45. Degenerate Art

Torquemada Principle

In 1930, Theodor Lessing—a friend of Ludwig Klages of the Cosmic Circle, and who had studied under Edmund Husserl—published Der jüdische Selbsthaß, his classic on Jewish self-hatred, published in 1930 by Jüdische Verlag, the Zionist publisher established in 1901 by a group that included Chaim Weizmann and Martin Buber, shortly before the fifth Zionist Congress. Lessing, who dedicated several writings to Nietzsche’s philosophy, tried to understand the phenomenon using the Nietzschean concepts of Verinnerlichung (“internalization”) and ressentiment, a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement.[1] In the book, written three years before Hitler came to power, Lessing tried to explain the phenomenon of Jewish intellectuals who incited anti-Semitism against the Jewish people and who regarded Judaism as the source of evil in the world. As examples of Jewish self-haters, Lessing listed Nietzsche’s friend Paul Rée, as well as Otto Weininger and Arthur Trebitsch, who were both admired by the founders of the Thule Society, which gave rise to the Nazis.

In “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938,” Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor Jacob Boas noted, “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’.”[2] By preferring the race-minded, emigration-focused Zionists to the “assimilationists,” whom they regarded as bent on destroying National Socialism, powerful Nazis like Heydrich backed Zionist attempts to gain ascendency over the Jewish community of Germany, echoing the official SS position that the activities of Zionists should be encouraged, at the expense of the non-Zionists who were to be discouraged.[3] According to Heydrich:

We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish state… our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them.[4]

Astounding is the fact that numerous Nazis were of Jewish origin—reflecting the anti-Semitic tendencies of the Frankists—even, by some accounts, Hitler himself. Such a claim was asserted in The Torquemada Principle (1976), by Jerrold Morgulas, where Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942)—a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust—comes into possession of a confidential file named “Torquemada,” which hides the secret that Hitler had Jewish ancestry. The name “Torquemada” was in reference to Thomas of Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, who despite his own Jewish heritage, was responsible for the persecution of Jews. Likewise, the psychological torment of self-hatred that would have burdened Hitler produced the insanity that resulted in so many barbarities. The novel follows the efforts of a journalist, a historian, and a CIA agent to find the file and reveal the truth, while being pursued by ruthless enemies who want to destroy it.

According to Jean Robin, there are reports that Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the racist theories of the Nazis, known as Ariosophy, was also a member of the Asiatic Brethren.[5] 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.”[6]

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.

Other Nazis with Sabbatean ancestry included general Erich von Manstein (1887 – 1973), whose original name was Manstein von Lewinski, as well as SS war criminal Ernst Biberstein, whose real name was Szymanowski.[7] 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. Biberstein, who was a defendant at the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg, gave testimony 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.[8] Biberstein 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. 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.[9] 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.[10]

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.[11] In 1935, an investigation that followed rumors that his father was a Jew was halted by Göring, who produced an affidavit by Milch’s mother that his true father was her uncle Karl Brauer, who admitted not only to adultery but also incest. Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate.[12] 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, American High Commissioner of Germany, to 15 years of imprisonment in 1951.

Blond Beast

Theodor Fritsch, among the founders of the Thule Society, was on the advisory board of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (“German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation”), the largest and the most active antisemitic federation in Germany after World War I, and an organization that formed a significant part of the völkisch movement during the Weimar Republic. The Trutzbund merged with Fritsch’s Reichshammerbund and with the Deutschvölkischer Bund, the organization that had succeeded the Deutschvölkische Partei. The Trutzbund’s publishing arm issued books that greatly influenced the opinions of Nazi Party leaders such Himmler.[13] After the organization folded in around 1924, many of its members eventually joined the Nazis, among whom was Reinhard Heydrich—a secret Sabbatean, and author of the Final Solution.[14]

Heydrich was described by Swiss diplomat and historian Carl Jacob Burckhardt was a “young, evil god of death,” after meeting him, and he was sometimes called by his subordinates, “the Blond Beast.” According to Hitler’s Biographer Joachim Fest:

Heydrich was actually a deeply split personality. This menacing figure with its apparently well-knit, compact inhumanity concealed a nervously irritable individual, subject to secret anxieties and continually plagued by tension, bitterness and self-hatred. His cynicism, the sign of complex weakness and vulnerability, alone betrayed what his elastic youthfulness concealed. His hardness and imperviousness were founded less in a tendency to sadistic brutality, as is popularly believed, than in the forced absence of conscience of a man who lived under continual constraint. For Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was besmirched by an indelible stain and in a melancholy state of ‘mortal sin’; he had Jewish ancestors.[15]

Hitler described purported Heydrich as “the man with the iron heart.”[16] He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks carried out by SA stormtroopers against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria in November, 1938. 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.”[17]

As reported by Israeli historian Shlomo Aronson, a legend circulated in Germany that Heydrich was of Sabbatean descent from his mother’s side.[18] Heydrich was the son of a musician, opera singer and composer named Bruno Heydrich, who was passionate about Wagner. Bruno became director of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Dresden, one of whose backers was Major Freiherr von Eberstein, also a Wagner enthusiast. Eberstein became a friend of the family and godfather to the infant Reinhard. Two of Reinhard’s forenames were musical references: “Reinhard” referred to the hero from his father’s opera Amen, and “Tristan” stems from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Heydrich’s third name, “Eugen,” was his late maternal grandfather’s forename, Eugen Krantz (1844 – 1898), who had been the director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory, one of the oldest German conservatoires, established in 1856 after Francesco Morlacchi, Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner made reference to the necessity of establishing institutional training for musicians in Dresden. Weber was invited to write music for the Hamburg Temple, which was founded with the financial support of Judah Herz Beer, the father of his friend, Giacomo Meyerbeer.[19]

Despite his love for the anti-Semitic Wagner, Bruno’s appearance and manner, as Peter Padfield explained, was “just what many of the good citizens of Halle took to be Jewish,” and even von Eberstein’s son Karl von Eberstein (1894 – 1979) described him as looking “really Jewish.”[20] Additionally, Bruno was fond of mimicking an “Isidor,” as Jews were known. And when it was discovered that he sent money every month to a Frau Ernestine Süss, a Jewish name, the name taken by his mother when she remarried, suspicions grew. Bruno was referred to as the “Jud Süss.” Reinhard and his brother Heinz were taunted at school with “Isi! Isi!” Then in 1916, when the two boys were attending the Realgymnasium, an encyclopedia of music appeared in which the entry for their father was written as “Bruno Heydrich (really Süss).” Although Bruno managed to have the entry removed from subsequent editions, the rumors persisted.[21]

Karl von Eberstein told Schlomo Aronson that as a schoolboy Reinhard had been “extremely völkisch,” had joined several völkisch groups and had developed into an “absolute race fanatic.”[22] Apparently, Heydrich later told one of his crew comrades that, because his father was called a Jew, he himself had become especially active in anti-Semitic circles and it was soon said, “The old Heydrich cannot be a Jew if his Reinhard is such a rampant anti-Semite.”[23] Heydrich’s former fellow officer, Hubertus von Wangenheim, told a relative who was working in the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters, about the rumors that had accompanied Heydrich’s time in the navy, and mentioned that Heydrich had been teased by his fellow officer cadets as a “white Jew” and “white Moses.”[24]

Eberstein also joined the SS and was appointed to the staff of Heinrich Himmler. And when Heydrich joined the National Socialist Party in 1931, with von Eberstein’s help, he was able to obtain a meeting with Heinrich Himmler. Himmler received Heydrich and hired him as the chief of the new SS Intelligence Service, which would later become known as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and murders. Richard Evans argues that Heydrich “became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime” and had the qualities that Himmler needed: “Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control.[25] In 1933, Hermann Göring established the Gestapo. The following year, he decided to form an alliance with Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, appointing Himmler Inspector of the Secret State Police and Heydrich its commander. The whole police apparatus was then firmly in control of the SS.

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.[26] Nazi Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan claimed Heydrich was not a pure Aryan.[27] Gregor Strasser passed the allegations on to the Nazi Party’s expert on racial matters, Achim Gercke, who investigated Heydrich’s genealogy. Gercke finally insisted that the rumors were baseless and reported that according to the Ahnenliste (“Ancestry List”) provided, Heydrich was “…of German origin and free from any colored and Jewish blood.”[28] Nevertheless, Heydrich privately engaged SD member Ernst Hoffmann to further investigate and dispel the rumors.[29] Hoffman later recalled Heydrich’s nervousness at each of their meetings, a nervousness which seemed “understandable but without foundation.”[30]

However, as pointed out in Charles Wighton’s biography, Heydrich: Hitler’s Most Evil Henchman, the Ancestry List or chart enclosed with the report completely ignores the existence of Heydrich’s maternal grandmother and her ancestors. The chart showed that Heydrich’s mother was Elisabeth Maria Anna Amalie Krantz, daughter of Eugen Krantz, but omitted to mention his wife, which must have been a deliberate omission to protect Heydrich. From a study of the top secret Ahnenliste kept by Martin Bormann, which Wighton had been permitted to inspect in the closely guarded U.S. Document Centre in West Berlin, he concluded a yet more secret set of files containing information which could not be included in the normal Party archives must have been kept in Bormann’s panzerschrank (“armoured safe”), where the surname of the mysterious grandmother was listed as Mautsch. As Wighton concluded, “There can be little doubt that Martin Bormann held secret evidence that the maternal grandmother of Reinhard Heydrich was either Jewish or had at least Jewish blood.”[31]

According to Walter Schellenberg (1910 – 1952), Heydrich’s former subordinate, who, towards the end of the war, largely took Heydrich’s place in the Himmler establishment, Canaris—just after Heydrich’s assassination in 1942—assured him that he possessed proof of Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry.[32] Again, in 1940, a baker from Halle, Johannes Papst, himself a member of the Nazi Party, was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for spreading further rumors that Heydrich was a Jew, when Heydrich won an action against him. But the case went to appeal, when the higher court was informed that all records relating to the period of Heydrich’s birth in 1904—both in the civil registration office and in the church books—had disappeared.[33] After 1945, Wilhelm Höttl, a former SS officer, maintained in his autobiographical book The Secret Front (1950) that Heydrich ordered his agents to remove the gravestone of his “Jewish grandmother.”[34] According to Felix Kersten, Himmler’s Finnish masseur, Himmler confirmed that he had known about Heydrich’s Jewish background ever since their time together in the Munich police in 1933. Himmler revealed to Kersten Hitler, too, had known about Heydrich’s ancestry.[35] In his preface to the Kersten memoirs, published in English in 1947, Hugh Trevor-Roper confirmed “with all the authority that I possess” that Heydrich was a Jew, a view supported by eminent German historians such as Karl Dietrich Bracher and the Hitler biographer Joachim Fest.[36]

Pro-Palästina Komitee

The basic elements of what was to become the official policy of Nazi Germany toward Zionism during the 1930s, in terms of both domestic Jewish policy and the Palestine question as an issue of strategic and foreign policy, is found in the early writings of Thule member Alfred Rosenberg. The basis of Rosenberg’s conspiracy theory was the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whereby the goal of the Zionists was not only the creation of Jewish state in Palestine, but a power base of a “Jewish Vatican,” from which to carry out their plans to subvert and dominate the rest of the world. Nevertheless, in Die Spur, published in 1920, Rosenberg concluded, “Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.” Rosenberg’s identification of the Zionists as the group among Jewish organizations in Germany with potential for cooperation with a future in impeding Jewish assimilation and promoting Jewish emigration was eventually transformed into policy by the Hitler regime after 1933.[37]

As was outlined by Nicosia, the Nazis’ support of the Zionist cause was a continuation of decades of policy on the part of the German government towards the Jewish Question. The result of the conquest of Palestine was a shift in the locus of the Zionist movement from Germany and central Europe to London and the United States. The Zionist movement had become an instrument for the promotion of British, rather German, imperial interests. The press and public opinion in Germany, both Jewish and non-Jewish, began calling for German counter-response, as the impact of the Balfour Declaration on world Jewish opinion was recognized as a victory for the British. The German Foreign Office decided to press the Ottomans to also issue a declaration in favor of Zionist aims in Palestine, which they did on December 12. A similar statement was issued by the Austro-Hungarian government on November 21, and Germany followed with its own declaration on January 5, 1918.

In early in 1918, in an attempt to reverse the trend, the German Foreign Office created a special department for Jewish affairs under the Zionist Professor Moritz Sobemheim (1872 – 1933). In May 1918, as the government also encouraged German Zionists and their supporters in their efforts to set up a German equivalent to the British Palestine Committee, the Deutsches Pro-Palästina Komitee (“German Pro-Palestine Committee”), was established in Berlin. It stressed the political, economic and cultural advantages that Germany would reap in the strategically important Middle East and the importance of strengthening Jewish sympathy for Germany around the world. With the end of World War I, Germany’s defeat, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of British power in Palestine, the prior alliance between the German government and German Zionism came to an end. The Pro-Palästina Komitee quickly disbanded,

In September, 1920, the German Foreign Office began to consider reviving active support for the German and international Zionist movements as a means of rebuilding German influence in Palestine. The small community of Palästinadeutsche, the German citizens of Palestine, along with a growing number of central and east European Jewish immigrants, who continued to be culturally oriented towards Germany, came to be viewed as useful instrument for promoting Germany’s promotion of political, economic and cultural interests. On May 8, 1922, its first policy statement on Palestine was issued to all German diplomatic missions abroad, which highlighted the strategic value gained by Britain in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, and the sympathy of the world’s fourteen million Jews that resulted from the Balfour Declaration.

Friedrich Naumann, the pro-Zionist member of the Weimar National Assembly, had noted that the German cultural orientation of European Jews promised an alliance with the German Templer Society, among the Palästinadeutsche, who came expressed support for the Nazi movement.[38] An American-German colony was founded in 1866 by American colonists from Maine, which included Rolla Floyd—one of the founding members of the first Masonic lodge in Israel, linked to the Quatuor Coronati (QC) and the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF)—but when that failed, it was resettled and became a German Templer colony, which in time evolved into a mixed German Protestant colony.[39] The Templers were founded by Christoph Hoffmann (1815 – 1885), who was inspired by Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687 – 1752), who had belonged to Zinzendorf’s Moravian Church.[40] Hoffmann believed that humanity’s salvation lay in the gathering of God’s people in a Christian community. He also believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent, and that according to biblical prophecy it would take place in Jerusalem, where God’s people were to gather as a symbol of the rebuilding of the temple. The German branch of the PEF, the German Association for Palestine Exploration (Deutscher Verein zur Eiforschung Palästinas), also known as the German Palestine Association (Deutscher Palästinaverein, DPV), developed ties with the Templers, with the aim of reinforcing the presence of a newly united Germany in the area.[41]

When it joined the League of Nations in 1922, Germany became bound the British Mandate over Palestine, and was treaty-bound to support the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. To that end, the German government pursued its Palestine policy through the German Zionist movement. Seeking to generate greater popular support within Germany for its endorsement of the Zionist cause and the British Mandate, the German Foreign Office participated in the reestablishment of the Pro-Palästina Komitee in December, 1926, composed of prominent Jews and gentiles. Its first chairman was Count Johann von Bernstorff (1862 – 6 October 1939), a member of every German delegation to the League of Nations. The Pro-Palästina Komitee provided assistance to the German Foreign Office in cultivating friendly relations with the World Zionist Organization (WZO), giving support to several visits to Germany by Chaim Weizmann and other leaders of the during the 1920s. Membership in the organization continued to grow and by 1932, it had secured the active participation of 217 of the most prominent German citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, including Konrad Adenauer (1876 – 1967), then Mayor of Cologne, who would eventually become the first chancellor of post-War Germany.

Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD)

Article 4 of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws granted that, while Jews were forbidden to fly the Reich or national flag, they were, on the other hand, permitted to display the “Jewish colors,” the Zionist white and blue flag marked with the Star of David, a right to be protected by the state.[42] The struggle for leadership of the Jewish community in Germany was between two camps: advocates of assimilation to the “German-Jewish way” of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens (“Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith,” or CV), against the “racial” conception of Jewry of the Zionitsische Vereinigung für Deutschland (“Zionist Federation of Germany” or ZVfD), favored by the Nazis. As German Jews were overwhelmingly non or anti-Zionist, the ZVfD believed that Hitler’s assumption of power would encourage a flow of immigrants to Palestine. The ranks of the ZVfD grew rapidly as Germans Jews flocked to the Zionist side, and encouraged by the pro-Zionist bent of Nazi Jewish policy, the ZVfD ultimately considered itself the legitimate representative for all German Jews. The Jüdische Rundschau, the official organ of the 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.[43]

From gaining power in 1933, until the outbreak of war in 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate.[44] British historian Christopher Sykes, referring to the Hitler’s election victory in 1932, noted “that the Zionist leaders were determined at the very outset of the Nazi disaster to reap political advantage from the tragedy.”[45] Although they represented only a small minority of German Jews, German Zionists were vocal and politically active, and challenged the prevailing assumptions about assimilation, proposing that the Jews constituted a nation. They therefore advocated for a for a new understanding of the relationship between Western and Eastern European Jews. The Zionist proposed that a national movement would transform the Ostjuden into an equal partner with his western brother. Earlier critiques of assimilation glorified the Ostjuden as a more authentic representation of Jewish identity.[46]

Nevertheless, Zionists never overcame the fundamental biases that existed against the Ostjuden. The difference was the Zionists wanted to “cure” the “sick” Ostjuden by removing them to the Promised Land, as Herzl explained it.[47] “From this viewpoint,” explained Aschleim, “Zionism could also be understood as a kind of safety valve for bourgeois German Jewry, a convenient mechanism for removing from German territory the ubiquitous threat of invading masses of ‘Ostjude’.”[48] As German Zionist Adolf Friedeman admitted in the Jüdische Rundschau, the official organ of the ZVfD:

West Europeans will mainly provide the organisers for colonisation… naturally we are not about to initiate a mass emigration of German, French, and English Jews.[49]

According to Boas, “much of the idiom through which Zionism expressed its main ideas bore a striking, if superficial, resemblance to the völkisch ideas of the day.”[50] The Zionists, though, were cognizant of these troubling parallels and went to great lengths to dissociate themselves from them. And yet, as Boas explains, the Zionists were impressed by the growing power of Nazi regime, and appropriated aspects of its style, ideas and rhetoric. An example was the Juedische Volkspartei, a party organized in 1919 by Zionist-oriented Jewish groups in Germany, who did not call for a Jewish state in Palestine, but who nevertheless viewed the Jews as a Volk (“people” or “ethnic group”) and advocated that the previously religious communities should transform into Volksgemeinde (“people’s community”). As Boas summarizes, “Nevertheless, at bottom it was this elemental consonance with currently popular völkisch modes of thought, in addition to the existence of Palestine as a potential haven, which enabled Zionists to gain the upper hand in the prolonged struggle for supremacy in the Jewish community.”[51]

On March 1, 1933, the Nazi SA Storm Troopers occupied the central office of the CV and closed it, and five days later the CV in Thuringia was banned because of “high treasonous intrigues.” At the same time, the Nazis turned against other non-Zionist Jewish organizations, including the Reich League of Jewish Veterans and the Union of National German Jews. 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.

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.”[52] 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 of Brit Shalom were allowed to appear.[53]

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 Gestapo Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Hermann Göring. Plant apparently even had the secret telephone number he could call Diels anytime.[54] 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.”[55] 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.”[56]

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 and Leo Strauss.[57]

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 .[58] Ernst Herzfeld also reports that in the last months of 1936 the Gestapo acted more leniently towards Zionists than towards “assimilationists.”[59] The Israelitisches Familienblatt of March 21, 1935, cited authoritative Nazi sources urging favoritism towards pro-emigration groups like the Zionists.[60] At its convention held in Berlin in May 1935, the ZVfD unanimously adopted a resolution which boldly proclaimed: “The Zionist movement in Germany demands the right to influence decisively the entire Jewish life in Germany.”[61]

Haavara Agreement

The most infamous case of Zionist collaboration with fascism came in the 1930s, when Chaim Arlosoroff—the former lover of Goebbels’ wife Magda—on behalf of Ben Gurion’s Mapai, negotiated the Haavara Agreement—also known as the Transfer Agreement—with the Nazis. The property and valuables of Jews who fled Nazi Germany were confiscated by the regime. But those who emigrated to Palestine could regain some of their lost wealth in the form of Nazi goods exported to Palestine. Arlosoroff was a protégée of Arthur Ruppin, who founded the Brit Shalom movement with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. According to Etan Bloom, in Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture, Ruppin’s “friendly” meetings with the Nazi race theorist Hans F.K. Günther in 1933, were actually the preliminary discussions for the Transfer Agreement.[62] They arrived at the common conclusion, as Günther put it, that as the German and Jewish races had their own particular moral and cultural standards, mutual understanding between them was impossible.[63]

In the year following the Ruppin’s meeting with Günther, in their efforts to justify the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis published a pamphlet entitled Warum Arierparagraph? Ein Beitrag zur Judenfrage (“Why the Aryan law? A Contribution to the Jewish Question”), designed for mass distribution, which argued in favor of the beneficial effects of the “Aryan Law.” Schulz and Frercks, the literary agents who wrote the pamphlet, quoted Ruppin extensively. In 1934, Ruppin wrote in Jews in the Modern World:

Such an attempt at a peaceful settlement of the problem would have been possible if [...] Jews [...] had recognized that their peculiar position among the Germans was bound to lead to conflicts which had their origin in the nature of man, and could not be removed by arguments and reason. Had both sides realized that the present position was due, not to bad will, but to circumstances which had arisen independently of the will of either side, it would have been unnecessary to attempt the solution of the Jewish problem in an orgy of unbridled hatred.[64]

Arlosoroff was also a close friend of Chaim Weizmann. He went on to become a noted leader of Labor Zionism or socialist Zionism, the left-wing of the Zionist movement. Arlosoroff’s ideas attracted another Zionist thinker, A.D. Gordon (1856 – 1922). 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.”[65] 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.”[66]

1930, Arlosoroff was influential in unifying the two major Zionist socialist political parties, the Poale Zion and the Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker). The Poale Zion Party had a left wing and a right wing. In 1919, the right wing, including David Ben-Gurion, founded Ahdut HaAvoda. In 1930 Ahdut HaAvoda and Hapoel Hatzair 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. 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.

In addition, Arlosoroff was named Political Director of the Jewish Agency for Palestine—established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO)—a prominent position which he filled until his 1933 assassination, just two days after his return from negotiations in Germany. Despite intense investigation and much controversy, Arlosoroff’s murder was never solved. One theory is that it was Goebbels who had him killed. Arlosoroff had begun to view Magda as his conduit to Goebbels to secure a transfer deal, but his former relationship with Magda proved to be an embarrassment to Goebbels. 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.[67]

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.”[68] 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.[69] The Jewish conference in London in 1933, to weaken or defeat any boycott resolution, was torpedoed from Tel Aviv because Ruppin, in close contact with the consulate in Jerusalem, sent cables to London:

Our main function here is to prevent, from Palestine, the unification of world Jewry on a basis hostile to Germany […]. It can damage the political and economic strength of Jewry by sowing dissension in its ranks.[70]

As explained by Etan Bloom, “The Transfer Agreement is considered as being a crucial step toward the establishment of the State of Israel and the improvement of its social structure—a fact fully recognized by the Nazis themselves.”[71] A December 1937 internal memorandum by the German Interior Ministry reviewed the effect of the Transfer Agreement:

There is no doubt that the Transfer Agreement arrangement has contributed most significantly to the very rapid development of Palestine since 1933. The Agreement provided not only the largest source of money, but also the most intelligent group of immigrants, and finally it brought to the country the machines and industrial products essential for development.[72]

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.[73]

The absorption of the transferred Jews was handled by a special department directed by Ruppin, with special programs and a construction company that planned settlements and neighborhoods in accordance with their particular needs. Between 1933 and 1941, approximately 50,000 German Jews immigrated to Palestine as a result of the Transfer Agreement, comprising about ten percent of Germany’s 1933 Jewish population. By 1939, the German Jewish immigrants made up about 15% of Palestine’s Jewish population. Many of them transferred considerable personal wealth and were recognized by the Zionist immigration authorities as valuable Menschenmaterial. Approximately 60% of all capital invested in Palestine between 1933 and 1939 was channeled through the agreement.[74] The SS also cooperated with the Haganah and secretly supplied weapons to THE Jewish settlers for use in their clashes with Palestinian Arabs.[75]

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.”[76]

Office of Jewish Affairs

In the spring of 1933, the ZVfD commissioned Kurt Tuchler, a member of the Juedische Volkspartei on the Berlin Executive, to appeal to Nazis sympathetic for the Jewish enterprise in Palestine. Tuchler managed to recruit SS officer Baron Leopold von Mildenstein (1902 – 1968), who worked in the headquarters of the SD, in charge of the Jewish Desk, with the title of Judenreferat (Office for Jewish Affairs), under the overall command of Heydrich.[77] Later that spring, the two men, accompanied by their wives, embarked on a trip to Palestine. Upon his return, the Baron persuaded the editors of Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff to carry a story titled “A Nazi travels to Palestine,” which positively presented Zionist colonization of Palestine. To commemorate the voyage, Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.[78] 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.[79]

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, under the overall command of Heydrich.[80] The Judenreferat 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 state accompany them.”[81] In the summer of 1935, Mildenstein, then holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer, attended the 19th Congress of the Zionist Organization in Lucerne, Switzerland, as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation.[82]

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.[83] 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 Haganah. SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert Hagen, who succeeded Mildenstein as director of the Judenreferat, claimed in his papers that Polkes held the “leadership of the whole self-defense apparatus of the Palestinian Jews.”[84] 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 was sent to observe the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937.[85] 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.[86] Mildenstein invited Eichmann to join the Judenreferat at its Berlin headquarters.[87] 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.[88] Eichmann was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer (head squad leader) in 1936 and was commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) the following year.

According to a report discovered by the CIA, by Dr. Franz Reichert, then a representative of the German news agency in Jerusalem of the DNB, the official central press agency of the Third Reich, was one of the principal agents of Eichmann, and Polkes one of his sub-agents. Eichmann’s agents included Gentz, the DNB representative in Cairo, responsible for monitoring development of the “Jewish State”; Siegfried Levit, a Czechoslovakian Jew who worked for the Gestapo; Gustav Doerr, a Romanian who reported on “the development of the Jewish Question”; Hans D. Ziegra, president of the New York Overseas Corporation involved in financing mass emigration of Jews from Germany, and who had established contact with the he Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), an organization under Heinrich Himmler; Heinrich Schlie, who had contacts with Croatians and supported illegal emigrations of Jews; and von Bolschwing, a Nazi Party member in Berlin who reported on Jewish emigration from Germany. [89]

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.”[90] 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.”[91]

Polkes invited Eichmann to visit the Jewish colonies in Palestine. However, rather than admit that Eichmann, 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 contact 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.[92] 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.”[93]

Following the trip of Eichmann and Hagen, the collaboration between Nazis and Zionists was cemented by the “Mossad Alivah Beth,” which had been created by the Haganah as an illegal immigration organization, after Britain had banned Jewish immigration to Palestine as a result of the Peel paper. At the end of 1937, emissaries of the Mossad, Pina Ginsburg and Moshe Auerbach, travelled to Germany with the permission of the Nazi authorities in Berlin. Ginsburg, who introduced himself to the Gestapo as emissary of the “Union of Communal Settlements,” declared that he was on a special mission to organize the emigration of German Jews to Palestine, a task that confirmed with the intentions of the Nazi government, and that only with the support of the Nazi leaders could such a project be carried out on a large scale. The Gestapo had then discussed with Ginsburg “how to promote and expand illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine against the will of the British mandate government.”[94]

In Nazi-occupied Vienna, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established and placed under Eichmann’s charge. 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. Likewise, Ginsburg in Berlin was able, again with the help of the Nazi authorities, to establish similar training camps.[95]

Irgun and Lehi

Ben-Gurion abhorred the Revisionist Movement’s founder and leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, calling him “Vladimir Hitler,” in a People’s Meeting in Tel Aviv.[96] As noted by Klaus Polkehn, in “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941,” for the Journal of Palestine Studies, 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, had openly expressed their admiration on many occasions before 1933 for people like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.[97] 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.”[98] 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.[99]

With World War II looming, British policies in Palestine were influenced by a desire to win Arab world support and could ill afford to engage with another Arab uprising. The MacDonald White Paper of May 1939 declared that it was “not part of [the British government’s] policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State,” sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine and restricted Arab land sales to Jews. However, the League of Nations commission held that the White Paper was in conflict with the terms of the Mandate as put forth in the past. The outbreak of the Second World War suspended any further deliberations. The Jewish Agency hoped to persuade the British to restore Jewish immigration rights, and cooperated with the British in the war against Fascism. Aliyah Bet was organized to help Jews escape out of Nazi controlled Europe, despite the British prohibitions. However, the White Paper also led to the formation of Lehi, a small Jewish organization which opposed the British.

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. The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, remained cooperative with the British. But the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization, NMO) and Lehi, two small, dissident militias of the right-wing Revisionist movement which split from the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule in 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. IZL, Irgun Zva’i Leumi, is the Hebrew army, the “army of freedom and royalty,” implying that it shall be the one to establish the “Kingdom of Israel.”[100] Lehi, often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang, was founded in August 1940 by Avraham Stern, a former member of the Irgun. In a pamphlet entitled 18 Principles of Rebirth, Stern noted the need to “solve the problem” of the “alien population” and called for the “conquest” of Palestine. It also emphasized the need to gather the Jewish Diaspora into a new sovereign state, revive the Hebrew language as a spoken language, and build a Third Temple as a symbol of the “new era.”[101] Stern’s overriding desire was to establish the Third Temple at the centre of the restored Kingdom of Israel.[102]

The Irgun were among the Zionist groups labelled as terrorist organizations by the British authorities, the United Nations, and United States governments, and in media such as The New York Times.[103] During the later stages of the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, the Irgun conducted a campaign of violence against Palestinian Arab civilians resulting in the deaths of at least 250. The group also killed a number of Jews it deemed guilty of “treason.”[104] Lehi openly declared its members as “terrorists.”[105] An article titled “Terror” in the Lehi underground newspaper He Khazit (The Front) argued as follows:

Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: “Ye shall blot them out to the last man.”[106]

Some writers have stated that Lehi’s true goals were the creation of a totalitarian state.[107] “The main features of their ideology,” explains Heller, “were historical determinism, social Darwinism, militarism, corporatism and imperialism, xenophobia, ‘sacred egoism’, suppression of opposition, subordination of the individual to the state, anti-liberalism, a denial of democracy and an internally centralised regime.”[108] Perlinger and Weinberg write that the organization’s ideology placed “its world view in the quasi-fascist radical Right, which is characterized by xenophobia, a national egotism that completely subordinates the individual to the needs of the nation, anti-liberalism, total denial of democracy and a highly centralised government.”[109] Perliger and Weinberg state that most Lehi members were admirers of the Italian Fascist movement.[110] According to Kaplan and Penslar, Lehi’s ideology was a mix of fascist and communist thought combined with racism and universalism.[111] In mid-1940, Stern became convinced that the Italians were interested in the establishment of a fascist Jewish state in Palestine. He conducted negotiations, he thought, with the Italians via an intermediary Moshe Rotstein, and drew up a document that became known as the “Jerusalem Agreement.” In exchange for Italy’s recognition of, and aid in obtaining, Jewish sovereignty over Palestine, Stern promised that Zionism would come under the aegis of Italian fascism, with Haifa as its base, and the Old City of Jerusalem under Vatican control, except for the Jewish quarter.[112]

Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on “nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance.”[113] Britain’s betrayal of Zionism disqualified her from being an ally. England was the real “enemy,” Germany a mere “persecutor.”[114] 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. Stern defined the British Mandate as “foreign rule” regardless of British policies and took a radical position against such imperialism even if it were to be benevolent.[115]

On January 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of the war, at a time when the massacre of Jews in occupied Poland had already begun, the Lehi proposed a formal military pact with 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 offer states:

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 Herr Hitler stressed that any combination and any alliance would be entered into in order to isolate England and defeat it.[116]

According to Joseph Heller, “The memorandum arising from their conversation is an entirely authentic document, on which the stamp of the ‘IZL in Israel’ is clearly embossed.”[117] Stern offered “active participation in the war on the German side. On the condition that the aforementioned aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised.” Within the framework of co-operation, Stern hoped he could recruit 40,000 men for the conquest of Eretz Israel. Stern emphasised that the “moral” effect of the participation of “the Jewish liberation movement in the New Order… would strengthen its moral foundations in the eyes of all humanity.”[118]

Even as the full scale of Nazi atrocities became more evident in 1943, Lehi refused to accept Hitler as the main foe, as opposed to Britain.[119] After Stern’s death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move towards support for Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and the ideology of National Bolshevism, which was considered an amalgam of both right and left.[120] Regarding themselves as “revolutionary Socialists,” the new Lehi developed a highly original ideology combining an “almost mystical” belief in Greater Israel with support for the Arab liberation struggle.[121] According to Yaacov Shavit, professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, articles in Lehi publications contained references to a Jewish “master race,” contrasting the Jews with Arabs who were seen as a “nation of slaves.”[122] Lehi advocated mass expulsion of all Arabs from Palestine and Transjordan, or even their physical annihilation.[123]

The lrgun began 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), a disciple of Jabotinsky and future Prime Minister of Israel. Irgun’s most notorious bombing of the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, which was housed in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on the July 22, 1946. 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.[124] 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.”[125] In April of 1948, Lehi and the Irgun were jointly responsible for the massacre in Deir Yassin of at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children. Lehi assassinated Lord Moyne, British Minister Resident in the Middle East, and made many other attacks on the British in Palestine.

[1] Jacob Golomb. Nietzsche and Zion (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 10.

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

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 353.

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

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

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

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

[9] 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.

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

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

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

[13] Peter Padfield. Himmler: Reichsführer SS (York: Henry Holt, 1990), p. 107.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Joachim Fest. The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (Da Capo Press. 1999).

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

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

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

[19] Meyer. The Origins of the Modern Jew, pp. 133-137.

[20] Peter Padfield. Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Thistle Publishing, 2013).

[21] Ibid.

[22] Shlomo Aronson. Reinhard Heydrich und die Frühgeschichte des SD und der Gestapo 1931-1935 (Berlin, 1966).

[23] Peter Padfield. Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Thistle Publishing, 2013).

[24] Robert Gerwarth. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 62.

[25] Richard Evans. The Third Reich in Power (2005) pp. 53-54.

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

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

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

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

[30] Ibid., p. 62.

[31] Charles Wighton. Heydrich, Hitler's Most Evil Henchman (Arcole Publishing, 2017).

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Cited in Gerwarth. Hitler’s Hangman, p. xv.

[35] Charles Wighton. Heydrich, Hitler’s Most Evil Henchman (Arcole Publishing, 2017).

[36] Cited in Gerwarth. Hitler’s Hangman, p. xv.

[37] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 25.

[38] Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 144; “Volk und Rasse.” Die Warte des Tempels (August 1935). Cited in Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 95.

[39] Moshe Gilad. “Tel Aviv’s American Colony Comes Back to Life.” Haaretz (June 25, 2013). Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/culture/2013-06-25/ty-article/.premium/a-tel-aviv-gem-hidden-among-luxury-real-estate/0000017f-e3a7-d38f-a57f-e7f734740000; Zddis. “Freemasonry In Israel.”

[40] Christoph Hoffmann. Jerusalem Journey (Stuttgart: Maria-Paulus-Foundation, 1969), p. 19.

[41] Markus Kirchhoff. “Surveying the Land: Western Societies for the Exploration of Palestine, 1865-1920.” Benedikt Stuchtey (ed.). Science across the European Empires, 1800-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 162.

[42] Boas. “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938.”

[43] 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. 156; cited in Klaus Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (Spring/Summer, 1976), p. 62.

[44] Mark Roseman. The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Allen Lane, (2002), pp. 11–12.

[45] Christopher Sykes. Crossroads to Israel (London,1965); cited in Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 58.

[46] Aschheim. “Reflection, Projection, Distortion,” p. 71.

[47] “The Family Affliction,” in Herzl, Zionist Writings, 2: 1898-1904 (New York, 1975); cited in Aschheim. “Reflection, Projection, Distortion,” p. 70.

[48] Aschheim. “Reflection, Projection, Distortion,” pp. 71.

[49] “Stammesbewusstein und Volkbewusstein,” Jüdische Rundschau, 15: 8 (February 25, 1910); cited in Aschheim. “Reflection, Projection, Distortion,” p. 71.

[50] Boas. “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938.”

[51] Ibid.

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

[53] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 62.

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

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

[56] 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

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

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

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

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

[61] Ibid.

[62] Etan Bloom. Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 344.

[63] Ruppin. Jews in the Modern World, 256–257. Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 344.

[64] Ruppin. Jews in the Modern World, 256–257. Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 344.

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

[66] Ibid., p. 3.

[67] Jeremy Rosen. “Magda Goebbels and Haim Arlosoroff.” The Algemeiner (January 30, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/01/30/magda-goebbels-and-haim-arlosoroff/

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

[69] Ibid.

[70] Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 355.

[71] Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 349.

[72] Interior Ministry internal memo (signed by the State Secretary W. Stuckart) (December 17, 1937). Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 349.

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

[74] Ibid., p. 349–350.

[75] Nicosia. Third Reich and the Palestine Question, 63–64, 105, 219–220. Cited in Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 352–353.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[82] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 61.

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

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

[85] Nicosia. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 61.

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

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

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

[89] Memorandum for: Director of Central Intelligence. Subject: Adolf Eichmann. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/OSS/eichunknowndateb.pdf

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

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

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

[93] Ibid., p. 75.

[94] Ibid., p. 75.

[95] Ibid., p. 76.

[96] Ushi. “Ben-Gurion’s Battle Against Bringing Jabotinsky’s Bones to Israel.” Museum of the Jewish People (March 7, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.anumuseum.org.il/blog/ben-gurions-battle-bringing-jabotinskys-bones-israel/

[97] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” pp. 77.

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

[99] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” pp. 77.

[100] Joseph Heller. “The Zionist Right and National Liberation: From Jabotinsky to Avraham Stern.” In Wistrich, Robert S.; Ohana, David (eds.). The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory, and Trauma (Routledge, 1995), p. 96.

[101] Ada Amichal Yevin. In purple: the life of Yair-Abraham Stern. (Tel Aviv: Hadar Publishing House, 1986), p. 316 (in Hebrew). Retrieved from http://www.saveisrael.com/stern/saveisraelstern.htm

[102] Joseph Heller. “The Zionist Right and National Liberation: From Jabotinsky to Avraham Stern.” In Wistrich, Robert S.; Ohana, David (eds.). The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory, and Trauma (Routledge, 1995), p. 88.

[103] Sam Pope Brewer. “Irgun Bomb Kills 11 Arabs, 2 Britons.” New York Times (December 30, 1947). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20210817055447/https://www.nytimes.com/1947/12/30/archives/irgun-bomb-kills-11-arabs-2-britons-missile-thrown-from-a-taxi-in.html?sq=terrorist+Irgun&scp=2&st=p

[104] Perliger & Weinberg, p. 101.

[105] Calder Walton (2008). “British Intelligence and the Mandate of Palestine: Threats to British national security immediately after the Second World War.” Intelligence and National Security. 23 (4): 435–462.

[106] He Khazit, Issue 2, August 1943; cited in Heller, p. 115.

[107] Heller, 1995, p. 70.

[108] Joseph Heller. The Stern Gang (Routledge, 1995), p. 82.

[109] Arie Perliger & Leonard Weinberg. “Jewish Self-Defence and Terrorist Groups Prior to the Establishment of the State of Israel: Roots and Traditions.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 4, 3 (2003), p. 108.

[110] Perliger & Weinberg. “Jewish Self-Defence and Terrorist Groups Prior to the Establishment of the State of Israel: Roots and Traditions,” p. 107.

[111] Eran Kaplan & Derek J. Penslar. The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History (2011) p. 274.

[112] Joseph Heller. “The Zionist Right and National Liberation: From Jabotinsky to Avraham Stern.” In Wistrich, Robert S.; Ohana, David (eds.). The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory, and Trauma (Routledge, 1995), p. 86.

[113] Sasson Sofer. Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy. (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 253–254.

[114] Joseph Heller. The Stern Gang (Routledge, 1995), p. 84.

[115] Israel Eldad. The First Tithe (1950), p. 84

[116] Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts,” p. 86.

[117] Heller (1985) p. 85.

[118] Joseph Heller. The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940–1949 (Routledge, 2012), p. 114

[119] Ibid., p. 114

[120] Ibid., p. 105.

[121] Walter Laqueur. “Jabotinsky and Revisionism.” A History of Zionism, 3rd ed. (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2003). p. 377.

[122] Yaacov Shavit. Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement 1925–1948 (Routledge, 1988), p. 231.

[123] Leonard Weinberg & Ami Pedahzur (ed.). Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism (Routledge, 2008), p. 112.

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

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