By collaborating with the Nazis, a small group of Zionists weakened anti-fascist resistance and contributed to the genocide of Europe’s Jews, writes Stefan Moore.
Adolf Hitler, at a window of the Reich Chancellery, receives an ovation on the evening of his inauguration as chancellor, Jan. 30, 1933. (Robert Sennecke, German Federal Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By Stefan Moore
Special to Consortium News
As uncomfortable as it may be to many, Israel’s current apartheid policies took shape in the lead up to the Holocaust when Nazi Germany and a small group of influential Zionists formed an alliance to build their ethno-nationalist states.
On Aug. 25, 1933, German Zionists signed an agreement with the Nazi government that allowed some wealthy German Jews to immigrate to Palestine in exchange for purchasing German goods that were then exported to the Jewish community in Palestine.
As part of the deal, the Zionists also agreed to lobby the global Jewish community to end their boycott of German goods that began when Hitler came to power.
A 1933 memo from the Zionist Federation of Germany to the Nazi party promised: “should the Germans accept the cooperation of the Zionists, these (sic) would try to dissuade Jews abroad from supporting the anti-German boycott.” (See pages 231-232 of Lucy Dawidowicz’s book, The War Against Jews: 1933-1945)
The so-called Transfer or Haavara Agreement (named for the Tel Aviv company where the funds were transferred) was endorsed by official representatives of Nazi Germany.
For the Zionists, the deal allowed affluent German Jews to keep some of their capital and resettle in Palestine. For the Nazis, the agreement not only helped rid Germany of a small portion of its Jewish population (60,000 between 1933-1939) but, critically, it doomed the boycott movement to failure and opened up the global export market for German goods to boost its economy.
The cover of a matchbook distributed by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to champion the anti-Nazi boycott of 1933. (Ephemeral New York, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
For the majority of mostly non- and anti-Zionist Jews around the world, it was a betrayal that deprived them of one of the few weapons they had to fight the Nazis.
It was symbolised by the freakish image of the Haavara transport ship, the Tel Aviv, with its name inscribed in Hebrew on the bow, and the Swastika flag hoisted on deck.
In the decades before the agreement, Zionists’ efforts to build a Jewish state in Palestine had been slow. Even after the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, British authorities limited Jewish immigration and Jews found it difficult to acquire enough land to displace the indigenous Arab population. By 1920, Jews had only been able to purchase less than 2 percent of Palestinian land.
For the Zionists, Hitler’s ascendance presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to supercharge immigration to Palestine: Israel’s future leader, David Ben Gurion, said “what Zionist propaganda for years could not do, disaster has done overnight.”
And according to German-Jewish journalist and historian Hannah Arendt,
“anti-Semitism was an overwhelming force, and the Jews would either have to make use of it or be swallowed up by it. In expert hands [such as David Ben-Gurion & Co.] this ‘propelling force’…would be used in the same way that boiling water is used to produce steam power.”
Who Should Be Saved
What was left out of the Zionist project, however, was the fate of the vast majority of European Jews who were being marginalized, attacked and murdered.
In his history of the British Mandate, Le Septième Million, Israeli journalist Tom Segey wrote (see page 539) that “saving European Jews did not figure at the head of the priorities of the [Zionist] ruling class.” Rather, “the foundation of the State was primordial in their eyes.”
At a Zionist Labor Party conference in 1938, Ben Gurion laid out his formula for who should be saved after Britain’s offer to rescue thousands of Jewish children from Europe:
“If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but the historic interest of the people of Israel.”
Ben Gurion speaking at the cornerstone laying ceremony for the trade-union Histadrut building in Jerusalem, 1924. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
However, it wasn’t just any children the Zionists wanted in Palestine, such as the majority from the impoverished shtetls of Eastern Europe and Russia.
“We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us…only the educated to enter,” declared Israel’s future president Chaim Weizmann (see page 498 of Ben Hecht’s book A Child of the Century) at the 1937 World Zionist Conference in Zurich, Switzerland,
“the other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.”
Indeed, the Zionists and Nazis were kindred spirits: both were building ethno-nationalist states premised on racial purity — a concept increasingly espoused at the time — and both vehemently opposed the assimilation of Jews in Europe.
“The attitude of the Zionists towards the encroaching menace of fascist domination in Germany was determined by some common ideological assumptions:” writes German journalist Klaus Polkhen, in No. 57 in The Secret Contacts:
“The fascists as well as the Zionists believed in unscientific racial theories, and both met on the same ground in their beliefs in such mystical generalizations as ‘national character (Volkstum)…and ‘racial exclusiveness.’”
Seeing Eye-to-Eye With Fascists
A memo to the Nazi party from the Zionist Federation of Germany on June 21, 1933, (page 155 of Lucy Dawidowicz’s A Holocaust Reader) assured the fascists that they saw eye to eye:
“Our recognition of the Jewish nationality allows us to establish clear and sincere relations with the German people and its national and racial realities…because we too are against mixed marriages and for the maintaining of the purity of the Jewish group.”
Chaim Weizmann in 1900. (Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Athur Ruppin, a sociologist who headed the Palestine Zionist Executive, drew directly on Nazi master race theories.
He believed that Zionism required “racial purity” and that “only the racially pure come to the land.” Inspired by the work of Nazi scientists, he performed skull measurements to demonstrate that Ashkenazi Jews were superior to Yemeni Jews and argued against immigration of Ethiopian Jews because of their lack of “blood connection.”
In fact, some Zionists were elated by Nazi anti-Semitism. At a 1937 Berlin meeting with Adolf Eichmann, Feivel Polkes, a member of the Zionist underground army, commended the 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.” (See Polkhen’s No. 74 in The Secret Contacts)
Polkes’s admiration was reciprocated by Eichmann, who claimed, “had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist there was.”
Given their similar views on race and nation-building, the Nazis gave the Zionists preferential treatment in almost every sphere (see No. 62 in Polkehn‘s The Secret Contacts). They were the only non-Nazi group allowed to wear their own uniforms, fly their own flag and espouse a separate political philosophy up to 1939.
While the German Ministry of Propaganda banned all newspapers published by the Communists, Social Democrats, trade unions and other progressive organizations, the Zionist paper, the Judische Rundschau, was allowed to publish its propaganda unhindered from 1933 to 1939.
Street seller of Jüdische Rundschau in 1934 in Berlin. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Unlike the German Zionists, most Jews in Europe were resisting the fascists — fighting them in Spain — where 30 percent of the American Lincoln Brigade were Jews — and in Poland, where half of the 5,000 Dombrovski brigade fighters were Jewish, smuggling arms to Eastern European ghettos and pushing for other countries to come to their rescue.
At the same time, Zionists were doing everything possible to scuttle these efforts.
In 1938, when a global conference of 32 countries convened in Evian-les-Baines, France, to address the issue of German and Austrian Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, only the Dominican Republic came to their rescue, offering up to 100,000 Jewish refugees “vacant areas of fertile land, excellent roads, and a police force that maintains law and order.” (See page 315 of Post Uganda Zionism on Trial.)
Despite the generous offer, “the Zionists’ hostility was naked and uncompromising,” wrote Holocaust researcher S. B. Beit Zvi
“Zionists were resistant (see page 218) to anything liable to jeopardize their fundraising revenues …. If the Jews of America contributed to the colony in the Dominican Republic, they might give less to the Jewish National Fund or the Keren Hayesod [United Israel Appeal].”
Similarly, Zionists were hostile to various other proposals and offers to resettle Jews in Australia, the Soviet Union, Japan, Madagascar and Alaska. (See page 260 of The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black.)
“Focusing on Palestine as the ONLY legitimate destination for large-scale emigration, the World Zionist Organization rejected opportunities from 1933 onwards to resettle German Jews in havens or homes other than Eretz Yisrael,” wrote American historian Edwin Black: “The Zionist stance made it clear: Palestine or nothing.” (See page 260 of Black’s The Transfer Agreement.)
Even by 1943 when the Holocaust was well underway, Zionists continued to block Jews who tried to settle outside of Palestine.
When a large group of American orthodox rabbis marched in Washington, D.C., asking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rescue Europe’s Jews, Zionist leaders dissuaded the president from meeting with them.
Playing to American anti-Semitism, the head of the World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Samuel Rosenman, from the American Jewish Committee, told Roosevelt that the protesting rabbis were first-generation immigrants who were “not representative of American Jewry” and not the kind of Jews with whom Roosevelt should meet. Indeed, when they arrived at the White House, they were told (untruthfully) that Roosevelt was not available.
The Kastner Train
Perhaps no other incident exemplified the Zionist betrayal more than the saga of the Kastner Train, which involved collaborating with Nazis over the fate of Hungarian Jews.
In April 1944, at the height of the exterminations, Adolf Eichmann offered a deal to Joel Brand, the head of the Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee: the Nazis would spare the lives of one million Hungarian Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other goods from the Allies.
Brand immediately flew to Istanbul to present the proposal to the Jewish Agency which, as Brand later said, lacked any sense of urgency, since it was more focused on Jewish emigration to Palestine than the slaughter in Europe.
Kastner in the early 1950s at Kol Yisrael, the official Israeli state radio station, where he hosted a program in Hungarian. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Back in Budapest, Eichmann proposed another deal to Zionist leader Rudolph Kastner, Brand’s colleague from the Committee: in exchange for $1,000 each ($25,000 in today’s currency) Eichmann would allow the departure of 1,684 mostly affluent Jews, including Kastner’s family and friends, to escape to Switzerland by train. As part of the arrangement, Kastner agreed to not inform Hungarian Jews that they were being sent to their deaths in the crematoriums.
Between May and July 1944, 437,000 Jews — almost the entire rural Jewish population of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz, where most were gassed on arrival.
In 1954, an Israeli judge ruled that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil” by negotiating with Eichmann to save some Jews, while “paving the way for the murder of Hungarian Jewry.” He was assassinated on 15 March, 1957. by members of the Lehi, Israel’s right-wing militia, for collaborating with Nazis. Kastner was later rehabilitated as a hero in Israel.
Many still maintain that the Haavara Agreement and Kastner’s deal with Eichmann were pragmatic decisions to save the lives of thousands of Jews and help build a Jewish homeland. But, as American journalist Lenni Brenner wrote about Haavara,
“All excuses that it saved lives must be strictly excluded from serious consideration…it saved wealth, not lives… or, more properly, a piece of the property of the German Jewish bourgeoisie”
In the end, collaboration with the Nazis by a small group of Zionists broke the global boycott against Germany, weakened anti-fascist resistance worldwide, and contributed to the genocide of Europe’s Jews.
Indeed, the Zionists-Nazi Alliance became part of the ideological foundation of Israel’s apartheid and genocidal policies today.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker whose films have received four Emmys and numerous other awards. In New York he was a series producer for WNET and a producer for the prime-time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for the national film company Film Australia and ABC-TV.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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In this context, Consortium readers might take a look at “A Nazi Travels to Palestine” by Jacob Boas, in History Today (Volume 30, January 1980), and the ensuing flak (see Letters to the Editor, History Today, April 1980), as well as author’s response, History Today, May 1980. The principal objection was to the linking of the Swastika and the Star of David which the magazine placed above the article and used to promote it in major British newspapers. For the article, see
hxxps://drive.google.com/file/d/1m1jt5_z3KVK527rFAkerYSsE7Q9PR9kI/view
In my earlier comment, where I wrote “” most of whom were citizens of the German Reich,””
I meant the Second German Reich, which was dissolved in 1918.
These Germans were also citizens of the German successor states, including the Third Reich.
However, many of them were “denaturalized” by various laws passed during the Third Reich and in effect became stateless.
Re those Jews who wanted to prevent Jewish assimilation, without the Third Reich and the Zionist movement and the Palestine Project, these Jewish chauvinist control freaks would have been tilting at windmills at best. As of 1933 there were about 500,000 Jews in Germany, about 400,000 of them German citizens. Among these, there were about 35,000 mixed marriages—then add in the the children those marriages produced to get an approximate assimilation profile. Another way of putting it (right now I can’t recall where I saw this) is that by the turn of the 20th Century 50% of marriages by Jews were with Gentiles.
People with too much money wouldn’t be able to screw everything up for the rest of us if we didn’t think they were so great for having so much money. And they laugh.
No war but class war.
EXACTLY!
Everything started with a religious theft and defamation for imaginary messiah threatening and ransacking temples probably to defame resistance to Roman occupation. Weaponization of the monotheist ideal that went on to create a theology of permissive genocides world wide and attempts for full spectrum cultural dominance as part of NATO strategic planning. Including opposing other orthodox spin offs
as of the empire and eventually the protesters too. As well as unscientific eugenic race superiority complexes for dominance theory..
The Zionists were traitors to all Jews everywhere. They were nothing more than violent settler colonizers who invaded and pillaged Palestine to set up a theocracy based on made-up Judaism myths.
Remarkable how “liberal democracies” in the 21st century support horrendous brutality based on the Old Testament.
Those same German Jews ensured Britain continued with WW1 after 1916 provided Britain promised them Palestine (if Britain beat the Otomans) and they would ensure America entered that war on Britains side. All this so the Germans could try and beat the Tsar to ensure he and the Russians suffered as payback for Tsarist persecution.
Those German Zionists have a lot of blood on their hands, there fellow Jews, Brits, Germans, Americans, Russians, etc and of course the Palestinians.
I appreciate the appearance of this account that highlights the nature of early Zionism.
The “Holocaust narrative” has totally overshadowed and practically made a crime of any discussion of the actual roots of Zionism and the colonial/racists practices that flowed from these roots from the very start of the movement.
Re British involvement in furthering the Zionist idea, one important piece of the picture not mentioned in this article is the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Re “those German Zionists,”
##Herzl was Austrian.
##Over 50 % of the participants in the First Zionist Congress were from Eastern Europe.
##The Zionist idea long predated Herzl, who was a privileged Johnny-com-lately to the notion. He was very well connected with the MSM of that day.
##The earlier Zionist organizational umbrella was mainly the Hovevei Zion. Virtually all of these were in Eastern Europe.
See, for a start, hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovers_of_Zion
##Here is a list of the actual attendees of the First Zionist Congress; it makes interesting reading:
hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Delegates_to_the_First_World_Zionist_Congress
##Please don’t blame the Zionist madness on Jewish Germans, most of whom were citizens of the German Reich, identified as German, fought in WW1, and were not generally supportive of the push into Palestine. Their lives were made considerably more complicated by the influx of Eastern European Jews into Germany, especially the larger cities, in the late 19th C. Obviously the situation developed and changed radically after the defeat of WW1. Many German Jews with the assets and options to leave Germany got out if they had the foresight and contacts to do so. Some of these took the Palestine deal, but by no means all, and it would be interesting to know whether there are any data on percentages. It is a pretty well established fact that even those Jewish Germans with means had a hard time finding a place to go. The mother of one personal acquaintance of mine was fortunate to have a sponsor in the USA. In the 1930s in Germany it was “scoundrel time” all around, to borrow a phrase from a later era.
Zionism / Nazism: two cheeks of the same butt
Zionism should be banned for its racist supremacy ideology & doctrine
Of Jewish background – it totally pains me and shames me to see what the state of israel is doing.
“Shapira and Elitzur justified killing babies and small children on the grounds of satiating the national thirst for revenge. “Sometimes,” the rabbis wrote, “one does evil deeds that are meant to create a correct balance of fear, and a situation in which evil actions do not pay off… and in accordance with this calculus, the infants are not killed for their evil, but due to the fact that there is a general need of everyone to take revenge on the evil people, and the infants are the ones whose killing will satisfy this need.”
-Max Blumenthal
Goliath p.304
Writing about Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira’s and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur’s “Torat Ha’Melech” published in 2009, the 230 page unofficial code of the israeli religous nationalist soldier.
“In a seperate essay published two years after Israel’s conquest of the Occupied Territories (1969), Leibowitz predicted that the occupation would descend into a malignant phase in which “concentration camps would be erected by the Iraeli rulers” and “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
-Ibid p.265
“I am a Jew. In spite of that, indeed because of that, I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war.
“This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kastner, leader of the council which spoke for all Jews in Hungary. While I was prisoner number 44070 at Auschwitz – the number is still on my arm – I compiled careful statistics of the exterminations … I took these terrible statistics with me when I escaped in 1944 and I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers … Kastner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.'”
-Dr Rudolph Verba
London Daily Herald February 1961
-As quoted by Harpal Brar
ZIONISM: A Racist, Anti-Semitic and Reactionary Tool of Imperialism p.53
“Zionist leaders in Germany welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, because they shared his belief in the primacy of ‘race’ and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among ‘Aryans’. They congratulated Hitler on his triumph over the common enemy – the forces of liberalism. Dr. Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in B34 a special book, Wir Juden (We, Jews), to celebrate Hitler’s so- called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism”– Israel Shahak
hxxps://archive.org/details/JewishHistoryJewishReligionTheWeightOf3000Years-I.Shahak/page/n59/mode/2up?view=theater
The illusion of superiority is a very powerful illusion.
You know it’s an illusion as those claiming superiority often act in inferior ways.
Beliefs create behaviours.
This is all news to me, unlike the Voyage of the Damned, which I read about every few years. In 1939 the ship St.Louis was shamelessly denied permission to dock in the USA with its 900+ passengers. This tragic episode pales in comparison to what’s described here.
It makes one wonder why the St. Louis was denied entry.
Now you know. I knew.
Chilling
A very important read on history ,especially with what is presently going on in Palestine .The machinations of the Nazis and Zionists is very close to the same ,with very few differences .
I can vouch for the veracity of this historical article as it is much the same as what I have read regarding the fascist Nazis and Zionists before ,during and after WWII .
Thank you Stefan Moore and Consortium News for this so very important historical information .So many simply do not know.
I would like to read other comments before possibly commenting myself; however I see no other comments. Hmmm.
I will offer this: My innate intelligence is tremendously pleased to finally see this information regarding collaboration between the satanic Zionists and the Nazis — and even further, the manipulation of the Nazis *and everyone else* by the satanic zionists — rise to visibility in this apocalyptic phase of the human timeline.
This article confirms multiple suspicions that I had never seen hinted at in prior propagandized U.S. bullshit public discourse.
The facts inbthis article got Ken Livingston, a Brit Labour Party legend expelked from his party as an AS.
Which was wrong.
Good point. Mr. Moore, just for writing about uncomfortable facts of history, shows a lot of courage. Pointing out historical irony and hypocrisy can be hazardous for one’s career, or even one’s life.
On the other hand, Zionism, and Nazism are both far-right, authoritarian and racist political ideologies
A reality check, truths which today may not be considered and thus, the world finds itself in the horrible state it’s in. This article supports a more detailed article on point which I published and is available on Academia.com.
“Unlike the German Zionists, most Jews in Europe were resisting the fascists — fighting them in Spain — where 30 percent of the American Lincoln Brigade were Jews.”
I believe it’s referred to as the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”
That’s correct. A friend of mine’s father fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His Dad originally came from Spain and returned to fight the fascists.
The fascist mind-set of race or class superiority, intolerance and the sacrifice of others is always the same; German Nazis, Ukrainian Banderites, Israeli Zionists, and neocons everywhere. All are severely damaged, self-serving egoists. In the human community, they are like cancer cells.
And, when considering the fascist mindset, let’s not forget the apartheid South African whites (boers).
And the support Zionists gave to the Apartheid regime is South Africa.
I can’t disagree.
“Indeed, the Zionists and Nazis were kindred spirits: both were building ethno-nationalist states premised on racial purity — a concept increasingly espoused at the time — and both vehemently opposed the assimilation of Jews in Europe.”
I would observe in addition, that both groups thought of themseves as “socialist.” I have been a socialist-minded person most of my life, and have only recently begun to reckon with my assumptions about “liberty” and “libertarianism.”
I deeply appreciate the works of Karl Marx, and especially his analytical framework known as Dialectical Materialism. But I no longer think of myself as a “Marxist,” a “Socialist,” or adhere to any “ist” or “ism.”
Until the post-9/11 evisceration of civil liberties and civilian control of goverment, I took liberty for granted. So, I took the possibility of utilizing government to good ends as a given.
I am more skeptical now, although not cynical.
Now I know you need both liberty and universal economic rights to avoid totalitarianism. Inside every socialist is a libertarian, once you lock him in a cage. Inside every libertarian is a socialist, once he is bankrupted by medical debt or other indebtedness.
A central tenet of the U.S. Constitution is that it is the obligation of Congress to declare war. Yet Congress has not done so since 1943. I believe that this is the precipitating and proximate cause of all the evils committed by the Unites States since the end of the Second World War.
Lastly, there seems to be a problem with the article’s chronology? The Rabbi’s March of 1943 is spoken of as if it preceded the late forming of a rescue commission in 1941?
Oh no you don’t.
Socialism is the People owning the means of production.
Zionism is a racist, anti-semitic and reactionary tool of Imperialism.
Nazism is the same.
Here again is Professor Michael Parenti on Imperialism:
“Why do people build empires? It takes alot of
purposive, and conscience effort to build
an empire. Why all this conquest? Is it
conquest just for conquest? Power for Powers
sake? Actually, there are very real
material interests involved in empire.
There’s plunder, there’s tribute, there
are resources, there are markets, there’s
expropiating the land, the crops,
the cheap labor, and in the case of Rome,
the slave labor. Empires are
enormously profitable, and they are
enormously costly. They cost more
than they bring in. But it doesn’t matter,
because the profits go to one group
(Neoliberals) and the costs go to another
group (the people). The empire is
very profitable for their ruling elites,
and interests. And empires are
enormously costly for the common populace of
the imperial nation. The empire
feeds off the resources of the Republic.
You can see that today..”
Now I don’t have a real good hold on Libertarianism, but from what I’ve heard, read and seen. It promotes smaller government, deregulation and “freedom”.
Which are the basic tenets of Neoliberalism.
The People do not need any more of that.