Nazi Admiration for Zionist Efforts in Palestine
(This is the completion of Mr. Brenner essay on Zionist--Nazi cooperation before and during WWII.)
The Nazis were quite resigned to the partition of Palestine and their main
concern became the fate of the 2,000 Germans then living in the country.
A few were Catholic monks, a few were mainline Lutherans, but most
were Templars, a nineteenth-century sect of pietists who had come to the
Holy Land for the shortly expected return of Jesus. They had eventually
settled in six prosperous colonies, four of which would be in the Zionist
enclave. No matter how much the WZO leadership wanted to avoid
antagonising Berlin over the Templars, now almost all good Nazis, the
local Nazi party realised that any spontaneous Jewish boycott after
partition would make their position totally impossible. The German
Foreign Ministry wanted either to have the colonies under direct British
control or, more realistically, to have them moved into the Arab territory.
Popular Arab opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to partition, although
the Nashishibis --the clan rivals of the dominant Husaynis-- would have
accepted a smaller Jewish state. They very reluctantly opposed the
British proposal and their evident lack of zeal in opposing the partition,
coupled with an intense factional hatred for the Husaynis, led to a
ferocious civil war within the Arab community. Outside the country the
only ruler who dared to hint at acceptance of the scheme was Abdullah
of Trans-Jordan, whose emirate was to be merged with the Palestinian
statelet. Ibn Saud in Arabia remained silent. Egypt and Iraq's ruling
cliques publicly lamented, while privately their only concern was that the
partition would arouse their own people and trigger a general movement
against them and the British. Understandably, the Germans were
completely unconvinced of the Arabs, ability to stave off partition, and
when the Mufti finally appeared at their consulate on 15 July 1937,
Doehle offered him absolutely nothing. He immediately notified his
superiors of the interview: 'The Grand Mufti stressed Arab sympathy for
the new Germany and expressed the hope that Germany was
sympathetic toward the Arab fight against Jewry and was prepared to
support it.' Doehle's response to the proffered alliance was virtually
insulting. He told the supplicant that: 'after all, there was no question of
our playing the role of an arbiter.. I added that it was perhaps tactically in
the interests of the Arabs if German sympathy for Arab aspirations were
not too marked in German statements.'[(11)]
In October it was the Zionists' turn to court the Nazis. On 2 October
1937, the liner Romania arrived in Haifa with two German journalists,
aboard. Herbert Hagen and his junior colleague, Eichmann,
disembarked. They met their agent, Reichert, and later that day Feivel
Polkes, who showed them Haifa from Mount Carmel and took them to
visit a kibbutz. Years later, when he was in hiding in Argentina, Eichmann
taped the story of his experiences and looked back at his brief stay in
Palestine with fond nostalgia:
I did see enough to be very irnpressed by the way the Jewish
colonists were building up their land. I admired their desperate will
to live, the more so since I was myself an idealist. In the years that
followed I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I
been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not
imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most
ardent Zionist imaginable.[(12)]
But the two SS men had made a mistake in contacting their local agent;
the British CID had become aware of Reichert's ring, and two days later
they summarily expelled the visitors to Egypt. Polkes followed them
there, and further discussions were held on 10 and 11 October at Cairo's
Cafe Groppi. In their report on their expedition Hagen and Eichmann
gave a careful rendering of Polkes's words at these meetings. Polkes told
the two Nazis:
The Zionist state must be established by all means and as soon as
possible.;. When the Jewish state is established according to the
current proposals laid down in the Peel paper, and in line with
England's partial promises, then the borders may be pushed further
outwards according to one's wishes.[(13)]
He went on:
in Jewish nationalist circles people 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 in Palestine.[(14)]
During his February visit to Berlin, Polkes had proposed that the
Haganah should act as spies for the Nazis, and now he showed their
good faith by passing on two pieces of intelligence information. He told
Hagen and Eichmann:
the Pan-Islamic World Congress convening in Berlin is in direct
contact with two pro-Soviet Arab leaders: Emir Shekib Arslan and
Emir Adil Arslan... The illegal Communist broadcasting station
whose transmission to Germany is particularly strong, is, according
to Polkes' statement, assembled on a lorry that drives along the
German-Luxembourg border when transmission is on the air.[(15)]
Next it was the Mufti's turn to bid again for German patronage. This time
he sent his agent, Dr Said Imam, who had studied in Germany and had
for a long time been in contact with the German consulate in Beirut,
directly to Berlin with an offer. If Germany would 'support the Arab
independence movement ideologically and materially', then the Mufti
would respond by 'Disseminating National Socialist ideas in the
Arab-Islamic world; combatting Communism, which appears to be
spreading gradually, by employing all possible means'. He also proposed
'continuing acts of terrorism in all French colonial and mandated
territories inhabited by Arabs or Mohammedans'. If they won, he swore
'to utilize only Gemman capital and intellectual resources'. All of this was
in the context of a pledge to keep the Semitic and Aryan races apart,
which task was delicately referred to as 'maintaining and respecting the
national convictions of both peoples'.[(16)]
Palestine was now getting intense scrutiny from every relevant branch of
the German state and party bureaucracy. The pro-Zionists still had their
telling arguments, particularly the economists, who saw the Ha'avara as
helping German industry. The critics of the Nazi-Zionist relationship were
concemed that the proposed Jewish statelet would be recognised
internationally and begin to be seen as a Jewish Vatican, which could
create diplomatic problems for the Germans over their treatment of the
Jews. This was the main argument of Hagen and Eichmann in their report
on their trip.
It was the British who solved the Nazis' dilemma. They had begun to
ponder upon what would follow if they created a Zionist statelet. The
possibility of a world war was evident and the creation of a Zionist state
was guaranteed to drive the Arabs into Hitler's arms. The further
possibility of war with the bellicose Japanese made it crucial to maintain
the ability of moving troops through the Middle East, by land and via the
Suez Canal, without violent native opposition. Peel's partition was
therefore hastily buried and the British determined that the Arab revolt
was to be extinguished before the emerging Axis alliance could profit
from it. The revolt was savagely crushed by the British Army and then
Zionist immigration, the cause of the revolt, was curtailed.
Hitler now no longer had to trouble himself over the possibility of a
Jewish Vatican, but the fact that the British had actually proposed it made
the future possibility of a Jewish state a serious consideration. Long-term
German military calculations now made concern for Arab opinion a
factor in foreign policy. Many German diplomats insisted that the
Ha'avara agreement guaranteed the eventual creation of the state, and
Foreign Office opinion began to turn against it; however, it was saved by
the intervention of Otto von Hentig, a career diplomat who had dealt with
the Zionists under the Kaiser and Weimar. According to Emst Marcus,
Ha'avara's Berlin representative, von Hentig 'with his deep love of his
nation and its spirit... appreciated the driving forces of Zionism as an
element akin to his own feelings'. He therefore worked with his Zionist
associate to try and keep 'preferential treatment of Palestine' alive.
He advised me to prepare suitable material in order to prove that the
number of Jewish emigrants from Germany to Palestine as well as
their financial contribution to the upbuilding of the Jewish
homeland were far too small to exert a decisive influence on the
development of the country. Accordingly, I compiled a
memorandum which emphasised the share of Polish Jews in the
work of reconstruction in all its important phases, described the
financial contribution of American Jewry and contrasted it with the
small effort made by the Jews of Germany.[(17)]
Von Hentig knew that the task of persuading Hitler to help Zionism had
to be done in person and at the 'favourable moment', when he was
laughing and jolly and full of his customary goodwill toward Jews. One
day in early 1938, von Hentig called with the good news: 'The Fuehrer
had made an affirmative decision and that all obstacles in the way of
emigration to Palestine had now been removed.'[(18)]
At first the Nazis had tried to stay neutral during the Arab revolt. On
Coronation Day in 1937 all the Templar colonies flew the swastika in
sympathy with Britain and they were under strict orders not to solicit the
British troops nor to have anything to do with the Mosleyites.[(19)] But
Berlin kept the pressure on and, while Jewish money and emigrants were
still pushed towards Palestine, in 1938 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the
head of the Abwehr Intelligence Division, put the Mufti on his payroll.
However, the Mufti showed no signs of political or military competence
and the money, which was always irregular, finally stopped.[(20)] Further
military non-involvement in the Arab revolt remained strict policy until the
Munich Conference in September 1938, and arms shipments were
prepared only in late 1938. Even then the desire not to antagonise
London with threats to the British Empire led to the sudden cancellation
of the first shipment via Saudi Arabia when the Germans became
convinced that the Saudi Foreign Minister was a British agent.[(21)] With
the aborting of the arms shipment, German concern for the Arab revolt
ceased.
The Failure of the Mufti's Collaboration with the Dictators
The Mufti gained nothing, then or later, from his collaboration with either
Rome or Berlin, nor could the Palestinian interest ever have been served
by the two dictators. When the Mufti approached the Nazis, they were
encouraging Jews to emigrate to Palestine; yet not once in all of his
pre-war dealings with the Nazis did he suggest that they stop the very
emigration which was the source of Zionism's new strength. Later, during
the Second World War, his Jew-hatred and his anti-Communism
persuaded him to go to Berlin and to oppose any release of Jews from
the camps for fear that they would end up in Palestine. He eventually
organised Muslim SS troops against the Soviets and the Yugoslav
partisans.
The Mufti was an incompetent reactionary who was driven into his
anti-Semitism by the Zionists. It was Zionism itself, in its blatant attempt
to turn Palestine from an Arab land into a Jewish state, and then use it for
the yet further exploitation of the Arab nation, that generated Palestinian
Jew-hatred. Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner of Aguda Yisrael gave a perceptive
explanation for the Palestinian's career.
It should be manifest, however, that until the great public pressures for
the establishment of a Jewish state, the Mufti had no interest in the Jews
of Warsaw, Budapest or Vilna. Once the Jews of Europe became a
threat to the Mufti because of their imminent influx into the Holy Land,
the Mufti in turn became for them the Malekh Hamoves --the
incarnation of the Angel of Death. Years ago, it was still easy to find old
residents of Yerushalayim who remembered the cordial relations they
had maintained with the Mufti in the years before the impending creation
of a Jewish State. Once the looming reality of the State of Israel was
before him, the Mufti spared no effort at influencing Hitler to murder as
many Jews as possible in the shortest amount of time. This shameful
episode, where the founders and early leaders of the State were clearly a
factor in the destruction of many Jews, has been completely suppressed
and expunged from the record.[(22)]
If the Mufti's collaboration with the dictators cannot be justified, it
becomes absolutely impossible to rationa1ise the Haganah's offers to spy
for the Nazis. Given the outcry against the Ha'avara and the servile
posture of the ZVfD, it seems certain that, at the very least, a signiflcant
minonty of the WZO would have voted with their feet had they known of
the Haganah's subterranean betrayal.
Notes
[(1)]. 'Hitler's Friends in the Middle East', Weiner Library Bulletin, vol.
XV (1961), p. 35.
[(2)]. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 658-9.
[(3)]. David Yisraeli, 'Germany and zionism', Germany and the Middle
East, 1835-1939 (1975), p. 158.
[(4)]. David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in Cerman Politics
1889-1945 (Hebrew), Bar-Ilan university, Appendix (German):
'Geheime Kommandosache Bericht', pp. 301-2
[(5)]. Ibid., p. 304.
[(6)]. Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, vol. V,
(Washington, 1953), pp. 746-7.
[(7.)] Ronald Storrs, Orientations, p. 405.
[(8)]. The Voices of Zionism (Shahak reprint), p. 18.
[(9)]. Enzo Sereni, 'Towards a New Orientation', Jews and Arabs in
Palestine, pp. 282-3.
[(10)]. Moshe Beilenson, 'Problems of a Jewish-Arab Rapprochement',
Jews and Arabs in Palestine, pp. 193-5.
[(11)]. Documents on German ForeignPolicy, pp. 755-6.
[(12)]. Adolf Eichmann, 'Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story', Life
(28 November 1960), p. 22.
[(13)]. Klaus Polkehn, 'The Secret Contacts: zionism and Nazi Germany
1933-41', Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring 1976), p. 74.
[(14)]. Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death 's Head, p. 337.
[(15)]. Polkehn, 'The Secret Contacts', p. 75.
[(16)]. Documents on German Foreign Policy, p. 779.
[(17)]. Ernst Marcus, 'The German Foreign office and the Palestine
Question in the Period 1933-39', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 11, pp.
187-8, 191.
[(18)]. Ibid., pp. 192-3.
[(19)]. H.D. Schmidt, 'The Nazi Party in Palestine and the Levant
1932-9', International Affairs (London, October 1952), p. 466.
[(20)]. Yisraeli, 'The Third Reich and Palestine', Middle East Studies
(May 1971), p. 349.
[(21)]. Documents on German Foreign Policy, p. 811.
[(22)]. Yitzhak Hutner, 'Holocaust', Jewish Observer (October 1977),
p. 8. |
