Did Zionists collaborate with Nazi during WWII and before ?
When the war against Hitler began, almost all of the Jewish organizations joined forces with the Allies and some of the most eminent leaders, such as Weizmann, declared themselves on the allied side; but the German Zionist group, though it was a small minority at the time, took the opposite side : from 1933 to 1941, it was committed to a policy of compromise and even of collaboration with Hitler. The Nazi authorities, even while they persecuted the Jews, for example by dismissing them from the Civil Service, kept contact with the Zionist leaders, granting them special treatment and distinguishing them from the "integrationist" Jews they were hunting down.
The accusation of collusion with the Hitlerian authorities does not therefore apply to the immense majority of Jews; these had not even waited until the war to fight Fascism with weapons, as they did in Spain from 1936 to 1939 as members of the International brigades, all the way to the Warsaw ghetto where the fighters of the "Jewish Committee" showed that they knew how to fight and die in battle. But the highly organized minority of Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis for eight years. Their one goal was to create a powerful Jewish State.
In the days of Hitler and Mussolini, the Zionist leaders behaved in an ambivalent way with regards to Fascism, at times sabotaging the anti Fascist struggle and even attempting to collaborate with others. The fundamental aim of the Zionists was not to save Jewish lives but to create a Jewish state in Palestine. A month after the Nazi pogrom against Germany's Jews, famously known as Kristallnacht, Ben Gurion, Israel's first head of State, declared outright to the "Labor" Zionists on December 7th 1938 an interesting mathematical formula for saving German Jewish kids, after the British government proposed that thousands of Jewish children be brought to Great Britain from the continent:
"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 also the history of the people of Israel." Source: Yvon Gelbner, "Zionist policy and the fate of European Jewry", in Yad Vashem studies (Jerusalem, vol. XII, p. 199).
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"The saving of the Jews in Europe did not figure at the head of the list of priorities of the ruling class. It was the foundation of the State which was primordial in their eyes. " Source: Tom Segev. "Le septième million" Ed. Liana Levi, Paris, 1993, p.539.
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"(...) Must we help all those who need it without taking into account the characteristics of each one? Must we not give this action a national Zionist character and attempt to give priority to the saving of those who can be useful to the Land of Israel and to Judaism? I understand that posing the question in this manner may appear cruel, but we must establish unequivocally that if we are able to save 10,000 people out of the 50,000 who can contribute to the construction of the land and national rebirth, or a million Jews who will become a burden or, at best, a dead weight, we must limit ourselves to saving 10,000 people who can be saved-despitethe accusations and the appeals of the million left behind. Source: Memorandum of the "Salvation Committee" of the Jewish Agency. 1943. Quoted by Tom Segev. Op. cit. p.124.
It was this fanaticism which inspired, for instance, the attitude of the Zionist delegation at the Evian conference of July 1938, where 31 nations had gathered to discuss the absorption of refugees from Nazi Germany : the Zionist delegation demanded, as the only possible solution, the admission of 200,000 Jews to Palestine. The Jewish state was more important than the lives of Jews. As far as the Zionist leaders were concerned, the worst enemy was "assimilation". In this they resembled the Hitlerians as do all racists, for whom the fundamental preoccupation is purity of blood. This is why the Hitlerians regarded the Zionists as valid interlocutors who served their designs, insofar as Hitler's ultimate goal was to rid Germany, and later Europe, of all Jews. There is plenty of proof of this collusion between Nazis and Zionists. In a memorandum of June 21st 1933 to the Nazi party, the "Zionist Federation of Germany" expressed itself as follows :
"In the foundation of the new State, which has proclaimed the race principle, we wish to adapt our community to these new structures… Our recognition of the Jewish nationality allows us to establish clear and sincere relations with the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not want to underestimate these fundamental principles, because we too are against mixed marriages and for the maintaining of the purity of the Jewish group...The Jews who are conscious of their identity and in whose name we speak, can find a place within the structure of the German State, for they are free of the resentment that the assimilated Jews must feel;...we believe in the possibility of loyal relations between those Jews conscious of their community and the German State.”
To attain its practical objectives, Zionism hopes it will be able to collaborate with a government that is fundamentally hostile to the Jews. Source : Lucy Dawidowicz, "A Holocaust reader", p. 155.
The memorandum added that "should the Germans accept the cooperation of the Zionists, these would try to dissuade Jews abroad from supporting the anti-German boycott."Source : Lucy Dawidowicz : "The war against Jews (1933-1945)" Penguin books. 1977. p.231-232.
The Hitlerian leaders were well-disposed towards the Zionists, whose exclusive aim was to create a state in Palestine, thus favoring their own designs to get rid of the Jews. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi theoretician, wrote:
"Zionism must be vigorously backed so that a yearly contingent of German Jews shall be transported to Palestine." Source : A. Rosenberg : "Die Spur des juden im Wandel der Zeiten". Munich 1937. p.153.
Reinhardt Heydrich, who was later to become "Protector" of Czechoslovakia, wrote in Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the S.S. in 1935, when he was head of the S.S. security. In an article entitled "The invisible enemy", he made a distinction between two kinds of Jews :
"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." Source : Hohne. "Order of the Death's Head", p.333."
The German Betar received a new name: Herzlia. The activities of the movement in Germany had to obtain, of course, the approval of the Gestapo; in fact, Herzlia acted under the protection of the Gestapo. One day, a group of SS attacked a Betar summer camp. The head of the movement then complained to the Gestapo and, a few days later, the secret police declared that the SS in question had been punished. The Gestapo asked the Betar what compensation would seem most adequate. The movement asked that the recent prohibition that had struck them, forbidding them to wear brown shirts, be lifted; their request was granted." Source : Ben-Yeruham, "Le livre de Betar" T. II, p. 350.
A circular issued by the Wilhelmstrasse indicated:
"The goals that this category of Jews have set themselves (those Jews who oppose assimilation and favor a regrouping of their co-religionaries within a nation), with the Zionists in the front rank, are those leastdistant from the goals pursued in reality by Germany's policy towards the Jews." Source : Circular letter by Bulow-Schwante to all the Reich diplomatic missions. #83. February 28,1934.
"There is no reason," wrote Bulow-Schwante to the Ministry of the Interior, "to impede by administrative measures the Zionist activity in Germany ; for Zionism is not in conflict with the National-Socialist program, whose object is to make the Jews leave Germany progressively." Source : Letter number ZU 83-21. 28/8, April 13, 1935.
These directives confirmed previous measures and were applied scrupulously. By virtue of the privileged status of Zionism in Germany, the Bavarian Gestapo addressed the following circular to the police on January 28,1935:
"By reason of their activity orientated towards emigration to Palestine, the members of the Zionist organization mustnot be treated with the harshness needed in dealing with the members of German Jewish (assimilationist) organizations." Source : Kurt Grossmann : "Sionistes et non sionistes sous la loi nazie dans les années 30" Yearbook.Vol. VI, p.310.
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"The Zionist organization of German Jews had a legal existence until 1938, five years after the advent of Hitler....
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The "Jüdiche Rundschau" (the German Zionist newspaper) came out until 1938."
Source : Leibowitz : "Israel et Judaisme". Ed. Desclée de Brouwer, 1993. p. 116.
In exchange for their official recognition as sole representatives of the Jewish community, the Zionist leaders offered to break the boycott which the world anti-Fascists were trying to organize.
Economic collaboration began in 1933 : two companies were created : the "Haavara Company" at Tel Aviv and the "Paltreu", in Berlin. The mechanism of the operation was the following : a Jew wanting to emigrate would deposit a minimum of 1,000 pounds sterling at the Wasserman Bank in Berlin or in the Warburg bank in Hamburg. With this sum, Jewish exporters could buy German goods for Palestine, and pay the corresponding amount in Palestinian pounds into the Haavara account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank at Tel Aviv. When the immigrant arrived in Palestine, he received the equivalent of the sum he had deposited in Germany.
Several future Israeli prime ministers took part in the "Haavara" undertaking, including Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharret (who was then called Moshe Shertok), Golda Meir (who supported it from New York), and Levi Eshkol, who was its representative in Berlin. Source: "Ben Gourion et Shertok, dans Black": L'accord de la "havaara", p.294. Quoted by Tom Segev in "Le septième million", (Ed. Liana Levi. French translation. 1993, p. 30 and 595).
The operation was advantageous for both parties : the Nazis thus succeeded in breaking the blockade (the Zionists managed to sell German merchandise even in Britain); whereas the Zionists were able to operate the "selective" immigration they desired : only millionaires were able to emigrate, their capital providing the funds needed to develop Zionist colonization in Palestine. In accordance with the goals of Zionism, it was more important to save Jewish capital from Nazi Germany that would permit the development of their undertaking, than to save the lives of poor Jews, unable to work or fight, who would have been a burden.
This policy of collaboration lasted until 1941, in other words eight years after Hitler's rise to power. Eichmann liaisoned with Kastner. The Eichmann trial revealed to some extent the mechanism of this connivance, of these "exchanges" between Zionist Jews "useful" to the creation of a Jewish State (wealthy personalities, technicians and youngsters who could serve to reinforce an army, etc.). with a mass of Jews who, being less favored, were left in Hitler's clutches.
The president of the committee, Ytzhak Gruenbaum, declared on January 18, 1943:
"Zionism comes before everything else.. " "They're going to say I'm an anti-Semite," Gruenbaum answered, "that I don't want to save the Exile, that I don't have a Warm Yiddish heart (...) Let them say what they want. I won't demand the sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Judaism. And I think that whoever demands such things accomplishes an anti-Zionist action." Source : Gruenbaum: "Jours de destruction", p. 68.
This was also Ben Gurion's point of view:
"The Zionist's task is not to save the "rest" of Israel which finds itself in Europe, but to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people."
(Quoted by Tom Segev. op. cit., p. 158.).
"The leaders of the Jewish Agency agreed on the fact that the minority which could be saved had to be chosen according to the needs of the Zionist project in Palestine." Source: Idem p.125.
The conclusion of Isaiah Trunk's book : "Judenrat" (MacMillan, New York 1972) was that:
"According to Freudiger's calculations, fifty percent of the Jews could have escaped if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish councils." (p.141).
Significantly, at the time of the 50th anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, Yitzhak Rabin asked Lech Walesa not to let one of the co-leaders of the insurrection, Marek Edelman, make a speech.
In 1993, Marek Edelman had been interviewed by Edward Alter for the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz". In this interview, he recalled those who had been the true instigators and heroes of the Warsaw ghetto's "Jewish fighters' committee" :
"Socialists of the Bund, anti-Zionists, Communists, Trotskyites, Mihal Rosenfeld, Mala Zimetbaum, Edelman and a minority of Left-wing Zionists from the Poalei Zion and the Hashomer Hatzair."
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"It was they who fought against the Nazis with weapons, as did the Jewish volunteers in the international brigades of Spain. Over 30% of the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were Jews, who were attacked at the time by the Zionist press because they fought in Spain instead of going to Palestine."
Source : "Jewish Life", April 1938, p. 11.
2,250 of the fighters in the Polish Dombrovski brigade, out of a total of 5,000 Poles, were Jews.
These heroic Jews, fought on all fronts side by side with the anti-fascist forces of the world. And yet, the Zionist leaders declared in an article by their London representatives entitled :
"Must Jews take part in the anti-Fascist movements?" "NO !...",
setting a single goal:
"the construction of the land of Israel".
In his autobiography, the President of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Goldman, described his dramatic meeting with the Czech Prime Minister, Edward Benes, in 1935. Benes accused the Zionists of having broken the boycott of Hitler with the "Haavara" (the transfer agreements) and blamed the refusal of the world Zionist Organization to organize resistance against the Nazis:
"I have had to take part in many painful meetings in my life, but I have never felt as miserable and ashamed as during those two hours. I felt with every fiber of my being that Benes was right." Source : Nahum Goldman. "Autobiographie", op.cit. pp. 157- 158. Ibid, p.260.
The Zionists, counting on Mussolini's hostility to England, established contact with him as early as 1922. He had received them after his march on Rome in October, on December 20th 1922.
Source : Ruth Bondy, "The Emissary: a life of Enzo Sereni" (p.45).
Mussolini received Weizmann on January 3rd 1923, and another time on September 17th 1926; Nahum Goldman, president of the World Zionist Organization, had a meeting with Mussolini on October 26th, 1927, where the Italian leader told him :
"I will help you to create this Jewish state." (Nahum Goldman : "Autobiographie", op.cit., p. 170).
This collaboration was already a form of sabotage against the international anti-Fascist struggle. It subordinated the entire Zionist policy to the sole design of building a Jewish state in Palestine. Its design remained unalteredduring the war, even when Hitler's persecution of European Jews was at its worst.
When the Jews were deported from Hungary, Rudolf Kastner, the vice-president of the Zionist organization, negotiated with Eichmann on the following basis : If Eichmann allowed the departure to Palestine of 1,684 "useful" Jews who would help in the construction of the future state of Israel (capitalists, technicians, soldiers, etc...) Kastner would allow Eichmann to make 460,000 Hungarians believe that they were not being deported to Auschwitz but simply being transferred.
At the time of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi recalled that Kastner had intervened on behalf of one of his Nazi interlocutors : one of Himmler's henchmen, Standartenführer Kurt Becher, escapedpunishment thanks to Kastner's testimony at the Nuremberg Trial.
The Judge was formal:
"There was no truth or good faith in Kastner's testimony...Kastner deliberately committed perjury in his testimony before this court when he denied that he had intervened on behalf of Becher. Furthermore, he concealed this vital fact : his action on behalf of Becher was made in the name of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress...It is clear that Kastner's recommendation was not made on a personal basis but also in the name of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress...and this is why Becher was released by the Allies."
After the verdict, Israeli opinion was shaken. In the newspaper "Haaretz", Dr. Moshe Keren wrote on July 14th 1955 :
"Kastner must be tried for collaboration with the Nazis..." But the evening paper "Yediot Aharonot" (23rd June, 1955) clearly explained why this was impossible. "If Kastner is tried, the entire government might collapse before the nation, following what this trial will uncover."
What would be discovered was that Kastner had not acted alone but with the agreement of the other Zionist leaders who were members of the government at the time of the trial. The only way to prevent Kastner from talking and causing a scandal was for him to disappear. And indeed, he died at just the right moment, after which the Israeli Government introduced an appeal to rehabilitate him. The Supreme Court granted the appeal.
In 1940, to arouse indignation against the English, who had decided to save the Jews threatened by Hitler by taking them to Mauritius, the Zionist leaders of the "Hagannah" (led by Ben Gurion) did not hesitate to blow up the ship when it called at Haifa on December 25th 1940, causing the death of 252 Jews and English crewmembers. Source: Dr. Herzl Rosenblum, director of "Yediot Aharonoth", revelation made in 1958 and justified in "Jewish Newsletter", N.Y., November 1958.
In 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being slaughtered, the US Congress finally got around to proposing a rescue commission. Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of American Zionism’s most important spokesmen, "came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it did not mention Palestine." (Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators p. 242). The romantic chauvinism of 19th century nationalist ideology came home to roost in the politicking of a liberal reform rabbi. Here, both murderers and the spokesmen for their victims emerged from the same ideological currents.
In 1941, Yitzhak Shamir (later on, 7th prime minister of Israel) committed "an unforgivable crime from the moral point of view: he preached an alliance with Hitler, with Nazi Germany, against Great Britain." While still considering themselves part of the Irgun, the Sternists sent a proposal of alliance to the Nazis."The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich," the Stern document read, "offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side." It adds that "the NMO [Irgun] is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure".
Stern Gang asking Nazi Germany for alliance between both groups.
Source: “The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics, and Terror 1940-1949” by Joseph Heller who is a professor in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Yitzhak Yzernitsky — later to call himself Yitzhak Shamir, one of the longest serving Prime Minister of Israel, became the operations commander of the Stern Gang after Avraham Stern was killed by the British army in February of 1942. Under Shamir’s leadership, 14 assassinations were attempted on British officials with two successful ones, of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, sitting in Cairo, and the UN Representative to Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, who received three bullets in the heart on the order of Stern’s operations commander Yitzhak Shamir.
Count Folke Bernadotte recognised universal human rights and advocated for the Palestinian right of return to their lands and properties they were dispossessed and ethnically cleansed from by the Zionists at that time.
In early 1948, Jewish paramilitary forces began to seize more land in Palestine. By the end of July, more than 400,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee their homes, and their plight as refugees had just begun.
In May of that year, Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte had been appointed as the UN Mediator in Palestine. His mission was to seek a peaceful settlement. The Count surveyed devastated Palestinian villages and visited refugee camps in both Palestine and Jordan. The scale of the humanitarian disaster became apparent, as he witnessed cramp living conditions, long queues for basic food and scarce medical aid.
Count Bernadotte was no stranger to human disaster; with the Red Cross he had rescued over 30,000 prisoners of war from Nazi concentration camps. Now he advocated the Palestinian's right to return to their homes.
In the first Progress Report dated 16 September 1948 submitted by the UN-appointed Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, the Mediator recognized the right of return as key to a resolution of the conflict in Palestine. Bernadotte wrote:
"No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the homes from which he has been dislodged. It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the Right to Return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries."
The Count's first proposal argued for fixed boundaries through negotiation, an economic union between both states, and the return of Palestinian refugees - the proposal was turned down.
On 17 September, the day following his UN report, Count Bernadotte's motorcade was ambushed in Jerusalem. He was shot and liquidated by terrorists of the Jewish Stern gang.
The killing was approved by the three-man 'center' of Lehi: Yitzhak Yezernitsky (the future Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir), Nathan Friedmann (also called Natan Yellin-Mor) and Yisrael Eldad (also known as Scheib).
Menachem Begin, founder of Likud, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel and a leader of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, honored Stern by putting his portrait on a postage stamp.
The Charter of the Stern Gang, or more accurately, the principles promulgated by Stern, included the establishment of a Jewish state "from the Nile to the Euphrates", the ‘transfer of the Palestinian Arabs to regions outside of the Jewish state, and the building of the Third Temple in Jerusalem. It maintained offices outside of the Middle East – including Warsaw, Paris, London, and New York City, the latter headed by Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu’s father.
Stern is still revered today in Israel, and has a settlement named in his honor, as well as a postage stamp.
When Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s future Prime Minister in the 1980s, was asked to explain their collaboration with the Fascists, he replied:
”The enemy of my enemy is my friend.“(Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete , p.464).
Mussolini’s fascist friend Ze'ev Jabotinsky was a Russian Revisionist Zionist leader, who established several Zionist organizations in Palestine, including Betar and Irgun. The former currently has a football club that calls itself the most racist club in the world, and the latter was a Zionist Jewish terrorist organization that committed bombings and massacres against Palestinian civilians.
Jabotinsky collaborated with the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini and both supported each others ideologies. As a matter of fact, there was an entire Naval Academy in fascist Italy to train Zionist militias. This was the Betar Naval Academy, and it was built and operated with fascist blessings. Many future commanders of the Israeli navy would train here under fascist supervision. The cadets at this academy were supportive of Mussolini’s regime, and supported Italy’s expansionist colonial wars in Africa, most notably the second Italo-Ethiopian war.
Arthur Ruppin, one of the founders of the Zionist Brit Shalom Peace Movement, believed that realization of Zionism required "racial purity" of Jews, and was inspired by works of anti-semitic thinkers, including some Nazis. Ruppin personally met Hans F. K. Günther, one of many racist thinkers who greatly influenced Nazism. Ruppin believed in numerous "Jewish types," performed skull measurements and believed Ashkenazi Jews were made of various racial subclasses, according to nasal structure.
He distinguished between "Racial Jews" and "Jewish types", and believed Ashkenazi Jews to be superior to Yemeni Jews. His concepts included dividing Jews into "white, black and yellow" metaracial categories. Ruppin wrote that the Jewish race should be "purified", and he stated that "only the racially pure come to the land."
After becoming head of the Palestine Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he argued against immigration of Ethiopian Jews because of their lack of "blood connection" and that Yemenite Jews should be limited to menial labor.
Due to the Holocaust, historiography in Israel played down or ignored altogether this aspect of Ruppin's life.
Sources: Tom Segev, The Makings of History / Revisiting Arthur Ruppin. Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (2007) 2018 p.125, n.19. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Israel’s Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering Seth J. Frantzman April 21, 2014.
The Zionist ideology is still in keeping with the founding doctrine of Theodore Herzl, who constantly harped on the theme in his "Diaries". As early as 1895, he declared to a German interlocutor (Speidel):
"I understand anti-Semitism. We Jews have remained, even if it is not our fault, foreign bodies in different nations. " Source: ("Diaries", p. 9).
A few pages further, he is even more explicit:
"Anti-Semites will become our surest friends, anti-Semitic countries our allies." Source: ("Diaries", p.19).