Historical and ideological convergences between Nazism and Zionism

Part 5 on Zionism as an anti-Jewish, racist ideology

Zionism includes the belief that everyone in the world simply hates Jews

Anti-Zionist Jewish writer Moshe Menuhin, in his 1969 book Not by Might, nor by Power: The Zionist Betrayal of Judaism, quoted historian Arnold Toynbee who wrote in the NYT in 1961 about the common ground between Nazis and Zionists: 

"Zionism and anti-Semitism are expressions of an identical point of view. The assumption underlying both ideologies is that it is impossible for Jews and non-Jews to grow together into a single community and that therefore a physical separation is the only practical way out. The watchword of anti-Semitism is “Back to medieval apartheid”; the watchword of Zionism is “Back to the medieval ghetto." All the far-flung ghettos in the world are to be gathered into one patch of soil in Palestine to create a single consolidated ghetto there.”

Faris Yahya, in his 1978 book Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany (reviewed over at Liberated Texts) quotes a pamphlet from the socialist organization Matzpen arguing along similar lines: 

“Zionism accepts anti-Semitism as the natural, normal attitude of the non-Jewish world towards the Jew. It does not consider it a distorted, perverted phenomenon, it is a response to anti-Semitism but not a confrontation, denunciation or fight against it. Zionists fundamentally accept the racial ideology of the anti-Semites.” 

These quotes diagnose the common ground between Zionist ideology and the most anti-Jewish ideology ever invented: Nazism. 

Race Science and Zionism

Nazism is basically an extreme combination of two Western inventions: scientific racism and anti-communism. Zionism makes use of both. 

As a European ideology of race hierarchy, violence, and anti-communism, some form of Nazism is found in all European countries. Nazis seek a Europe cleansed both of inferior races and socialist influences. 

Nazis associate Jews with both racial inferiority and with socialism (see, e.g., Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism or Joe Emersberger’s review of Mein Kampf, which he calls “Hitler’s Love Letter to Western Imperialism”). As you will see below, Zionists also associate Jews with racial inferiority and with socialism.

Zionists and Nazis also share a common interest: Nazis want Jews out of Europe; Zionists want Jews in Palestine. 

Zionism and Nazism embraced scientific racism, eugenics, and the discredited idea that humanity could be subdivided into a hierarchy of races. The Nazi use of race science is well known. Perhaps less so the Zionist use of the same. But the Zionist embrace of eugenics and race science is reviewed in Tony Greenstein’s book Zionism During the Holocaust.

Greenstein reviews the early figures of what he calls “Racial Zionism”, including Moses Hess, who argued that ‘Race struggle is primary; class struggle is secondary’; Max Nordau, who called Jews ‘a race of accursed beggars’ in an address to the first Zionist Congress in 1897 and who told a French newspaper in 1903 that Zionism was ‘not a question of religion but exclusively of race’; and Jacob Klatzkin who argued that ‘we ought to be thankful to our oppressors that they closed the gates of assimilation to us and took care that our people were concentrated and not dispersed.’ 

But the great sage of racial Zionism was Arthur Ruppin, who Greenstein calls the “single most important figure in Palestinian Zionism in the first four decades of the 20th century.” Director of the Palestine Office from 1908, Hebrew University faculty from 1926, member of the Zionist Executive, founder of the kibbutz, known as the Father of Land Settlement. Ruppin was originally a German nationalist, but adopted Zionism after being rejected by that movement. In Ruppin’s view, East European (Ashkenazi) Jews were descended from Indo-Germanic races and were racially superior to Sephardic (from Spain/Portugal) and Oriental (from Asia) Jews. Sephardic and Oriental Jews shouldn’t be brought to Palestine at all, Ruppin believed, “since they carried Semitic dysgenic elements”. The Zionists nevertheless oversaw the importation of Yemeni Jews as “cheap labour for the Zionist project”, who suffered a 50% death rate between 1912-1918. 

Arthur Ruppin, race theorist and Zionist

Ruppin had won second place in an 1899 competition for the Krupp Prize for applying Social Darwinism to the organization of society. When a friend called him an anti-Semite, he wrote in his diary that “I have already established here that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.” In 1933, he had a friendly conversation with Hans Gunther, writing in his diary about the meeting with “Prof. Hans F.K. Gunther, the founder of National-Socialist race theory. The conversation lasted two hours. Gunther was most congenial and agreed with me that the Jews are not inferior but different, and that the Jewish question has to be solved justly.” Gunther, for his part, praised Zionism for “recognizing the genuine racial consciousness of the Jews.” 

Zionist doctors adopted eugenics: From The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics: “The educator Israel Rubin published a letter to physicians and educators in 1934, in the periodical of the Hebrew Authors’ Association in Palestine, entitled “The ingathering of the exiles from a eugenic perspective.” Rubin viewed “our life in the homeland, in its very essence” to be “a great and courageous national effort in the eugenic sense.”

“Anyone, who does not recognize the return of the sons to the land of their forefathers as a great eugenic revolution in the life of the nation, does not discern the ‘forest’ from the individual trees... The essence is the sum total: The production of a New Hebrew type restored and improved. Thus, a psychobiological approach to the problem of the settlement of Land of Israel is a duty to us all!”

Physician Joseph Mayer, chief executive of the health insurance fund for Jews in Palestine, wrote: “Who has the right to give birth to children? Eugenics, the science for the improvement of the race and keeping it from degeneration, is concerned with searching for proper answers to this question…” 

The Zionist leadership wanted to save the selected, not the mass. In the words of the United Jewish Appeal’s Henry Montor:

“Selectivity is an inescapable factor in dealing with the problem of immigration to Palestine. By ‘selectivity’ is meant the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes… there could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism… if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables who would make impossible the conditions of life in Palestine and destroy the prospect of creating such economic circumstances as would ensure a continuity of immigration.” 

Genetic testing for eugenic reasons continues to be popular in Israel, as Meira Weiss writes in the 2002 book The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society. She notes that:

“Israeli geneticists have attitudes towards abortion [that] are, “on average, more positive and accepting than those of their international colleagues. For example, fully 68 percent of them agree that giving birth to a child with a serious impairment is socially wrong. In contrast, geneticists around the world usually regard the decision to abort a deformed fetus as primarily personal. An astounding 14 percent of the Israeli geneticists agree that "the role of genetics is to purify the human genetic pool," a view that “flouts the international code of ethics of genetic counseling, which stresses non-directiveness.”

The foreign relations of the Zionist organizations and the Nazis

In Eastern Europe where most of the world’s Jews lived before World War 2, people living in Jewish communities held diverse identifications. Some were socialists, others religious Jews, others nationalists of the countries where they lived, others identified strongly with the Yiddish language, others with the Hebrew revival, and finally there were Zionists. Until the rise of Hitler, the Zionist view was not the majority or even the plurality among the world’s Jews. But by the time the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Zionists had claimed the right to speak for all Jews. How did this happen? 

The story of how it happened in Germany is recounted in Faris Yahya’s book. Most German Jews - 95% of those in an organization- belonged to the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, which had in its bylaws that its chief task was to fight anti-Semitism. Upon the arrival of the Nazis to power and the declaration of official anti-Semitism, this main organization of German Jews was declared “hostile to the State”. Yahya quotes Hannah Arendt on the consequences: “the Zionists could, for a time at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal co-operation with Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that ‘dissimilation’ combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a ‘mutually fair solution.’ At the time, many German officials held this opinion.” Yahya also mentions a Nazi march in June 1932, when “three hundred Nazis marched through the streets of Breslau and terrorised Jewish passersby, shouting ‘Let the Jews go to Palestine’.” 

Isaac Deutscher, Polish-Jewish socialist historian and author of the best-known biography of Trotsky, noted (quoted in Yahya) that “the great majority of Eastern European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the Second World War, opposed to Zionism… they were a significant minority but they never succeeded in attracting a majority of their co-religionists. The most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish, those who considered themselves Jews; they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine.” These masses of enemies of Zionism were exterminated by the Nazis. 

The Jewish Agency for Palestine concluded a series of agreements with the German Reich, called the Ha’avara clearing agreements. A Jewish capitalist who wanted to emigrate to Palestine could make a deal with a German exporter, who would transfer goods to Palestine and be paid with the otherwise blocked funds of the emigrating Jewish capitalist, who got his money in Palestinian currency upon arrival. German goods “poured into Palestine” and were supplemented with barter agreements: Palestinian oranges for German machinery, cars, pumps, etc. When the Nazis instituted a boycott against Jewish business and professions in 1933, anti-Nazi Jewish organizations tried to organize a counter-boycott. But “the Zionists’ signature of the Ha’avara agreement effectively sabotaged this hope”, and “Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods ‘made in Germany’.” The Zionist Federation of Germany told a senior Nazi offiical that “the propaganda which calls for boycotting Germany… is by its very nature completely un-Zionist.” The financial value of Ha’avara operations kept growing, from 1.2 million marks in 1933 to 31.4 million in 1937. By its end, the Ha’avara agreements had moved about 140 million marks. 

When the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, outlawing marriages between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, a member of the Zionist Executive, Menahem Ussishkin, quoted in Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million, said there was “something positive in their tragedy, and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.” Ussishkin had told Zionist leaders in Poland in 1920 that they should only send to Palestine migrants who were “physically healthy in the full sense of the word. Weak people who are ill with nervous diseases, tuberculosis and others are coming to us, and I don’t have to explain to you the disaster such wretched people will bring down on the Yishuv.” (quoted in Greenstein, Zionism during the Holocaust). 

In the 1988 book The Hidden History of Zionism, peace activist Ralph Schoenmann writes: “the Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the SS Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, in Der Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism.”

Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the SS Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews into “two categories.” The Jews he favored were the Zionists: “Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.“ 

In 1937, the Labor Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky) sent an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the SS Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah. Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann: “Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs.”

After 1938, the Nazis focused on inducing Jewish emigration from Germany. Citing Jon and David Kimche’s book The Secret Roads, Yahya describes a series of meetings between Zionist envoy Moshe Bar Gilad and Adolf Eichmann, who agreed to provide agricultural training for young Jews to prepare them for life in Palestine: “By the end of 1938 about a thousand young Jews were undergoing training in these Nazi provided camps.” Yahya continues: “The agreements which these envoys reached through their contact with the Gestapo and SS, whereby Nazi Germany made a vital contribution towards reinforcing Zionism’s manpower, training and consequent military effectiveness, were not an informal arrangement. They were solemn agreements officially, though secretly, entered into by the Nazi government: an alliance of convenience ordered in a policy directive by Hitler himself.” 

A passage from The Secret Roads quoted by Yahya makes one thing clear: the Zionist envoys were not in Germany “to save German Jews: that was not their job. Their eyes were fixed entirely on Palestine… They were looking for young men and women who wanted to go to Palestine because they wanted a national home of their own and were prepared to pioneer, struggle and, if necessary, fight for it.” 

Hitler and the Nazis abandoned emigration and opted for extermination in 1941 after they attacked the USSR, trapping millions of Jews within their occupied territories. 

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews fought the Nazi invaders in the Red Army; thousands of others fought guerrilla style as partisans; many others fought and died in urban combat in ghetto revolts. 

Meanwhile the Zionists saved their strength for the fight with the Palestinian Indigenous people that they knew was coming after the war. “When the war was in its closing stages, the Zionists dropped 31 parachutists in Nazi-occupied countries, but their task was to organise further emigration to Palestine rather than resistance to Nazism.” 

Saving the selected few from Weizmann and Ben Gurion to the Kastner Affair and the Eichmann Trial

Chaim Weizmann had said in 1937: “From the depths of this tragedy I want to save two million young people… The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world… Only the branch of the young shall survive… They have to accept it.” 

If this quote makes Weizmann sound particularly ice-cold, know that Ben-Gurion said much the same in 1938: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.” 

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative.” - Ben Gurion 1938

Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to the Zionist executive on December 17, 1938 that made this view even more stark. “Britain is trying to separate the issue of refugees from that of Palestine. It is assisted by anti-Zionist Jews. The dimensions of the refugee problem demand an immediate, territorial solution; if Palestine will not absorb them, another territory will. Zionism is endangered… the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda… we are risking the existence of Zionism.” 

To mitigate the risk, the Zionists put Yitzhak Greenbaum in charge of one of the rescue committees - this agent, in charge of rescuing European Jews, put the goal of colonizing Palestine first: “when they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land… If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food (for starving Jews under Nazi rule) with the money of the United Jewish Appeal… would we do such a thing? No! And once again no!” Yahya notes that Yitzhak Greenbaum’s son Eliezer also notoriously worked with the Nazis in Auschwitz. 

One of the Zionist militias, the Irgun-Stern faction (the so-called Stern Gang), authored a document in 1941 that stated that “the evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic boundaries…” Irgun expressed the opinion that “Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people… the establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis and bound by a treaty with the German Reich would be in the interest of maintaining and strengthening the future German position of power in the Near East.” The Stern Gang fought the British; when Stern died in 1942, his followers established another militia, “Lehi”, whose members murdered UN Mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Bernadotte had, Yahya notes, “played an important role in WW2 rescuing Jews from Nazi rule and securing them refuge in Sweden.” 

Rudolf Kastner of the Kastner Affair

In 1944, Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest concluded a deal with Adolf Eichmann about the fate of the 800,000 Hungarian Jews. Most Hungarian Jews didn’t belong to any organization: they belonged, as Ben Hecht, author of Perfidy, noted, “only to Hungary, its homes, streets, workshops, sports fields, cafes.” Nonetheless the Zionists of the Jewish Agency inserted themselves as the negotiators for them. In 1953, Israeli journalist Malchiel Greenwald published a series making the accusation that “Kastner’s Rescue Committee had collaborated with the Nazis and helped them to exterminate the bulk of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for being allowed to save more than 600 prominent Zionists and take them to Palestine.” Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government for libel, but the judge ruled that libel had not taken place.

Malchiel Greenwald, not guilty of libel

Kastner, in his agreement with the Nazis, the judge ruled, had “fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment or prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death.” The judge had been convinced that Kastner had agreed not to help the masses if the Nazis helped him save the “prominents.” 

Besides Eichmann, another Nazi with whom Rudolf Kastner had a working relationship was SS General Kurt Becher. After the war, Kastner told the Nuremberg Tribunal, in the name of the Jewish Agency and Jewish World Congress, that Becher had opposed the Holocaust and saved lives. After this intercession, Becher was released from prison, became one of Germany’s richest men doing trade between Germany and Israel, testified against Eichmann in the latter’s trial (from Germany), and died wealthy. Writer Ben Hecht noted that Becher had joined the Nazi party all the way back in 1934, served as an SS Major and member of the Death Corps, and “distinguished himself as a Jew slaughterer in Poland and Russia.” 

The SS Kurt Becher was Commissar of all German concentration camps. Kastner interceded on his behalf and he wasn’t punished.

The journalist Malchiel Greenwald had a lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, who had hoped to bring Kastner to trial as a collaborator. But Kastner was curiously assassinated and that loose end tied up. The story was picked up by Israeli journalist Moshe Keren, who wrote that the Kastner trial would “poison the air above us”, that the “state of Israel will never be after this verdict what it was before the verdict.” But the over-inquisitive Keren, too, was assassinated in Germany.

Yahya asked: why was Eichmann tried but not Becher, who was Eichmann’s superior in the SS and just as responsible for the Nazi genocide? Yahya cites Moshe Pearlmann’s book The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann, arguing that the ghost of Kastner was there, “hovering over the courtroom” in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. One of Kastner’s aides, Andre Biss, wanted to clear Kastner’s name by showing that Kastner had been following the guidance of the whole Zionist movement. Biss had been invited to testify, but he was told by the prosecutor (Hausner) “to omit from my evidence any mention of… the Kastner affair. Furthermore I should not speak of Becher’s activities… I told him I could not give evidence unless I was free to tell the whole truth. Hausner finally preferred to dispense with me as a witness.” When Israel executed Eichmann, Yahya notes, they executed “not the most senior surviving Nazi war criminal”, but “probably the Nazi with the most detailed knowledge of the Zionist movement’s relationship with the Nazi regime. All that knowledge died with him.” 

Converging on the view that Jews must not be allowed to have normal Western lives

Both Nazis and Zionists converge on the racist view that Jews are naturally obedient and frightened, that they went to their deaths in the Nazi genocide “like sheep to the slaughter”, as opposed to having a diverse range of reactions like any group of human beings. In fact there was tremendous and heroic Jewish resistance including partisans in Nazi-occupied territories, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the 350-500,000 Jews who fought with the Red Army against the Nazis. In Steven Friedman’s view the falsehood is convenient for Zionism, however, “because it strengthened the false claim that Jews could protect themselves only if they had a state. It also reinforced the notion of the ‘diaspora Jew’ as a lesser form of Jew compared to those who relied on states and armies.”

Zionists claim the rationale for the state of Israel is as the refuge of Jews facing persecution. “But”, Friedman notes in the previously mentioned Good Jew, Bad Jew, “the Zionists saw any effort to rescue Europe’s Jews not as the fulfilment of their political purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe’s Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine.”

The convergence between Nazis and Zionists on the question of whether Jews can live in Europe runs counter to the revealed preferences of Jews, who want to live in the West. When the USSR collapsed, hundreds of thousands of Jews wanted to migrate to the West. Zionists negotiated to get Germany close their doors to them and to prevent Soviet Jews from getting to other countries like the US, denying Jewish wishes, keeping Germany, the birthplace of European Nazism and once its strongest proponent, from accepting more Jews, and ensuring that the “human material” (a dehumanizing way Zionists referred to Jews, on which more later in the series) went to colonize Palestine. 

In summary: The historical convergence of Nazism (the ultimate anti-Jewish ideology) and Zionism (also an anti-Jewish ideology), is based on a shared embrace of: 1. Race science and racial hierarchies; 2. Anti-communism; 3. The notion that Jews cannot be allowed to live normal lives as Jews in Eastern Europe, the US, Canada, etc., and their presence is a problem, whose ‘solution’ could be sending them to colonize Palestine. At Hanukkah at the White House in 2023, Biden restated this Zionist thesis when he said that “no Jew in the world would be safe without Israel”, a horrible thing for a US President, whose government is ultimately responsible for the safety of millions of American Jews, to say. 

Biden, telling Jews they aren’t safe in America but only Israel, on a major Jewish holiday

Many have wondered why Israel has such good relations with far-right, Nazi-adjacent or aligned movements in Europe; why anti-Jewish politicians in Europe march under the Israeli flag or salute Netanyahu. The answer is tragic and simple: ideological convergence.