The Nexus of Jews and Nazism

The conventional historical narrative regarding the relationship between Nazi Germany and Jewish political movements, particularly Zionism, is incomplete and often inverted.

Extensive evidence confirms that during the 1930s, significant political and economic collaborations existed, driven by pragmatic geopolitical interests and underlying ideological overlaps, fundamentally contradicting the traditional Western account of absolute, universal enmity.

This relationship was defined by a shared objective: the removal of Jews from Germany and the establishment of a national home in Palestine.

The Shared Ideological Platform

The cooperation between certain Jewish factions and the National Socialists was facilitated by surprising ideological commonalities, particularly concerning the nature of Jewish identity and the need for a separate Jewish state.

Traditional Zionism often encouraged and exploited self-hatred among Diaspora Jewry, proceeding from the assumption that anti-Semitism was not only inevitable but, in a sense, justified as long as Jews remained outside the land of Israel. This position mirrored and reinforced the exclusionary logic of Nazism.

Zionist Statements: 

The harsh characterisations of Diaspora Jewry published in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were not substantially different from sentiments voiced by the founding fathers and subsequent leaders of Zionism.

Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first president of the state of Israel and president of the World Zionist Organization, remarked to 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.

The official organ of the Zionist youth organization, Hashomer Hatzair, published an assertion originally composed in 1917 and republished as late as 1936, which claimed that 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.

Nazi Recognition: 

Based on the available evidence, Hitler and numerous other Nazi leaders seemed to have concluded by the mid-1930s that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and only Zionism’s victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile. This perception informed the policies of the Third Reich towards Zionist organisations within Germany.

The Nazi-Zionist Economic Partnership (Ha’avara Agreement)

The most influential Zionist movement, led by figures such as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion, formed an important economic alliance with Nazi Germany throughout most of the 1930s. This pact, known as the Ha’avara or Transfer Agreement, was borne of a direct commonality of interests.

Breaking the Boycott

Following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933, Jewish groups worldwide quickly launched an economic boycott against Germany, hoping to cripple the nation’s export economy during the Great Depression. This provided Zionist groups with an opportunity to offer Germany a means of circumventing the trade embargo. The Zionists demanded favourable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods to Palestine, alongside the emigration of German Jews.

Financial Foundations of the Jewish Colony

The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact to the establishment and initial sustainability of the Jewish colony in Palestine is difficult to overstate. Due to the worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression, Jewish financial support from all other global sources had drastically declined.

Analysis indicates that between 1933 and 1939, over 60 per cent of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came directly from Nazi Germany. Without Hitler’s financial backing and the material support provided by the Transfer Agreement, the nascent, tiny, and fragile Jewish colony might easily have shrivelled up and died during that economically difficult period.

Nazi Support for Zionist Nationalism

Under the Third Reich, the German government afforded special status and privileges to the Zionist Party, despite outlawing all other non-Nazi political organisations for the German people.

Legal Status and Symbols: 

Germany’s local Zionist Party was granted complete legal status. Zionist flags, Zionist uniforms, and Zionist marches were fully permitted. The clear ideological proposition was that a German National Socialist Party was the correct political home for the country’s 99 per cent German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would fulfil the same function for the tiny Jewish minority.

Media Promotion: 

Despite strict censorship of all German publications, the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely available for sale at all newsstands and street corners. In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important Schutzstaffel (SS) official to visit the Jewish settlement in Palestine for six months. Upon his return, the official’s very favourable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were published as a massive 12-part series in Der Angriff, the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party, under the title A Nazi Goes to Palestine. A commemorative medal was struck to honour this Nazi-Zionist alliance, bearing a Star-of-David on one face and a Swastika on the obverse.

The Zionists’ Pursuit of a Military Alliance with the Axis Powers

The outbreak of World War II severed the economic partnership, primarily because financial transfers to British-run Palestine were no longer possible and Germany chose to prioritise relations with the vast sea of Middle Eastern Arabs. However, this period saw the emergence of a small, extreme right-wing Zionist faction led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, which actively pursued a military alliance with the Axis Powers.

The Actions of Yitzhak Shamir’s Faction

During the late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction became great admirers of the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists. After World War II began, this faction made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in 1940 and 1941, hoping to join the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate. Their explicitly stated goal was to establish the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.

They offered to undertake a campaign of attacks and espionage against the local British forces, expecting to share in the political booty following Hitler’s inevitable triumph. Official letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denounced the decadent democratic systems of Britain and France that he was opposing, 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.

Despite the fact that Shamir later served as the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State, the revelation of his pro-Axis past had only a relatively minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. This suggests that the Jews of Israel regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did citizens in the West, where a political figure supporting a military alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II would face inevitable political downfall.

Assassination and Terrorism as Political Tools

The more right-wing Zionist factions exhibited a remarkable inclination toward assassination, terrorism, and overtly criminal behaviour.

• Right-Wing Alignment:  The larger, somewhat more mainstream right-wing Zionist faction later led by Menachem Begin carried a regular column in its main Palestine newspaper entitled Diary of a Fascist.
• Acts of Violence:  Shamir’s faction was responsible for arranging the assassination of his factional rival. They also successfully assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Peace Negotiator. They failed in attempts to kill British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin and American President Harry Truman, and plans to assassinate Winston Churchill never moved past the discussion stage.
• Pioneering Terror:  Shamir’s group pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets. These tactics were utilised long before any Arabs or Muslims had considered similar methods. Shamir later served as director of assassinations at the Israeli Mossad during 1955–1965.

The Enduring Concept of the Judeo-Nazi

In Israeli political circles, extreme ideology was sometimes embraced and even celebrated. In 1983, a prominent liberal Israeli academic denounced hard-line political figures in Israel as Judeo-Nazis.

One high-profile political figure, widely believed to be Ariel Sharon, welcomed this label rather than rejecting it. This individual, the so-called Judeo-Nazi, gleefully advocated the slaughter of millions of Israel’s enemies, the vast expansion of Israeli territory by conquest and expulsion of populations, and the free use of nuclear weapons if resistance was offered.

This figure considered the large massacre of Palestinian women and children at Sabra and Shatila to be of no consequence whatsoever, remarking that the most unfortunate aspect was that the perpetrators had been Christian Phalangist allies rather than Israeli soldiers themselves.

The apparent ease with which a prominent Israeli political figure could advocate such mass violence and adopt the term Nazi is utterly distinct from public life in America or other Western nations, where such rhetoric is unthinkable for those moving in higher political circles.

Hitler’s Jewish and Part-Jewish Soldiers

While the political collaboration involved only certain factions, a distinct connection existed between Jews and Nazi Germany once World War II commenced, defined by the service of individuals with Jewish ancestry in the German military.

Integration into the German Military

The overwhelming pressures imposed by fighting a world war against a powerful coalition eventually compelled the German government to overcome ideological scruples regarding ancestry. Approximately 150,000 half-Jews or quarter-Jews served in the armed forces of the Third Reich. This percentage was probably not much different than their overall share of the general military-age population.

The long-integrated and assimilated Jewish population in Germany was disproportionately well-educated, affluent, and urban. Consequently, a large proportion of the part-Jewish soldiers who served Hitler were combat officers rather than mere rank-and-file conscripts.

Racial Classification and High Command

This group included at least 15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, and another dozen quarter-Jews who held these same high ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s powerful second-in-command, who played a central operational role in creating the Luftwaffe and certainly had a Jewish father. There were also widespread, though unsubstantiated, rumours that Reinhard Heydrich, the second-ranking figure in the SS, held considerable Jewish ancestry.

Even official policy was contradictory and vacillating. Although the racially-elite SS generally had stricter ancestry standards, when the civilian humiliations inflicted upon the fully Jewish parents of serving half-Jews were brought to Hitler’s attention, he deemed the situation intolerable. On one occasion, in response to questions about racial classification, Goering angrily responded, I will decide who is a Jew!.

In a particularly striking irony, a half-Jew bearing the distinctly non-Aryan name of Werner Goldberg had his photograph prominently featured in a 1939 Nazi propaganda newspaper with the caption describing him as The Ideal German Soldier.

The treatment of these part-Jewish soldiers, while including forms of mistreatment and discrimination, was often favourable when compared to the analogous situation of minorities in the American military during the same years. The notion of an American with an appreciable trace of Japanese or African ancestry serving as a high-ranking officer in the US military and exercising command authority over White American troops would have been almost unthinkable in that era.

The Eichmann Controversy and Historical Suppression

The figure of Adolf Eichmann, one of the most famous Nazis, is indelibly linked to the Nazi-Zionist partnership. Eichmann was a central Nazi figure in the alliance during the 1930s, even studying Hebrew and seemingly becoming something of a philo-Semite during his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders.

A more cynical analysis suggests that the determination of the Israelis to track down and execute Eichmann following his 1960 capture may have been driven by a need to eliminate their closest former political ally and collaborator. The release of information regarding the suppressed secret of the 1930s Nazi alliance might have had disastrous political and economic consequences for the nascent State of Israel, which was desperately dependent upon the goodwill and support of Jewish donors worldwide and America.

Eichmann was famously kept in an enclosed glass booth during his Jerusalem trial. One might speculate that this measure was intended to ensure that the sound could quickly be cut off if he began to stray from the agreed-upon script concerning his history. Although the official version of his later-published personal interview seemingly avoided the deadly topic of the pre-war Nazi-Zionist partnership, Israeli leaders must have been terrified of future revelations.

The powerful pro-Israel publishing industry in America exhibited reluctance to serve as a public conduit for information concerning the close Nazi-Zionist economic partnership. When the existence of this collaboration could no longer be concealed, pro-Israel groups undertook efforts to seize control of the narrative, allowing disclosure of only those parts of the history that could not be suppressed, while portraying the history in the best possible light.

The Endurance of Racial Law in Modern Israel

The paradoxes inherent in the historical Nazi-Zionist collaboration are amplified by the subsequent legal framework established in Israel, which mirrors the racial focus of traditional Judaism and the strict segregationist laws of earlier eras.

Historically, European societies were divided by religion, language, and culture rather than racial ancestry, a tradition of over a millennium. However, when the Third Reich devised its 1935 Nuremberg Laws restricting marriage and social arrangements, its experts drew upon some of America’s long legal experience in similar racial matters. The clear intent of the Nazi statute was to isolate the heavily-Jewish population while absorbing the quarter-Jews into the mainstream German society.

Ironically, Israel today stands as one of the very few countries that maintains a similar sort of strictly racially-based criteria for citizenship status and other privileges.

• Racial Enforcement: Jewish-only immigration policy is now often enforced by mandatory DNA testing. Furthermore, marriages between Jews and non-Jews are legally prohibited.
• Legal Discrimination: The legal framework permits consequences for individuals who violate these racial strictures. The world media reported the remarkable story of a Palestinian Arab sentenced to prison for rape because he had had consensual sexual relations with a Jewish woman by.

Political controversies periodically arise concerning the racial policies of Israel, such as cases where descendants of affluent Jewish families who have intermarried with Gentiles are officially classified as goyim under Orthodox law, legally prohibiting them from marrying Jews. Yet, despite international media coverage, such existing laws invariably remain in place after the commotion has died down. These issues are considered of little more importance than were the past World War II-era Nazi ties of the Israeli prime minister throughout most of the 1980s.

This situation contrasts sharply with America, Britain, France, or most other Western nations, where any official proposing racial DNA tests to decide upon the admission or exclusion of prospective immigrants would face immense political difficulty and public outcry.

Furthermore, contemporary geopolitical alliances continue to exhibit bizarre partnerships, such as the situation in Ukraine where militant groups whose public symbols and political ancestry unmistakably mark them as Neo-Nazis are controlled and bankrolled by a Jewish Oligarch holding dual Israeli citizenship. This peculiar alliance, midwifed by leading Jewish Neocons, is often kept away from the American public by media influence. This modern dynamic, where the Nazis occupy the role of eager suppliants to International Zionism, is viewed as merely an inverted continuation of the underlying relationship that existed during the 1930s.