From the Book

Chapter 1, "To the Rescue"

Kurt Blumenfeld was not surprised by the rise of Hitler. For years, he had expected a Nazi takeover of Germany. As president of the German Zionist Federation, he had been in contact with senior Nazis since at least 1930. He had been a world Zionist leader since 1909, when he was appointed secretary-general of the World Zionist Executive, then based in Berlin. World War I had turned him into a hater of his people. Like his Zionist colleagues, Blumenfeld waxed enthusiastic over Friedrich Nietzsche and German idealism while despising Judaism.

The son of a district court judge in East Prussia, Blumenfeld was not fearful of the Nazi agenda. Instead, he welcomed it. For decades, he had made little inroads in Jewish community life. Zionism was marginal in Germany, ignored by the assimilated elite and youth. A member of the Vaad Hapoel Hatzioni, or Zionist General Council, since 1920, Blumenfeld fought against Jewish rights in Germany. Instead, he urged Jews to support openly anti-Semitic candidates rather than Jewish converts to Christianity, who still looked toward their former coreligionists for votes. His goal was to destroy the Jewish community.

Soon after the 1930 elections, Blumenfeld became convinced that the Nazis would gain power. The Great Depression had rolled back years of economic gains and made many Germans penniless. He began a dialogue with Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi and close to Hitler. Strasser had participated with a deeply envious Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. Until his defection in late 1932, Strasser had been the boss of Heinrich Himmler and Josef Goebbels. In June 1934, he was assassinated during the Night of the Long Knives.

Strasser’s importance to the Nazi movement could not be exaggerated. A huge man with a shaven head, he was called the most important Nazi after Hitler until 1933 and the more impressive of the two. Although he lacked Hitler’s oratorical skills, Strasser, known by those closest to him as “Gregor the Great,” wielded an unparalleled gift for organization. He rebuilt the Nazi Party and established hundreds of chapters in northern Germany. After the disappointing results in the 1928 elections, his target became the blue collar class, particularly those working in industry. His meetings with Blumenfeld did not contain an ounce of sentiment. Although he advocated flexibility, Strasser hated Jews, Zionists included, as much as Hitler.2

Blumenfeld’s mission was to sell Hitler to the Zionist leadership. He portrayed Hitler as the ultimate anti-Semite who would end “the fundamental lie of Jewish life in Germany.” Blumenfeld held few illusions regarding Hitler and his colleagues. He knew that they despised Zionism and regarded the movement as an arm of international Jewry. In 1924, while in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, ignored by many but read by Ben-Gurion. Hitler did not believe that the Zionists wanted a state and certainly not one filled with downtrodden Jews. What the Zionist leaders sought was a sovereign entity to enable them to conduct business around the world.

“While the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jews finds 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 sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states.”3

In June 1932, Blumenfeld proposed to Weizmann, a lifelong colleague, that the Zionist movement initiate a dialogue with any Nazi regime on the future of the Jewish community in Germany. Until then, the Zionists would quietly help the Nazis. Blumenfeld and other leading German Zionists would refuse to cooperate with Jewish organizations to campaign against Hitler. Instead, they saw the impending Nazi ascent as an opportunity to take over the richest Jewish community in Europe.4

Two months after his proposal to Weizmann, Blumenfeld went public. The German Zionist president publicly envisioned Hitler’s leadership. The Zionist newspaper Judische Rundschau published an editorial titled “Challenges and Tasks in the event of a National Socialist Victory.” The Zionist approach to Hitler was different from that of the Jewish community. Many community leaders tried to block Hitler’s ascent through a partnership with the Social Democrats. Others sought to woo Hitler and even adopt his agenda to expel many in the Jewish community – particularly the Ostjuden, or Jews from the East, whose dress, professions and faith were embarrassing to the assimilated. The Zionists were much more to the liking of the Nazis: They embraced the idea of total expulsion of the Jews.

Eventually, Blumenfeld made this Zionist policy. He sent a letter to Zionist branches throughout Germany that the Nazi takeover was in the interest of the Zionist movement.

“Nevertheless, there exists for us today a unique opportunity to win over German Jews to the Zionist idea. In these days, we have the obligation to actively enlighten and recruit.”5

Weeks after Hitler’s rise to power, he made the Zionists the dominant force in the Jewish community. After the Reichstag was burned down, he declared martial law, ending freedom of the press and assembly. The opposition was outlawed. He was now the fuhrer.

On March 19, two weeks after Germany’s final election, Blumenfeld was invited to a meeting with Goering, now president of the Reichstag. Blumenfeld’s arrival surprised the Jewish leaders who had never considered him a colleague. They soon realized that he had been summoned by the Nazis. Goering began the meeting with threats and bravado. He expressed alarm over efforts in the United States to boycott the Reich. There had been plans for a mass protest against Germany in New York’s Madison Square Garden on March 27.

Goering, considered a leading confidant of Hitler and eventually his deputy, wanted the German Jews to foil the boycott. The Jewish leaders stumbled over themselves to placate Goering. Then, Blumenfeld, as if on cue, spoke. He announced that the Zionist movement could meet Nazi demands. The Zionists were ready to combat anti-German propaganda and neutralize any boycott. He said he could immediately send an envoy to London to persuade other Jewish leaders to support the Reich. This was the reason that Goering had invited Blumenfeld. In one stroke, Blumenfeld, in close contact with his colleagues in Palestine, presented the Zionist movement as an alternative to the timid Jewish community and became its de facto leader.6

The Goering meeting set the tone for Nazi policy: Persecute the Jews and promote the Zionists. The first Zionist demand was to end the Judische Volkspartei, which had governed Berlin’s Jewish community since 1926. The Nazis responded by mass arrests. Within days of the meeting, some 60,000 people, many of them Jews, were imprisoned in four concentration camps. Jewish shopkeepers were simply taken away, their businesses sold to Aryan competitors next door.

Goering needed the Zionists immediately. The Nazi leaders, inheriting a people on the verge of starvation, had concluded that their survival depended on whether the German economy could last through the winter of 1933-34 and supply jobs in the morning and food in the evening. They closely monitored the opposition in Europe and the United States, which sought to ensure that Berlin would be unable to export products or pay for food or fuel. Their hope was that a hungry German, regardless of his politics, would abandon the Nazis and support anybody able to deliver bread and a wage.

A week after the March 1933 elections, American Jewish leaders began discussing a boycott of Germany. Their aim was to turn the new Third Reich into a pariah. In 1906, the American Jewish Committee had engineered an economic war against Tsarist Russia, said to have succeeded in curbing Moscow’s anti-Semitic offensive. After World War I, the American Jewish Congress used its massive membership to support Jewish self-determination in Palestine while protecting the rights of Jewish minorities in the Diaspora.