American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New York Times
as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article
about the controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Back
in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white
print publication, lacking the large color photographs of rap stars and
long stories about dieting techniques that fill so much of today’s news
coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder edge in its Middle
East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir’s predecessor Menacham
Begin had allowed his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into
invading Lebanon and besieging Beirut, and the subsequent massacre of
Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps
had outraged the world and angered America’s government. This
eventually led to Begin’s resignation, with Shamir, his Foreign
Minister, taking his place.
Prior
to his surprising 1977 election victory, Begin had spent decades in the
political wilderness as an unacceptable right-winger, and Shamir had an
even more extreme background, with the American mainstream media freely
reporting his long involvement in all sorts of high-profile
assassinations and terrorist attacks during the 1940s, painting him as a
very bad man indeed.
Given
Shamir’s notorious activities, few revelations would have shocked me,
but this one did. Apparently, during the late 1930s, Shamir and his
small Zionist faction had become great admirers of the Italian Fascists
and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they had made
repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940
and 1941, hoping to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine
affiliate, and undertake a campaign of attacks and espionage against the
local British forces, then share in the political booty after Hitler’s
inevitable triumph.
Now the Times
clearly viewed Shamir in a very negative light, but it seemed extremely
unlikely to me that they would have published such a remarkable story
without being absolutely sure of their facts. Among other things, there
were long excerpts from the official letters sent to Mussolini
ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and
France that he was opposing, and assuring Il Duce that such
ridiculous political notions would have no future place in the
totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to establish under his
auspices in Palestine.
As it
happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger
geopolitical issues at the time, and given the small size of Shamir’s
Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of those efforts. But
the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State having spent
his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly
something that sticks in one’s mind, not quite conforming to the
traditional narrative of that era which I had always accepted.
Most
remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seems to have had
only a relatively minor impact upon his political standing within
Israeli society. I would think that any American political figure found
to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during the
Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the
resulting political scandal, and the same would surely be true for
politicians in Britain, France, or most other western nations. But
although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press,
especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines,
apparently most Israelis took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir
stayed in office for another year, then later served a second, much
longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel
apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most
Americans, let alone most American Jews.
Around
that same time, a second intriguing example of this quite different
Israeli perspective towards the Nazis also came to my attention. In
1983, Amoz Oz, often described as Israel’s greatest novelist, had
published In the Land of Israel to glowing reviews. This book
was a collection of lengthy interviews with various representative
figures in Israeli society, both moderate and extreme, as well as some
coverage of the Palestinians who also lived among them.
Of
these ideological profiles, one of the shortest but most widely
discussed was that of an especially hard-line political figure, unnamed
but almost universally believed to be Ariel Sharon, a conclusion
certainly supported by the personal details and physical description
provided. Near the very beginning, that figure mentioned that people of
his ideological ilk had recently been denounced as “Judeo-Nazis” by a
prominent liberal Israeli academic, but rather than reject that label,
he fully welcomed it. So the subject generally became known in public
discussions as the “Judeo-Nazi.”
That
he described himself in such terms was hardly an exaggeration, since he
rather gleefully advocated the slaughter of millions of Israel’s
enemies, and the vast expansion of Israeli territory by conquest of
neighboring lands and expulsion of their populations, along with the
free use of nuclear weapons if they or anyone else too strongly resisted
such efforts. In his bold opinion, the Israelis and Jews in general
were just too soft and meek, and needed to regain their place in the
world by once again becoming a conquering people, probably hated but
definitely feared. To him, the large recent massacre of Palestinian
women and children at Sabra and Shatila was of no consequence
whatsoever, and the most unfortunate aspect of the incident was that the
killers had been Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies rather than
Israeli soldiers themselves.
Now
rhetorical excess is quite common among politicians and a shroud of
pledged anonymity will obviously loosen many tongues. But can anyone
imagine an American or other Western public figure talking in such
terms, let alone someone who moves in higher political circles? These
days, Donald Trump sometimes Tweets out a crude misspelled insult at
2am, and the American media is aghast in horror. But given that his
administration leaks like a sieve, if he routinely boasted to his
confidants about possibly slaughtering millions, we surely would have
heard about it. For that matter, there seems not the slightest evidence
that the original German Nazis ever spoke in such ways privately, let
alone while a journalist was carefully taking notes. But the
“Judeo-Nazis” of Israel are another story.
As
near as I can recall, the last even slightly prominent figure in
American public life who declared himself a “Nazi” was George Lincoln
Rockwell during the 1960s, and he was much more of a political
performance artist than an actual political leader. Even as
marginalized a figure as David Duke has always hotly denied such an
accusation. But apparently politics in Israel is played by different
rules.
In
any event, Sharon’s purported utterances seem to have had little
negative impact upon his subsequent political career, and after spending
some time in the political wilderness after the Lebanon disaster, he
eventually served five years as Prime Minister during 2001-2006,
although by that later date his views were regularly denounced as too
soft and compromising due to the steady rightward drift of the Israeli
political spectrum.
Over the years I’ve occasionally made half-hearted attempts to locate the Times article about Shamir that had long stuck in my memory, but have had no success, either because it was removed from the Times
archives or more likely because my mediocre search skills proved
inadequate. But I’m almost certain that the piece had been prompted by
the 1983 publication of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist of the Trotskyite persuasion and
Jewish origins. I only very recently discovered that book, which really
tells an extremely interesting story.
Brenner,
born in 1937, has spent his entire life as an unreconstructed hard-core
leftist, with his enthusiasms ranging from Marxist revolution to the
Black Panthers, and he is obviously a captive of his views and his
ideology. At times, this background impairs the flow of his text, and
the periodic allusions to “proletarian,” “bourgeoisie,” and “capitalist
classes” sometimes grow a little wearisome, as does his unthinking
acceptance of all the shared beliefs common to his political circle.
But surely only someone with that sort of fervent ideological commitment
would have been willing to devote so much time and effort to
investigating that controversial subject and ignoring the endless
denunciations that resulted, which even included physical assaults by
Zionist partisans.
In
any event, his documentation seems completely airtight, and some years
after the original appearance of his book, he published a companion
volume entitled 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,
which simply provides English translations of all the raw evidence
behind his analytical framework, allowing interested parties to read the
material and draw their own conclusions.
Among
other things, Brenner provides considerable evidence that the larger
and somewhat more mainstream right-wing Zionist faction later led by
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was almost invariably regarded as a
Fascist movement during the 1930s, even apart from its warm admiration
for Mussolini’s Italian regime. This was hardly such a dark secret in
that period given that its main Palestine newspaper carried a regular
column by a top ideological leader entitled “Diary of a Fascist.”
During one of the major international Zionist conferences, factional
leader Vladimir Zabotinsky entered the hall with his brown-shirted
followers in full military formation, leading the chair to ban the
wearing of uniforms in order to avoid a riot, and his faction was soon
defeated politically and eventually expelled from the Zionist umbrella
organization. This major setback was largely due to the widespread
hostility the group had aroused after two of its members were arrested
by British police for the recent assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, one
of the highest-ranking Zionist officials based in Palestine.
Indeed,
the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward
assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal
behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival,
a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a
bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had
acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top
Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his
faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s,
successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the
Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though
they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics;
and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the
same. Given that background, it was hardly surprising that Shamir later
served as director of assassinations at the Israeli Mossad during
1955-1965, so if the Mossad did indeed play a major role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he was very likely involved.
The
cover of the 2014 paperback edition of Brenner’s book displays the
commemorative medal struck by Nazi Germany to mark its Zionist alliance,
with a Star-of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the obverse.
But oddly enough, this symbolic medallion actually had absolutely no
connection with the unsuccessful attempts by Shamir’s small faction to
arrange a Nazi military alliance during World War II.
Although
the Germans paid little attention to the entreaties of that minor
organization, the far larger and more influential mainstream Zionist
movement of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion was something else
entirely. And during most of the 1930s, these other Zionists had formed
an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, based upon an
obvious commonality of interests. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s
one percent Jewish population as a disruptive and potentially dangerous
element which he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed as good a
destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very
similar objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in
Palestine obviously required both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial
investment.
After
Hitler had been named Chancellor in 1933, outraged Jews worldwide had
quickly launched an economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its
knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running the banner
headline “Judea Declares War on Germany.” Jewish political and economic
influence, then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths
of the Great Depression, impoverished Germany needed to export or die,
so a large scale boycott in major German markets posed a potentially
serious threat. But this exact situation provided Zionist groups with
an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that
trade embargo, and they demanded favorable terms for the export of
high-quality German manufactured goods to Palestine, together with
accompanying German Jews. Once word of this major Ha’avara or
“Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist
Convention, many Jews and Zionists were outraged, and it led to various
splits and controversies. But the economic deal was too good to resist,
and it went forward and quickly grew.
The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier
cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment
in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide
impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing
Jewish financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably
suggests that without Hitler’s financial backing, the nascent Jewish
colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died
during that difficult period.
Such a conclusion leads to fascinating hypotheticals. When I first stumbled across references to the Ha’avara
Agreement on websites here and there, one of the commenters mentioning
the issue half-jokingly suggested that if Hitler had won the war,
statues would surely have been built to him throughout Israel and he
would today be recognized by Jews everywhere as the heroic Gentile
leader who had played the central role in reestablishing a national
homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine after almost 2000 years of
bitter exile.
This
sort of astonishing counter-factual possibility is not nearly as
totally absurd as it might sound to our present-day ears. We must
recognize that our historical understanding of reality is shaped by the
media, and media organs are controlled by the winners of major wars and
their allies, with inconvenient details often excluded to avoid
confusing the public. It is undeniably true that in his 1924 book Mein Kampf,
Hitler had written all sorts of hostile and nasty things about Jews,
especially those who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, but
when I read the book back in high school, I was a little surprised to
discover that these anti-Jewish sentiments hardly seemed central to his
text. Furthermore, just a couple of years earlier, a vastly more
prominent public figure such as British Minister Winston Churchill had published sentiments nearly as hostile and nasty, focusing on the monstrous crimes being committed by Bolshevik Jews. In Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears,
I was surprised to discover that the author of the famous Balfour
Declaration, the foundation of the Zionist project, was apparently also
quite hostile to Jews, with an element of his motivation probably being
his desire to exclude them from Britain.
Once
Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other
political organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party
and Nazi political symbols being legally permitted. But a special
exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local Zionist Party
was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist
uniforms, and Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there
was strict censorship of all German publications, but the weekly Zionist
newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street corners. The
clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the
proper political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while
Zionist National Socialism would fill the same role for the tiny Jewish
minority.
In
1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six
months visiting the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return,
his very favorable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were
published as a massive 12-part-series in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff,
the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, bearing the descriptive
title “A Nazi Goes to Palestine.” In his very angry 1920 critique of
Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued that Zionism was locked
in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and
only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and
Gentile. Based on available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi
leaders seemed to have reached a somewhat similar conclusion by the
mid-1930s.
During
that era extremely harsh sentiments regarding Diaspora Jewry were
sometimes found in rather surprising quarters. After the controversy
surrounding Shamir’s Nazi ties erupted into the headlines, Brenner’s
material became the grist for an important article by Edward Mortimer,
the longtime Middle East expert at the august Times of London, and the 2014 edition of the book includes some choice extracts from Mortimer’s February 11, 1984 Times piece:
Who told a Berlin audience in March 1912 that “each country can absorb only a limited number of Jews, if she doesn’t want disorders in her stomach. Germany already has too many Jews”?No, not Adolf Hitler but Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Organization and later still the first president of the state of Israel.And where might you find the following assertion, originally composed in 1917 but republished as late as 1936: “The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligation, knows no order nor discipline”?Not in Der Sturmer but in the organ of the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer Hatzair.As the above quoted statement reveals, Zionism itself encouraged and exploited self-hatred in the Diaspora. It started from the assumption that anti-Semitism was inevitable and even in a sense justified so long as Jews were outside the land of Israel.It is true that only an extreme lunatic fringe of Zionism went so far as to offer to join the war on Germany’s side in 1941, in the hope of establishing “the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich.” Unfortunately this was the group which the present Prime Minister of Israel chose to join.
The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in the pages of Mein Kampf
were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s founding
fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two
ideological movements was not really so totally surprising.
However, uncomfortable truths do remain uncomfortable. Mortimer had spent nineteen years at the Times,
the last dozen of them as the foreign specialist and leader-writer on
Middle Eastern affairs. But the year after he wrote that article
including those controversial quotations, his career at that newspaper ended, leading to an unusual gap in his employment history, and that development may or may not be purely coincidental.
Also
quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, whose name today probably
ranks as one of the most famous half-dozen Nazis in history, due to his
postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli agents, followed by his public
show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens, Eichmann had
been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying
Hebrew and apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the
years of his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders.
Brenner
is a captive of his ideology and his beliefs, accepting without
question the historical narrative with which he was raised. He seems to
find nothing so strange about Eichmann being a philo-Semitic partner of
the Jewish Zionists during the late 1930s and then suddenly being
transformed into a mass-murderer of the European Jews in the early
1940s, willingly committing the monstrous crimes for which the Israelis
later justly put him to death.
This
is certainly possible, but I really wonder. A more cynical observer
might find it a very odd coincidence that the first prominent Nazi the
Israelis made such an effort to track down and kill had been their
closest former political ally and collaborator. After Germany’s defeat,
Eichmann had fled to Argentina and lived there quietly for a number of
years until his name resurfaced in a celebrated mid-1950s controversy
surrounding one of his leading Zionist partners, then living in Israel
as a respected government official, who was denounced as a Nazi
collaborator, eventually ruled innocent after a celebrated trial, but
later assassinated by former members of Shamir’s faction.
Following
that controversy in Israel, Eichmann supposedly gave a long personal
interview to a Dutch Nazi journalist, and although it wasn’t published
at the time, perhaps word of its existence may have gotten into
circulation. The new state of Israel was just a few years old at that
time, and very politically and economically fragile, desperately
dependent upon the goodwill and support of America and Jewish donors
worldwide. Their remarkable former Nazi alliance was a
deeply-suppressed secret, whose public release might have had absolutely
disastrous consequences.
According to the version of the interview later published as a two-part story in Life Magazine,
Eichmann’s statements seemingly did not touch on the deadly topic of
the 1930s Nazi-Zionist partnership. But surely Israeli leaders must
have been terrified that they might not be so lucky the next time, so we
may speculate that Eichmann’s elimination suddenly became a top
national priority, and he was tracked down and captured in 1960.
Presumably, harsh means were employed to persuade him not to reveal any
of these dangerous pre-war secrets at his Jerusalem trial, and one might
wonder if the reason he was famously kept in an enclosed glass booth
was to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he started to
stray from the agreed upon script. All of this analysis is totally
speculative, but Eichmann’s role as a central figure in the 1930s
Nazi-Zionist partnership is undeniable historical fact.
Just
as we might imagine, America’s overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing
industry was hardly eager to serve as a public conduit for Brenner’s
shocking revelations of a close Nazi-Zionist economic partnership, and
he mentions that his book agent uniformly received rejections from each
firm he approached, based on a wide variety of different excuses.
However, he finally managed to locate an extremely obscure publisher in
Britain willing to take on the project, and his book was released in
1983, initially receiving no reviews other than a couple of harsh and
perfunctory denunciations, though Soviet Izvestia took some interest in his findings until they discovered that he was a hated Trotskyite.
His
big break came when Shamir suddenly became Israel’s Prime Minister, and
he brought his evidence of former Nazi ties to the English-language
Palestinian press, which put it into general circulation. Various
British Marxists, including the notorious “Red Ken” Livingstone of
London, organized a speaking tour for him, and when a group of
right-wing Zionist militants attacked one of the events and inflicted
injuries, the story of the brawl caught the attention of the mainstream
newspapers. Soon afterward the discussion of Brenner’s astonishing
discoveries appeared in the Times of London and entered the international media. Presumably, the New York Times article that had originally caught my eye ran sometime during this period.
Public
relations professionals are quite skilled at minimizing the impact of
damaging revelations, and pro-Israel organizations have no shortage of
such individuals. Just before the 1983 release of his remarkable book,
Brenner suddenly discovered that a young pro-Zionist author named Edwin
Black was furiously working on a similar project, apparently backed by
sufficient financial resources that he was employing an army of fifty
researchers to allow him to complete his project in record time.
Since
the entire embarrassing subject of a Nazi-Zionist partnership had been
kept away from the public eye for almost five decades, this timing
surely seems more than merely coincidental. Presumably word of
Brenner’s numerous unsuccessful efforts at securing a mainstream
publisher during 1982 had gotten around, as had as his eventual success
in locating a tiny one in Britain. Having failed to prevent publication
of such explosive material, pro-Israel groups quietly decided that
their next best option was trying to seize control of the topic
themselves, allowing disclosure of those parts of the story that could
not be concealed but excluding items of greatest danger, while
portraying the sordid history in the best possible light.
Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement,
may have arrived a year later than Brenner’s but was clearly backed by
vastly greater publicity and resources. It was released by Macmillan, a
leading publisher, ran nearly twice the length of Brenner’s short book,
and carried powerful endorsements by leading figures from the firmament
of Jewish activism, including the Simon Weisenthal Center, the Israel
Holocaust Memorial, and the American Jewish Archives. As a consequence,
it received long if not necessarily favorable reviews in influential
publications such as The New Republic and Commentary.
In
all fairness, I should mention that in the Foreword to his book, Black
claims that his research efforts had been totally discouraged by nearly
everyone he approached, and as a consequence, he had been working on the
project with solitary intensity for many years. This implies the
near-simultaneous release of the two books was purely due to chance. But
such a picture is hardly consistent with his glowing testimonials from
so many prominent Jewish leaders, and personally I find Brenner’s claim
that Black was assisted by fifty researchers far more convincing.
Since
both Black and Brenner were describing the same basic reality and
relying upon many of the same documents, in most respects the stories
they tell are generally similar. But Black carefully excludes any
mention of offers of Zionist military cooperation with the Nazis, let
alone the repeated attempts by Shamir’s Zionist faction to officially
join the Axis Powers after the war had broken out, as well as numerous
other details of a particularly embarrassing nature.
Assuming
Black’s book was published for the reasons I suggested, I think that
the strategy of the pro-Israel groups largely succeeded, with his
version of the history seeming to have quickly supplanted Brenner’s
except perhaps in strongly leftist or anti-Zionist circles. Googling
each combination of the title and author, Black’s book gets eight times
as many hits, and his Amazon sales ranks and numbers of reviews are also
larger by roughly that same factor. Most notably, neither the
Wikipedia articles on “The Transfer Agreement” and “The Ha’avara Agreement”
contain any mention of Brenner’s research whatsoever, even though his
book was published earlier, was far broader, and only he provided the
underlying documentary evidence. As a personal example of the current
situation, I was quite unaware of the entire Ha’avara history
until just a few years ago when I encountered some website comments
mentioning Black’s book, leading me to purchase and read it. But even
then, Brenner’s far more wide-ranging and explosive volume remained
totally unknown to me until very recently.
Once
World War II began, this Nazi-Zionist partnership quickly lapsed for
obvious reasons. Germany was now at war with the British Empire, and
financial transfers to British-run Palestine were no longer possible.
Furthermore, the Arab Palestinians had grown quite hostile to the Jewish
immigrants whom they rightfully feared might eventually displace them,
and once the Germans were forced to choose between maintaining their
relationship with a relatively small Zionist movement or winning the
political sympathy of a vast sea of Middle Eastern Arabs and Muslims,
their decision was a natural one. The Zionists faced a similar choice,
and especially once wartime propaganda began so heavily blackening the
German and Italian governments, their long previous partnership was not
something they wanted widely known.
However,
at exactly this same moment a somewhat different and equally
long-forgotten connection between Jews and Nazi Germany suddenly moved
to the fore.
Like
most people everywhere, the average German, whether Jewish or Gentile,
was probably not all that political, and although Zionism had for years
been accorded a privileged place in German society, it is not entirely
clear how many ordinary German Jews paid much attention to it. The tens
of thousands who emigrated to Palestine during that period were
probably motivated as much by economic pressures as by ideological
commitment. But wartime changed matters in other ways.
This
was even more true for the German government. The outbreak of a world
war against a powerful coalition of the British and French empires,
later augmented by both Soviet Russia and the United States, imposed the
sorts of enormous pressures that could often overcome ideological
scruples. A few years ago, I discovered a fascinating 2002 book by
Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, a scholarly
treatment of exactly what the title implies. The quality of this
controversial historical analysis is indicated by the glowing
jacket-blurbs from numerous academic experts and an extremely favorable
treatment by an eminent scholar in The American Historical Review.
Obviously,
Nazi ideology was overwhelmingly centered upon race and considered
racial purity a crucial factor in national cohesion. Individuals
possessing substantial non-German ancestry were regarded with
considerable suspicion, and this concern was greatly amplified if that
admixture was Jewish. But in a military struggle against an opposing
coalition possessing many times Germany’s population and industrial
resources, such ideological factors might be overcome by practical
considerations, and Rigg persuasively argues that some 150,000 half-Jews
or quarter-Jews served in the armed forces of the Third Reich, a
percentage probably not much different than their share of the general
military-age population.
Germany’s
long-integrated and assimilated Jewish population had always been
disproportionately urban, affluent, and well-educated. As a consequence
it is not entirely surprising that a large proportion of these
part-Jewish soldiers who served Hitler were actually combat officers
rather than merely rank-and-file conscripts, and they included at least
15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, and another dozen quarter-Jews
holding those same high ranks. The most notable example was Field
Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s powerful second-in-command, who
played such an important operational role in creating the Luftwaffe.
Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less
substantiated claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his
sister was married to an SS general.
Admittedly,
the racially-elite SS itself generally had far stricter ancestry
standards, with even a trace of non-Aryan parentage normally seen as
disqualifying an individual from membership. But even here, the
situation was sometimes complicated, since there were widespread rumors
that Reinhard Heydrich, the second-ranking figure in that very powerful
organization, actually had considerable Jewish ancestry. Rigg
investigates that claim without coming to any clear conclusions, though
he does seem to think that the circumstantial evidence involved may have
been used by other high-ranking Nazi figures as a point of leverage or
blackmail against Heydrich, who stood as one of the most important
figures in the Third Reich.
As a
further irony, most of these individuals traced their Jewish ancestry
through their father rather than their mother, so although they were not
Jewish according to rabbinical law, their family names often reflected
their partly Semitic origins, though in many cases Nazi authorities
attempted to studiously overlook this glaringly obvious situation. As
an extreme example noted by an academic reviewer of the book, a half-Jew
bearing the distinctly non-Aryan name of Werner Goldberg actually had
his photograph prominently featured in a 1939 Nazi propaganda newspaper,
with the caption describing him as the “The Ideal German Soldier.”
The
author conducted more than 400 personal interviews of the surviving
part-Jews and their relatives, and these painted a very mixed picture of
the difficulties they had encountered under the Nazi regime, which
varied enormously depending upon particular circumstances and the
personalities of those in authority over them. One important source of
complaint was that because of their status, part-Jews were often denied
the military honors or promotions they had rightfully earned. However,
under especially favorable conditions, they might also be legally
reclassified as being of “German Blood,” which officially eliminated any
taint on their status.
Even
official policy seems to have been quite contradictory and vacillating.
For example, when the civilian humiliations sometimes inflicted upon
the fully Jewish parents of serving half-Jews were brought to Hitler’s
attention, he regarded that situation as intolerable, declaring that
either such parents must be fully protected against such indignities or
all the half-Jews must be discharged, and eventually in April 1940 he
issued a decree requiring the latter. However, this order was largely
ignored by many commanders, or implemented through a honor-system that
almost amounted to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” so a considerable fraction
of half-Jews remained in the military if they so wished. And then in
July 1941, Hitler somewhat reversed himself, issuing a new decree that
allowed “worthy” half-Jews who had been discharged to return to the
military as officers, while also announcing that after the war, all
quarter-Jews would be reclassified as fully “German Blood” Aryan
citizens.
It
has been said that after questions were raised about the Jewish ancestry
of some of his subordinates, Goring once angrily responded “I will
decide who is a Jew!” and that attitude seems to reasonably capture some
of the complexity and subjective nature of the social situation.
Interestingly
enough, many of part-Jews interviewed by Rigg recalled that prior to
Hitler’s rise to power, the intermarriage of their parents had often
provoked much greater hostility from the Jewish rather than the Gentile
side of their families, suggesting that even in heavily-assimilated
Germany, the traditional Jewish tendency toward ethnic exclusivity had
still remained a powerful factor in that community.
Although
the part-Jews in German military service were certainly subject to
various forms of mistreatment and discrimination, perhaps we should
compare this against the analogous situation in our own military in
those same years with regard to America’s Japanese or black minorities.
During that era, racial intermarriage was legally prohibited across a
large portion of the US, so the mixed-race population of those groups
was either almost non-existent or very different in origin. But when
Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave their wartime concentration
camps and enlist in the military, they were entirely restricted to
segregated all-Japanese units, but with the officers generally being
white. Meanwhile, blacks were almost entirely barred from combat
service, though they sometimes served in strictly-segregated support
roles. The notion that an American with any appreciable trace of
African, Japanese, or for that matter Chinese ancestry might serve as a
general or even an officer in the U.S. military and thereby exercise
command authority over white American troops would have been almost
unthinkable. The contrast with the practice in Hitler’s own military is
quite different than what Americans might naively assume.
This
paradox is not nearly as surprising as one might assume. The
non-economic divisions in European societies had almost always been
along lines of religion, language, and culture rather than racial
ancestry, and the social tradition of more than a millennium could not
easily be swept away by merely a half-dozen years of National Socialist
ideology. During all those earlier centuries, a sincerely-baptized Jew,
whether in Germany or elsewhere, was usually considered just as good a
Christian as any other. For example, Tomas de Torquemada, the most
fearsome figure of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition, actually came from a
family of Jewish converts.
Even
wider racial differences were hardly considered of crucial importance.
Some of the greatest heroes of particular national cultures, such as
Russia’s Alexander Pushkin and France’s Alexandre Dumas, had been
individuals with significant black African ancestry, and this was
certainly not considered any sort of disqualifying characteristic.
By
contrast, American society from its inception had always been sharply
divided by race, with other differences generally constituting far
smaller impediments to intermarriage and amalgamation. I’ve seen
widespread claims that when the Third Reich devised its 1935 Nuremberg
Laws restricting marriage and other social arrangements between Aryans,
non-Aryans, and part-Aryans, its experts drew upon some of America’s
long legal experience in similar matters, and this seems quite
plausible. Under that new Nazi statute, pre-existing mixed-marriages
received some legal protection, but henceforth Jews and half-Jews could
only marry each other, while quarter-Jews could only marry regular
Aryans. The obvious intent was to absorb that latter group into
mainstream German society, while isolating the more heavily-Jewish
population.
Ironically
enough, Israel today is one of very few countries with a similar sort
of strictly racially-based criteria for citizenship status and other
privileges, with the Jewish-only immigration policy now often determined by DNA testing, and marriages between Jews and non-Jews legally prohibited. A few years ago, the world media also carried the remarkable story
of a Palestinian Arab sentenced to prison for rape because he had
consensual sexual relations with a Jewish woman by passing himself off
as a fellow Jew.
Since
Orthodox Judaism is strictly matrilineal and controls Israeli law, even
Jews of other branches can experience unexpected difficulties due to
conflicts between personal ethnic identity and official legal status.
The vast majority of the wealthier and more influential Jewish families
worldwide do not follow Orthodox religious traditions, and over the
generations, they have often taken Gentile wives. However, even if the
latter had converted to Judaism, their conversions are considered
invalid by the Orthodox Rabbinate, and none of their resulting
descendants are considered Jewish. So if some members of these families
later develop a deep commitment to their Jewish heritage and immigrate
to Israel, they are sometimes outraged to discover that they are
officially classified as “goyim” under Orthodox law and legally
prohibited from marrying Jews. These major political controversies
periodically erupt and sometimes reach the international media.
Now
it seems to me that any American official who proposed racial DNA tests
to decide upon the admission or exclusion of prospective immigrants
would have a very difficult time remaining in office, with the
Jewish-activists of organizations like the ADL probably leading the
attack. And the same would surely be true for any prosecutor or judge
who sent non-whites to prison for the crime of “passing” as whites and
thereby managing to seduce women from that latter group. A similar fate
would befall advocates of such policies in Britain, France, or most
other Western nations, with the local ADL-type organization certainly
playing an important role. Yet in Israel, such existing laws merely
occasion a little temporary embarrassment when they are covered in the
international media, and then invariably remain in place after the
commotion has died down and been forgotten. These sorts of issues are
considered of little more importance than were the past wartime Nazi
ties of the Israeli prime minister throughout most of the 1980s.
But
perhaps the solution to this puzzling difference in public reaction lies
in an old joke. A leftist wit once claimed that the reason America has
never had a military coup is that it is the only country in the world
that lacks an American embassy to organize such activities. And unlike
the U.S., Britain, France, and many other predominately-white countries,
Israel has no domestic Jewish-activist organization filling the
powerful role of the ADL.
Over
the last few years, many outside observers have noted a seemingly very
odd political situation in Ukraine. That unfortunate country possesses
powerful militant groups, whose public symbols, stated ideology, and
political ancestry all unmistakably mark them as Neo-Nazis. Yet those violent Neo-Nazi elements are all being bankrolled and controlled by a Jewish Oligarch
who holds dual Israeli citizenship. Furthermore, that peculiar
alliance had been mid-wifed and blessed by some of America’s leading
Jewish Neocon figures, such as Victoria Nuland, who have successfully
used their media influence to keep such explosive facts away from the
American public.
At first glance, a close relationship between Jewish Israelis and European Neo-Nazis
seems as grotesque and bizarre a misalliance as one could imagine, but
after recently reading Brenner’s fascinating book, my perspective
quickly shifted. Indeed, the main difference between then and now is
that during the 1930s, Zionist factions represented a very insignificant
junior partner to a powerful Third Reich, while these days it is the
Nazis who occupy the role of eager suppliants to the formidable power of
International Zionism, which now so heavily dominates the American
political system and through it, much of the world.
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