Germany's Favorite Rabbi

By Steve Rodan

Leo Baeck was a self-conscious man with a burning ambition to make it in Germany. Born on May 23, 1873 and raised as an Orthodox Jew in a family of devout rabbis, the young Baeck chose the university and secular seminaries in his quest to lead the richest Jewish community in Europe. The process would soon make him valuable to the Zionist leadership, which viewed Germany as the financial wellspring of the movement.

From the start of his long career, Baeck became the spiritual guide of the assimilated Jew, whose observance was limited to synagogue attendance twice a year. He set an example for patriotism by being one of the first rabbis to volunteer for the German Army at the start of World War I in 1914.

When Adolf Hitler turned Germany into a blood-thirsty dictatorship in 1933, Baeck would play the key role in bowing to the new ruler -- a path that led from persecution to genocide. To senior Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, Baeck was known as the "Jewish fuhrer."

Zionist facilitator

Baeck was recruited by the Zionists in the mid-1920s. Although he refused to become an official member to avoid angering his reform congregation, he was seen as a facilitator of the Zionist goal of dominating German Jewry. He was appointed a member of the executive of Keren Hayesod, or the United Palestine Appeal. In 1929, he was named to the board of the Jewish Agency, the British-authorized group that controlled most of the Jewish community in Palestine.

"[Baeck was] for us a lasting benefit," German Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld said in 1921.

Hitler's rise did not upset Baeck's career. The Zionists and the assimilated Jews even welcomed the Nazis, with some of them being known as "Juden-Nazis." German Zionist leaders and their media adopted the Nazi obsession with race. In a statement on June 21, 1933, the Zionist Association for Germany identified with Hitler's aim of expelling the Jews -- as long as the destination was Palestine.

Baeck was in constant contact with the Zionist leadership, particularly Chaim Weizmann and Arthur Ruppin. While he refused to believe that Germans would support Hitler's persecution, he also saw the need for the Jews to emigrate, with Palestine as the destination for the young and strong. That justified the so-called Transfer Agreement, in which the Reich seized the assets of the Jews and relayed a small portion to the Zionists.

Several months into the Third Reich, Baeck was appointed the head of the new Nazi-dominated Jewish leadership. It was meant to be what was known as the Judenrat, later established in every ghetto in German-occupied Europe. From the start, the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden was dominated by Zionists aligned with the Jewish Agency. The new group contained a department run by the Palestine Office, which represented the Zionist movement and decided who would be allowed entry to the holy land.

Baeck's value to the Zionist leadership led him to stay in Germany throughout the Third Reich. Like other Jews working for Hitler, he was allowed to travel throughout Europe and Palestine -- mostly to raise money from world Jewry for the Nazi regime. By 1938, he no longer had family in Germany. Still, Baeck, like other Zionist apparatchiks, returned to Berlin to protect the interests of the movement. He fought efforts by the rival Revisionist movement, some of whom were even more enthusiastic in serving the Germans, from taking over the Jewish community.

Faithfully following orders

During the war, Baeck followed the orders of the SS and Gestapo. He advised German Jews to board the trains to the East, or the death camps in Poland. He encouraged rabbinical students to facilitate the deportations. He admitted that he knew their fate but insisted that informing the victims would not help them. Even some of his colleagues were stunned.

I got the first indication of the scope of the Nazi bestiality in the summer of 1941. A Gentile woman told me that she had voluntarily gone along with her Jewish husband when he was deported. In Poland, they were separated. She saw hundreds of Jews crowded into buses, which were driven off and came back empty. The rumor that the buses had a gassing mechanism was confirmed by the apparatus attached to all but one of them. That one carried a group to bury those who were gassed; afterward the gravediggers were shot. Similar stories were told by soldiers who came back on furlough. [1]

After Baeck had helped expel the vast majority of German Jews, it was his turn in January 1943. But unlike his most of his flock, Baeck would be sent to the Czech ghetto of Theresienstadt, turned into a transit camp for Auschwitz. He was given two large rooms in a house rather than being confined to barracks. According to a visitor, he slept in a "real bed" and his apartment contained an oven for heat.

As in Germany, Baeck became a Jewish leader in Theresienstadt. He presided over the funeral of the daughter of Zionist founder Theodore Herzl. He also watched two of his sisters die in the camp. The 71-year-old spent much of his time lecturing on religion, history and philosophy while many young Jews engaged in extramarital sex.

In April 1945, weeks before the end of the war, the Germans were sending Jews with spotted fever and other deadly diseases to Theresienstadt. One day Baeck was in the offices of the Jewish ghetto administration when Eichmann walked in. He saw the rabbi he had long worked with.

Herr Baeck, are you still alive? I thought you were dead.

Herr Eichmann, you are apparently announcing a future occurrence.

I understand now. A man who is claimed dead lives [2]

An uncomfortable aftermath

The aftermath of the war was not easy for Baeck. Some questioned his collaboration with Hitler, particularly his refusal to tell Jews that they were being sent to their death. It was a question that Baeck struggled with until the end. Others were dismayed by his warnings not to take revenge on the defeated Germans -- which he based on the New Testament.

But to the Zionist movement and other Jewish institutions, Baeck was portrayed as a hero. The U.S. Air Force flew him from Prague to Paris, and then a British warplane brought him to London, where his daughter was waiting. He resumed his presidency of the World Union for Progressive Judaism and given the leadership of other organizations. In the United States, he raised money for the United Jewish Appeal.

Baeck was soon honored by the new West Germany, which at first he had vowed never to visit. He explained that Bonn's willingness to compensate the Jews, and particularly the new State of Israel, changed his mind. He renewed relations with former Nazis and even wrote letters to help exonerate Germans accused of war crimes.

In 1948, several months after the State of Israel was established, Baeck embarked on his first lecture tour of West Germany. There were virtually no Jews left to address; instead, the 75-year-old rabbi visited universities and spoke of the hope of a new Germany and reconciliation with its past. It marked the first of six visits to his former homeland and helped promote efforts for Bonn to aid Israel. In 1952, his longtime friend Martin Buber flew to West Germany to receive what was called a peace prize from German publishers.

The government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was pleased. Adenauer, whose administration was filled with ex-Nazis, saw reparations as the price for Israeli and Jewish forgiveness. West German President Theodor Heuss, who nearly 20 years earlier voted to give Hitler dictatorial powers and later wrote for Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, praised the visiting rabbi. The two men, now friends, would meet regularly.

Although he supported the State of Israel, Baeck remained in London for the rest of his life. On Nov. 2, 1956 he died and was buried in a nearby cemetery. Heuss sent a wreath.

Evading history

Decades after his passing, Baeck managed to evade a critical examination of his behavior. Most historians ignored or glossed over his collaboration during the Holocaust. A united Germany would award the Leo Baeck Prize. Still, Hannah Arendt, a leading philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany for America, remembered Baeck as an agent of Hitler. "In the eyes of both Jews and Gentiles [Baeck] was the 'Jewish Führer,'" she wrote in 1963.

Reicha Freier worked with Baeck during the early years of Hitler. The founder of Youth Aliya, Freier sought the rabbi's help to smuggle Jewish youngsters out of Germany and to Palestine. He refused. She said he would also refuse to see the wives of deported Jews.

"[Someday]," Freier wrote in her memoirs in the late 1950s, "this man who was celebrated as a hero [would finally] be divested of his crown." [3]

Notes:

1. Baeck to Eric Boehm after World War II. Quoted in Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubles Times. Michael A. Meyer. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Online edition at Chapter 15: Epilogue. The Icon and the Person - Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (zoboko.com 2. ibid 3. Let the Children Come: The Early History of Youth Aliyah. Recha Freier. Page 66. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London. 1961.

Below: Baeck addressing Jews in a Berlin synagogue in the 1930s. U.S. Holocaust Museum