From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  It is therefore not surprising that Zionist and anti-assimilationist Jews were in favor of the Nuremberg laws, which prohibited marriages between Jews and Germans in the Reich. Joachim Prinz, a Zionist ideologist of German Jewry, who became president of the American Jewish Congress (1958–1966), writes in his book Wir Juden (“We the Jews”) published in Berlin in 1934: “We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. […] For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations.”301 Prinz left Germany in 1937 and immediately justified himself in an article for the journal Young Zionist titled “Zionism under the Nazi Government”: “The government announced very solemnly that there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!”302

  The relationship between Nazism and Judaism was well known in Jewish circles of the 1930s. No one expressed it better than the American rabbi Harry Waton in a book published in 1939 by the Committee for the Preservation of the Jews, A Program for the Jews: “Nazism is an imitation of Judaism; Nazism adopted the principles and ideas of Judaism with which to destroy Judaism and the Jews.” “The Nazi philosophy starts out with the postulate: The blood of a race determines the nature, course of evolution and the destiny of that race. […] whether consciously or not, the Nazis took this theory from the Bible itself.” Waton goes further still: “Hitler’s declaration that the Jewish consciousness is poison to the Aryan races is the deepest insight that the Western world has yet achieved in its own nature; and his capacity to realize this is the proof of his genius as well as the secret of his power and of the curious fascination which his personality exerts. […] it is not the practical power or wealth of the Jews that he fears, but the character of the Jewish mind. […] It is the hidden penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Gentile mind that is the danger; and it is a danger because the ‘Aryan’ mind cannot resist it, but must succumb.”303 Waton, in fact, misunderstands Hitler’s real views on Jewishness, which, in private, were less racist than his own: “We use the term Jewish race,” Hitler wrote to a friend, “merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. […] The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit.”304

  Nazism and Zionism shared more than one ideological foundation; they had as their common enemy the assimilationist Jew. They also had a common goal: the emigration of Jews from Germany. Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, wrote in 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps, the official SS journal: “We must separate Jewry into two categories: the Zionists and those who favour being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state. […] The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.”305 It would be exaggerating to say that Hitler was ideologically a Zionist, for he had written in Mein Kampf in 1923: “For while Zionism tries to make the other part of the world believe that the national self-consciousness of the Jew finds satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian State, the Jews again most slyly dupe the stupid goyim. They have no thought of building up a Jewish State in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, withdrawn from the seizure of others : a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.”306 Nevertheless, the Nazis were largely favorable to the project originally formulated by Herzl, who had boasted in his diary: “I believe I have found the solution of the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one,” repeating further that Zionism was “the only possible, final, and successful solution of the Jewish Question.”307 The first Zionist association inspired by Herzl’s book, the National-jüdische Vereinigung Köln, declared as its goal in 1897: “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question lies therefore in the establishment of the Jewish State.”308

  The Nazis naturally wholeheartedly supported Jewish emigration to Palestine. In the spring of 1933, Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, one of the earliest SS officers, spent six months in Palestine in the company of Zionist Kurt Tuchler. On his return, he wrote for Angriff (a journal founded by Joseph Goebbels) a series of twelve articles expressing great admiration for the pioneering spirit of Zionist Jews. It is not surprising, therefore, that when in 1933, the American Jewish Congress declared economic war on Germany and organized the boycott of German products, the Zionist Federation of Germany addressed a memorandum to “the New German State” (dated June, 21) condemning the boycott, and expressing sympathy for the Nazi ideology: “Our acknowledgment of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group and reject any trespasses in the cultural domain.” “The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda—such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways—is in essence un-Zionist.”309

  As Hannah Arendt has shown in her controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Nazi policy was pro-Zionist until 1938, and “all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed ‘Reichsvereinigung’ [compulsory organization of all Jews in Nazi Germany] were held by Zionists.” This created “a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.” Arendt was the first Jewish intellectual to unveil one of the Zionists’ darkest secrets, which has been since abundantly documented (e.g., by Tom Segev in The Seventh Million): “There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a ‘Haavarah’, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him. The alternative was the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five percent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of ‘goods made in Germany’.”310 Some sixty thousand wealthy Jews benefited from this Haavara Agreement, making a decisive contribution to the Jewish colonization of Palestine.

  This collaboration between Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency and Hitler’s Nazi government started in 1933 and ended officially in 1938 with Great Britain’s entry into the war. But the Lehi or Stern Gang, a dissident faction of the terrorist Irgun, led by future head of state Yitzhak Shamir, continued to bet on the Germans. In a document dated January 11, 1941, it recognized that “The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question,” envisioning “the establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by treaty with the German Reich,” and, with that aim, “offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.” The talks came to an end with the arrest by the British authorities of several Lehi members, including Yitzhak Shamir, for “terrorism and collaboration with the Nazi enemy.”311

  In London and Washington, of course, the Zionist movement, led by Chaim Weizmann, supported the economic war against Germany. Weizmann revived the
winning strategy of the First World War, attempting to monetize Jewish influence in England to bring the United States into the war. In a letter to Churchill dated September 10, 1941, he wrote: “I have spent months in America, traveling up and down the country […]. There is only one big ethnic group which is willing to stand, to a man, for Great Britain, and a policy of ‘all-out-aid’ for her: the five million American Jews. […] It has been repeatedly acknowledged by British Statesmen that it was the Jews who, in the last war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain. They are keen to do it—and may do it—again..”312

  The quid pro quo for this Jewish influence was the formation of an official “Jewish Army” among the Allied troops. This “Jewish Army” was an idea of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had already suggested it to the British in 1917 and made it public again in 1940 in his book The War and the Jew.313 The purpose, of course, was to use this official Jewish army after the war as an argument for the foundation of Israel, for whoever has an army must necessarily have a state. The failure of this claim did not prevent the founders of the Jewish state from inscribing in their Declaration of Independence in 1948: “In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.”

  In fact, the Zionists clashed with the British, not the Germans, in their efforts to increase the Jewish population in Palestine. Jewish immigration consistently surpassed British quotas, and accelerated with the rise of Nazism: from 82,000 colonists for the period 1924–1931 to 217,000 for the period 1932–1938. In 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, the population of Palestine was already one-third Jewish. The British government then issued a White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next five years. This provoked not only a strong protest from Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency, but also the mobilization of military groups (Haganah, and its offshoot the Irgun) against the British authorities in Palestine.314

  An example: In November 1940, the British prevented three vessels chartered by the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration (under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann), carrying 3,600 Jews from Nazi-occupied areas, from landing at the port of Haifa. On November 25, while the British were transferring these illegal immigrants to their ship, the Patria, with the intention of provisionally taking them to Mauritius, the Haganah sank the ship, drowning 267 of the 1,800 Jewish passengers already on board. The Haganah claimed that the passengers themselves had scuttled their ship, preferring death to the prospect of not being able to debark in the promised land. Then, forced to admit responsibility, the Hagana pleaded a mistake: the intention supposedly was simply to damage the ship and prevent the departure of the refugees.

  English opposition prevented Hitler from considering the transfer of all Jews from Europe to Palestine, especially since he had always hoped for an alliance with England against the Soviet Union: “In Europe there are only two possible allies for Germany, England and Italy, for the whole of the future,” he wrote in 1923 in Mein Kampf. Moreover, Hitler did not want to alienate the Arab States, which were hostile to the Judaization of Palestine. On the other hand, the British and American Zionists hampered President Roosevelt’s efforts to find solutions to the Jewish refugee crisis by convening the Evian Conference in July 1938 (International Conference on Political and Economic Problems Caused by the Expulsion of Jews from the Reich). Weizmann had declared at the Zionist Congress in London in 1937: “The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration.” But, considering emigration only to Palestine, he added: “From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people. […] The old will pass. […] Only the branch of the young shall survive…”315 Ben-Gurion protested against the plan to open all borders to the persecuted Jews on the pretext that “pity will take over and the energy of the people will be channeled to save Jews from various countries. Zionism will be removed from the agenda not only in public opinion in Great Britain and the United States, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow the separation of the refugee problem from the problem of Palestine, we will endanger the existence of Zionism.”316 The failure of the Evian Conference, by preventing the escape of German Jews, made war inevitable: the hundred deaths of “The Night of Broken Glass” (November 9–10, 1938), a pogrom triggered by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew, provided Roosevelt a pretext to formally impose a complete economic embargo on Germany, recall his ambassador from Berlin, and announce the construction of ten thousand planes. When war broke out, there remained in Germany about 275,000 Jews who, for want of a visa, were unable to emigrate.

  In May 1940, Heinrich Himmler drafted a project for Hitler: “A great emigration of all the Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere.” He affirmed his “inner conviction” that it was necessary “to reject as contrary to the Germanic spirit and as impossible the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people” (a method demonstrated by the Ukrainian genocide of 1932–33, which left more than seven million dead). According to the French historian Florent Brayard, this is “a particularly important document to gauge the Nazi projects,” which proves that there was at that time “no determined genocidal perspective.” After the armistice with France, the territorial solution envisaged was Madagascar—an underpopulated and almost unexploited French colony. The Madagascar Plan envisioned deporting one million European Jews every year over four years. The plan was postponed until after the hoped-for victory against England, since its realization required mastery of the seas. After the opening of the Eastern Front in 1941, it gave way to the plan of mass deportation to the concentration camps of Poland.

  Hitler’s Prophecy

  In the absence of a written document, historians are still debating the date when the expression “final solution,” borrowed from German Zionists who meant mass emigration to Palestine, would have become a Nazi code word for “extermination.” Brayard hypothesizes that between 1941 and 1942, “The final solution of the Jewish question,” the systematic murder of all European Jews, was conceived and implemented in absolute secrecy, or at least the greatest possible. But he notes that in Joseph Goebbels’ diary, until October 1943 Hitler’s close friend was persuaded that the fate of the deported Jews, once the war was over, would be expulsion to the east of Germany and its annexed territories.317

  Given that in January 1942 the project of exterminating the Jews, through forced labor, sterilization and/or outright elimination, was adopted by Hitler and some of his entourage, one of the key questions historians must elucidate is that of the ideological gestation of this project. In an earlier work on the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” Florent Brayard rightly emphasizes a famous prophecy announced by Hitler from the Reichstag tribune on January 30, 1939. After recalling that he had often been a prophet, as when he predicted his own rise to power, Hitler added: “I want to be a prophet again: If international Jewish finance inside and outside Europe were to once again cast peoples into World War, the result would not be the Bolshevization of the world, and thus the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” This “prophetic warning to Jewry!” as the headline of Völkische Beobachter put it the following day, was widely distributed and discussed, and extracts were inserted in a revised version of the propaganda film The Wandering Jew. This “prophecy” was a warning to England and France, who nevertheless entered the war on September 3, 1939. Hitler renewed his threat on January 30, 1941, mainly for the United States. The New York Times, which the Nazis held as the leader of the “Jewish press,” responded to Hitler’s speech with an article that was tantamount to challenging him to act on his word: “There is not a single precedent to prove he will either keep a promise or fulfill a threat. If there is any guarantee in his record, in fact, it is that the
one thing he will not do is the thing he says he will do.”318

  The United States entered the war in December under the pretext of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was on December 12, 1941, that Hitler made the following remarks during a long speech, which we know from the notes taken by Goebbels and transcribed in his diary: “As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer is determined to make a blank slate. He prophesized to the Jews that they would suffer destruction if they provoked another world war. It was not just empty words. World war is here, so the destruction of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” Historians like Christopher Browning believe that if one were to specify the moment when Hitler and his entourage rallied to the idea of exterminating all the Jews of Europe, it was just after the US entry into the war. Hitler’s prophecy was the key to this development, not only among the elite of the Reich but also in German public opinion. For this prophecy, recalled Brayard, “was an object of recurring attention in Nazi propaganda, which, at certain key moments, never ceased to repeat it.” Beginning in 1942, many Nazi dignitaries referred to it, in private or in public, to call for the destruction of European Jewry. Nazi Germany was, as it were, contaminated by that prophetic spirit that, already in the biblical tradition, nourished genocidal projects. “By launching his prophecy, Hitler had thus constituted a singular and constraining discursive space. True, this prophecy could be mobilized for propaganda purposes, but at the time of its realization, its internal logic determined the forms that this use might take. Moreover, in choosing to reiterate it, Hitler had put at stake his very status as a prophet, the oracular power of his word, the specific nature of his power: It was not possible, with the world war having come, that the prophecy should not come true. [. . .] Indeed, this constraint was sufficient to initiate a phase of radicalization of the anti-Jewish policy.”319 What this analysis conceals is the cynical role of the Allies and their press, who pretended not to take seriously this prophecy of the Holocaust, while at the same time taunting Hitler with it—taunts that were clearly driven by the Jewish elite, and that in a sense caught Hitler in the trap of his own prophecy.