isreview.org/issues/24/hidden_history/

[32] David A. Brenner. “Promoting East European Jewry: Ost und West, Ethnic Identity, and the German Jewish Audience.” Prooftexts, 15:1 (January 1995), pp. 63–88., pp. 63–88, 63–64, 67.

[33] Joachim Doron. “Social concepts prevalent in German Zionism: 1883–1914.” Studies in Zionism, 3:1 (1982), p. 4.

[34] Joachim Doron. “Social concepts prevalent in German Zionism: 1883–1914.” Studies in Zionism, 3:1 (1982), pp. 1–3.

[35] Noah Efron. Real Jews: Secular Versus Ultra-Orthodox: The Struggle For Jewish Identity In Israel (Basic Books, 2003), p. 259.

[36] Paul Reitter. The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 79.

[37] Joachim Doron. “Classic zionism and modern anti-semitism: Parallels and influences (1883-1914).” Studies in Zionism, 4:2 (1983), p. 169.

[38] Jean Robin. Hitler: L’Elu du Dragon Rouge (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1987) p. 45.

[39] Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 331.

[40] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 188.

[41] Mungo Melvin. Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010), pp. 432-434.

[42] Ronald Smelser & Edward Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 98.

[43] Mungo Melvin. Manstein: Hitler’s Greatest General (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010), p. 243.

[44] Peter Hoffmann. Hitler’s Personal Security: Protecting the Führer 1921–1945 (Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 50.

[45] Ibid., pp. 50, 51.

[46] Anita Bunyan. “Half-shadows of the Reich.” Times Higher Education (March 21, 2003).

[47] P. Kaplan. Fighter Aces of the RAF in the Battle of Britain (Pen and Sword, 2008), p132.

[48] Ian Kershaw. Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1998), p. 241.

[49] Joseph Howard Tyson. The Surreal Reich (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2010), p. 430.

[50] Kershaw. Hitler 1889-1936, p. 241.

[51] Esler Gavin. “The Good Goering.” Seriously. BBC. Radio 4 (January 27, 2016).

[52] William Hastings Burke. “Albert Göring, Hermann's anti-Nazi brother.” The Guardian (February 20, 2010).

[53] Ibid.

[54] Morris Freedman. Fact and Object (Harper & Row, 1963). p. 67.

[55] Adrian Weale. Renegades: Hitler's Englishmen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2nd edition, 2014).

[56] “Astonishing Politician, Astonishing Failure.” Human Events (September 28, 2006). Retrieved from http://humanevents.com/2006/09/28/astonishing-politician-astonishing-failure/

[57] Mario R. Dederichs. Heydrich: The Face of Evil (Drexel Hill, PA: Casemate, 2009), p. 92.

[58] Shlomo Aronson. Reinhard Heydrich und die Anfänge des SD und der Gestapo 1931-1935 (Berlin, 1966); Cited in Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 187.

[59] Paul Manning. Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile (Lyle Stuart Inc., 1981), pp. 159.

[60] "Reinhard Heydrich.” Auschwitz.dk. 20 January 1942. Retrieved from http://www.auschwitz.dk/Canaris/id3.htm

[61] Robert Gerwarth. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 61.

[62] Max Williams. Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography, Volume 1—Road To War (Church Stretton: Ulric Publishing, 2001), p. 38.

[63] Gerwarth. Hitler's Hangman, p. 61.

[64] Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 3.

[65] Joseph Gorny. The British Labour Movement and Zionism: 1917–1948 (London: Frank Cass), Ch.1.

[66] Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 60.

[67] Ibid., p. 3.

[68] Ibid., p. 26.

[69] David Ben-Gurion, “Reply to the Critics at the Third Ahdut Ha’avoda Convention” (in Hebrew), Kuntras 6, no. 119 (19 January 1923), p. 29; cited in Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 21.

[70] J. Boas. “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1984), pp. 3-25.

[71] Cited in Hans Lamm. Über die innere und aussere Entwicklung des Deutschen Judentums im Dritten Reich (inaugural dissertation, Philosophische Fakultat der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, 1951, p. 161.

[72] Ibid.

[73] Ibid., p. 156.

[74] Reichsgesetzblatt, Part I, No. 1 18/1939, pp. 1097 ff.

[75] Wiiifricd Martini. “Hitler und die Juden.” Christ und Welt (Stuttgart, June 16, 1961).

[76] Alfred Rosenberg. Die Spur des Juden im Wondel der Zeiten (Munich, 1937), p. 153.

[77] Jacob Boas. “A Nazi Travels to Palestine.” History Today, Vol. 30, Issue 1 (1980), pp. 33-38.

[78] Ernst Herzfeld. Meine letzten Jahre in Deutschland, 1933-1938 (1945), in: Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, p. 32.

[79] Boas. “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1935.”.

[80] Weiss, Yf’aat. “The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust.” Yad Va’shem Shoa Journal. Shoah Resource Center: 33.

[81] Klaus Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (Spring/Summer, 1976), pp. 77.

[82] Ibid., pp. 67.

[83] Joseph Howard Tyson. The Surreal Reich (iUniverse, 2010), p. 429.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” pp. 68.

[86] Kurt-Jacob Ball-Kaduri. Life of the Jews in Germany in 1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), p. 118.

[87] Klaus Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 70.

[88] Yf'aat Weiss. Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies 33/. The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust (PDF). Yad Vashem Studies. Retrieved from https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf

[89] Dana Villa. Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton University Press, 1996), p. xiv.

[90] Christopher Sykes. Crossroads to Israel (London. 195), p. 81.

[91] Edwin Black “COULD WE HAVE STOPPED HITLER? Could American Jews have acted sooner and done more to save European.” Reform Judaism (Fall 1999).

[92] Die Weltbühne (Berlin, May 31, 1932); cited in Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 77.

[93] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 77.

[94] Ibid., p. 77.

[95] Ibid., p. 78.

[96] Ya’akov Shavit & Joseph B. Schechtman. Encyclopaedia Judaica. (2008 The Gale Group).

[97] “The Covenant of the League of Nations and ‘Mandate for Palestine’.” Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 11, p. 862.

[98] Ralph Shoenmann. The Hidden History of Zionism (Santa Barbara: Veritas Press, 1988).

[99] Brenner. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.

[100] Max Williams. Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography, Volume 1 (2001), p 61.

[101] Das Schwarze Korps (Berlin, May 15, 1935).

[102] Francis R. Nicosia. The Third Reich & the Palestine Question (2000), p. 61.

[103] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 71.

[104] RFSS film roll 411; cited in Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 72.

[105] Robert Cooper. The Red Triangle: A History of Anti-Masonry (Hersham, Surrey: Lewis Masonic, 2011), pp. 83–85.

[106] Peter Padfield. Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Cassel & Co., 2001), p. 198.

[107] David Cesarani. Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Vintage, 2005), pp. 47-49.

[108] Cited in Heine Höhne. Der Orden unter den Totenkopf (Gutersloh, 1967), p. 309.

[109] Memorandum by Six in RFSS film roll 411; cited in Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 72.

[110] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 73.

[111] Ibid., p. 75.

[112] Ibid., p. 76.

[113] Joel Brand & Alex Weissberg. Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand (London: Andre Deutsch, 1958), pp. 41–42; David M. Crowe. Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story behind the List (New York: Basic Book, 2007), p. 295.

[114] Crowe. Oskar Schindler, pp. 40–41.

[115] Ibid., p. 151.

[116] Ladislaus Löb. Rezso Kasztner. The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews: A Survivor’s Account (London: Pimlico, 2009), pp. 54-56.

[117] Brand & Weissberg. Advocate for the Dead, p. 85.

[118] Löb. Rezso Kasztner, p. 67.

[119] Brand & Weissberg. Advocate for the Dead, pp. 136–137

[120] Michael J. Cohen. Churchill and the Jews, 1900–1948 (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 292; Yehuda Bauer. Jews for Sale: Nazi–Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 170.

[121] Churchill, minute to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, 11 July 1944, in FO 371/42809/115, and in Prem 4/51/10, National Archives, London.

[122] Yehuda Bauer. Jews for Sale: Nazi–Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 167, 192.

[123] Hansi Brand (May 30, 1961). “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Testimony of Hansi Brand, session 58.” Nizkor Project. p. 1/5.

[124] Testimony of Adolf Eichmann, Trial of Adolf Eichmann, session 86, part 3/5, 5 July 1961.

[125] Bauer. Jews for Sale, pp. 197-199.

[126] “On Trial.” Time (July 11, 1955).

[127] “Israel: Exoneration of Dr. Kastner.” Time (January 27, 1958).

[128] Ralph Shoenmann. The Hidden History of Zionism (Santa Barbara: Veritas Press, 1988).

[129] Ben Hecht. Perfidy (Milah Press, 1999), pp. 67-68, p. 84.

[130] Hecht. Perfidy, p. 259, n. 48.

[131] Paul Weindling (ed.). From Clinic to Concentration Camp: Reassessing Nazi Medical and Racial (Routledge, 2017).

[132] Ernest Jones. Sigmund Freud. Life and work (London: Hogarth, (1953-1957).

[133] Ernst Klee. The encyclopedia of the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945, 2nd edition (Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007), p. 467.

[134] Weindling (ed.). From Clinic to Concentration Camp.

[135] Eugene Straus. Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel Laureate: A Biographical Memoir (Basic Books, 1998), p. 221.

[136] Richard Stockton. “Did Nazi Research Actually Contribute Anything Valuable To Medical Science?” All That Interesting (February 25, 2016). Retrieved from https://allthatsinteresting.com/nazi-research/2

[137] Guido Knopp. Geheimnisse des “Dritten Reichs” (C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 2011).

[138] P. Longerich. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 477.

[139] R. J. Lifton. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 102.

[140] National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, 15 vols. See vol 1 and 2, Karl Brandt: The Medical Case (Washington DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1951-1952).

[141] Herwig Czech. “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna.” Molecular Autism 9, 29 (2018).

[142] Ibid.

[143] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 24. p. 215.

[144] Bruce Hoffman. Anonymous Soldiers: the struggle for Israel,1917-1947 ( Knopf, 2015), p. 196.

[145] Yehuda Bauer. Jews for Sale? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 194.

[146] Yitzhak Shamir. “Why the Lehi Assassinated Lord Moyne.” Nation, 32/119 (1995) pp. 333–37; cited in Perliger & Weinberg, 2003, p. 111.

[147] Paul Johnson. A History of the Jews, p. 523.

[148] Bruce Hoffman. Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 48–52

[149] “A/RES/106 (S-1).” General Assembly resolution. United Nations. May 15, 1947.

[150] Daniel Mandel. H V Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, 2004), pp.73, 81.

[151] Robert D. Kumamoto. International Terrorism & American Foreign Relations, 1945-1976 (1999).

[152] Amir Oren. “British Documents Reveal: Begin Refused Entry to U.K. in 1950s.” Haaretz (July 7, 2011).

[153] Alfred M. Lilienthal. The Zionist Connection, What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1978), pp. 350–3.

[154] Robert N. Rosen. Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), p. 318.

[155] “Israeli spy who snared Eichmann.” Sydney Morning Herald (April 15, 2003).

[156] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 73.

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union