James · @historyboy77
29th Apr 2016 from TwitLonger
Short analysis: "Was Hitler a "Zionist"?" (Answer NO!)
If ever there was a time that British politics managed to actually resemble an episode of the biting satire "The Thick of it" than yesterday (April 28 2016) was that day. Ken Livingstone, the hard left former mayor of London decided upon himself to defend Naz Shah MP who had been suspended from the Labour party the day previous after it had been exposed that she had posted comments on social media which suggested that the Jews of Israel ought to be deported to America, that the "Jews are rallying" by allegedly manipulating online polls, that "Zionists" are allegedly grooming Jews to exert high level influence and that what Hitler did was legal. These comments are clearly antisemitic full stop and ought to have no place in any form of mainstream democratic politics. Yet trust Ken to add fuel to the fire with the following remarks in a radio Interview, to a Jewish host no less!
"Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."
This led him to being branded a "Nazi apologist" from a fellow labour MP John Mann who also happens to chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism. Subsequent interviews including a car crash interview with Andrew Neil allowed him to flesh out his theory a little. "His policy," he claimed "was to initially send all of Germany's Jews to Israel and there were private meetings between the Zionist movement and Hitler's government...."
The first thing to note here was that Hitler was by 1933 a convinced antisemite and he had long made it clear that it also meant Antizionism. At no point did finding a "solution to the Jewish Question" mean the creation of Jewish state in the middle east. In Mein Kampf published in 1925 he was more than willing to equate Judaism with Zionism and if nothing else the equation of the two is an identifiable continous mantra of Nazi philosophy. "Zionism," Hitler claims is the "national character of the Jews." The "apparent struggle between Zionistic and liberal Jews" Hitler claims is "false through and through."
About the prospects of a Jewish state in Palestine Hitler would go on to say:
"The Jew's domination in the state seems so assured that now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks."
One easy way to describe Hitler's policy towards the Jews in 1933 was to force them out of Germany by any means necessary however one must be aware that this was accompanied by a ratcheting up of the persecution of the Jewish population. On April 12 1933 the first Jews were murdered for simply being Jews in a sub-camp at Dachau. Jews were in the process of being banned from holding any official positions and not too long after that on May 10 tens of thousands of books from Jewish and leftist authors were burnt. "The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end." Joseph Goebbels said as he watched the flames. In light of this many Jews left of their own accord to safer havens like Britain or the United States, not all went to the British mandate of Palestine.
If it can be said that Nazi policy towards the Jews prior to 1941 was incoherent as some have suggested then the answer can lie within the way in which the Nazi government itself operated. It wasn't like Stalin's regime which was a ruthlessly efficient top down machine of death wherein Stalin took interest in bureaucracy with his pencil in hand ready to dish death. Hitler was by dictatorial standards an exceptionally lazy character who would rather watch movies than deal with paperwork. He had an ideology (however crude one can describe it as such) and he imbibed his subordinates with that ideology. Policy orders with their deadly consequences therefore did not necessarily need to come from the top but what mattered is that those orders particularly from the lower end of the hierarchy had to be in the spirit of Hitler. If they were not they would soon be corrected. The Germans were "Working towards the Fuhrer" as Ian Kershaw succinctly puts it. And the Germans getting rid of the Jews was certainly a part of fulfilling that genocidal spirit. One suggested "solution to the Jewish question" held by a number of Nazi elites including for a time Adolf Eichmann involved deporting all the Jews of Europe to the island of Madagascar which would be turned into a massive ghetto. This was to be financed by stripping the Jews of their property. Again in a demonstration that Hitler nor his regime were not Zionist, Franz Rademacher commented that:
"This arrangement will prevent the possible establishment of a Vatican State of their own, in Palestine by the Jews, thus preventing them from using for their own purposes the symbolic value which Jerusalem has for the Christian and Mohammedan portions of the world."
But by 1942 the Madagascar plan had been shelved along with the possibility that a "solution to the Jewish question" entailed simple emigration. The German failure to defeat Britain and their failure to secure complete domination of the Atlantic made the plan impractical, and this meant finding other "solutions" to the Jewish question that was in the spirit of Hitler. Given that by this stage the Germans had conquered Poland, Belarus and Ukraine wherein before WW2 contained the largest Jewish populations in the world and given that all this territory was going to be Lebensraum for future Germans (another plank in Hitler's ideology). The "Solution" necessitated the full sale co-ordination and ergo the full scale attempt at extermination that was only stopped by German defeat. Had the Wehrmacht been more successful in the east, The German attempt to exterminate Jews would have gone on much further than just Europe. On November 28 1941 Hitler held a conversation with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine in which he told him that after the Germans had broken into the south of the Caucasus "Germany's objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power."
"Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews." he told the Mufti "That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine. which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the function of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews. Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well."
In light of all these remarks, what about Livingstone's claim that there were private meetings between the Zionist movement and Hitler's government...."? There is the Ha'avara Agreement which was undertaken by lower officials in the German Finance ministry and Zionist groups opposing the international Jewish boycott launched against Germany for its antisemitic policies for fears it was harming Jews in Germany also. It entailed that Jews could emigrate to Palestine if they paid a fee which could buy emigrant possessions. But there's no evidence that Hitler personally agreed with the Ha'avara Agreement or liked it because it created the prospects of a Jewish state in the middle East. Moshe Beilinson, a prominent Zionist labour leader within Palestine commented on this when he compared the situation of the Jews in Germany to the situation of Jews in Russia.
There is no fate worse than that of Russian Jewry, which is not allowed to travel to Palestine. [...] Today this possibility exists [in Germany, ed.], but only because of our refusal to join the boycott. This is our only weapon. Hitler is not concerned about assuring Jewish emigration to Palestine; only our neutrality - certainly our “power” is exaggerated - makes the Zionist enterprise possible. A change in our position would bring the entire Zionist enterprise, and particularly emigration from Germany, to a halt. German Jews are not yet in the situation of Russian Jews, and I do not want to bring them to such a situation."
Conclusion.
There is absolutely no evidence that Hitler was ever a Zionist or ever supported Zionism. The Ha'avara agreement is being abused to perpetrate a point that is not only self evidently absurd but also completely insulting. The idea that Hitler somehow helped the Jews or was an ally to the Jews is an unoriginal antisemitic trope and Ken Livingstone's comments are an extension of it.