The Contractor

By Steve Rodan

Martin Gerson spent a lifetime as a fixer for the Zionist movement in Germany. His assignment was to acquire property in Germany for agriculture that ostensibly would train young Jews for resettlement in Palestine. In 1930, he helped found Jewish Land Work, a company that controlled more than 820 acres of land in Gross-Gaglow.

Hitler's takeover of Germany in 1933 proved a boon for Gerson. Although Gross-Gaglow was confiscated by the new Nazi regime, he was given the estate of an exiled Jewish mogul. Soon, he was appointed to run all Zionist farms in Germany, known as Hachshara.

Gerson, born in 1902, also worked with the Zionist leadership in London and Jerusalem. In 1935, he visited Palestine to find land for the young Jewish cadets in Hachshara. He also searched for property in Cyprus. But he was denied that achievement and, unlike his colleagues, was ordered to return to Germany to maintain Zionist facilities in coordination with the SS and Gestapo. The Jewish Agency decided that Gerson was too valuable to emigrate.

Under Hitler, Gerson was assigned to exploit the privileges granted to the Zionists. The Zionist movement controlled the Jewish community through the Reich Deputation of German Jews, known as the Reichsvereinigung or RV. The organization was meant to carry out all of the anti-Semitic decrees of the German government, starting with loss of jobs, property, imprisonment and finally deportation and death. RV operated throughout World War II and facilitated the German plan to empty all Jews from the country.

Manpower for Berlin

As Germany gobbled up Europe in 1940, the Zionist movement continued to offer manpower to Berlin's war machine. Kurt Goldmann, a Hachshara functionary, testified that the Zionists proposed to send well over 1,000 young people to work in German labor camps and even in countries now occupied by Hitler.

The most ambitious offer by the Zionists came some two years after the war began. The Jews throughout occupied Europe were being segregated and persecuted. Many were starving as part of Hitler's extermination campaign. Gerson was ordered to prepare a plan to build ghettos for the Jews -- holding pens that would prevent escape until the time came to kill them.

The Zionists were familiar with the assignment. In October 1939, a leading Austrian Zionist, Josef Lowenherz, organized a construction gang in coordination with the SS's Adolf Eichmann to build facilities in what was termed "Judaea," a reservation of nearly 1,000 square kilometers where all but the strongest Jews were meant to die of starvation and disease. [1]

On Oct. 29, 1941, RV ordered Gerson to conscript Hachshara cadets for work in Poland. The plan was to use the young Zionists to build ghettos for elderly German Jews who had been deported to the Lublin district. By then, tens of thousands of Jews had been driven from their homes in Germany and sent to rot in remote areas of Poland without housing or food.

Autonomy

In contact with leading Zionists, Gerson agreed to carry out the order. But he responded that his approval was conditional. The Jews, he wrote, must be given some autonomy as well as basic means for survival.

"that is the agency's intentions for the Jews to shape their own lives by themselves under the supervision of the German agency. And they can count on the support of the German authorities for receiving their most elementary needs, namely work and food. It would have to be made clear that...the German authorities would also safeguard their lives...I proceed on the assumption that it must be the duty of Jewish youth ...to do everything they can in order to support the resettlement planned by the authorities in such a manner that the absorption of the Jews in the localities of the destination will occur without difficulties." [2]

Gerson did not ensure that any of his conditions were fulfilled. Instead, he lobbied the Reich security services to win contracts. In late 1942, he renewed his offer to construct Jewish ghettos in Poland. By then, however, SS chief Heinrich Himmler had ordered the destruction of the ghettos and everybody inside.

Until the end, Gerson served Hitler's killing machine. In 1941, he oversaw the decimation of Hachshara centers throughout Germany until one facility remained -- Nuendorf. Artur Posnanski recalled Gerson's obedience to the Gestapo and his insistence that every order be fully implemented. Posnanski, who took 150 children to Denmark and Sweden in the 1930s, said Gerson stopped Zionist youngsters from gaining their freedom as well as preventing them from smuggling food from the farms to ease their hunger. Gerson, his colleague asserted, "risked nothing." [3]

In June 1943, after writing a farewell note to Salman Schocken, a leading Zionist who had escaped Germany for New York, Gerson and his family were sent to the so-called privileged German camp in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, where he was in charge of young Zionists. Gerson was said to have been zealous in his obedience to the Germans. Despite lax German enforcement, he did not allow hungry Jewish agricultural workers to exceed their quota of carrots and potatoes.

Unlike some of the other prominent German Jews, Gerson did not survive the war. In October 1944, Gerson and his family were deported to Auschwitz and killed.

After the war, Salomon Adler-Rudel reflected on the cooperation of Gerson and the Zionist-controlled leadership with the Nazis. Adler-Rudel, a Zionist emissary frustrated in rescue efforts during the last year of the war, concluded that the cooperation with Hitler played a leading role in the destruction of the Jews.

"Naturally, the Reichsvereignigung could not suspect just how much they were, unsuspectingly, supporting the plans of the Nazis aimed at deportation and 'Final solution'...through this concentration," Adler-Rudel said. [4]

Notes

1. A Fatal Balancing Act: The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939-1945. Beate Meyer. Page 56. Berghahn Books, 2013

2. ibid. Page 38

3. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Oral history interview with Artur Posnanski. Tape 1. 37:02. Oral history interview with Artur Posnanski - Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushmm.org

4. A Fatal Balancing Act. Page 73

Below: Martin Gerson