The Zionist and his Friend

By Steve Rodan

Hermann Goering was always close to Jews. His godfather was Hermann von Epenstein, a Jewish convert to Christianity who supported Hermann's family and eventually became the lover of Goering's mother and father of his brother Albert. As an adult, Hermann Goering owed his life to the Jewish couple who treated him when he was shot in the groin during the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

But like other leading Nazis, Goering never let his feelings get in the way of his career. So, weeks after Hitler's seizure of power in March 1933, Goering, now head of the police in Bavaria, summoned leaders of the German Jewish community. The Jews of America and Europe were aghast at the Nazi killings of Jews and planned a boycott of the new Third Reich. On March 27, a mass protest was scheduled for Madison Square Garden in New York. Goering's job was to frighten the Jews into foiling any boycott and call off the New York event.

The Jewish leaders stumbled over themselves to placate Goering. Still, they noticed somebody who had not been on the printed invitation to the meeting. Kurt Blumenfeld was head of the German Zionist Federation, at the time the smallest of Jewish movements in Germany. Blumenfeld, the son of a district court judge in Prussia, had been a world Zionist leader since 1909. He was regarded as a confidant of Chaim Weizmann and had prepared for Hitler's ascent since the 1930 elections. He had been engaged in a dialogue with Hitler's then-second-in-command, Gregor Strasser, on Nazi plans for the Jews. Blumenfeld and other leading German Zionists would refuse to cooperate with Jewish organizations to campaign against Hitler. Instead, the Zionists saw the Nazis as an opportunity to take over the richest Jewish community in Europe. In 1932, the Zionist newspaper Judische Rundschau published an editorial titled “Challenges and Tasks in the event of a National Socialist Victory.”

Unlike the others in the room, Blumenfeld wielded a program meant to win Goering's approval. The Zionist movement was ready to mobilize around the world to foil any boycott of Germany. He said he could immediately send an envoy to London to persuade other Jewish leaders to support the Reich. What Blumenfeld didn't say in front of his colleagues was that the Zionists would be the only Jewish movement tolerated in Nazi Germany.

The prospect of a worldwide boycott made the Nazi leadership sweat. Hundreds of communities in the United States and Canada were discussing ways to protest, if not topple, Hitler. Germany was dependent on global trade and massive imports of raw material. Berlin needed its neighbors for iron ore and crude oil. It imported copper, silver, sulfur, lead and natural gas from Poland.

Germany was also vulnerable militarily. There was concern that Poland, fearful of Hitler’s threats, would launch a preemptive strike on Germany, much of whose weapons had been seized after World War I. The little man now called the fuhrer did not have the money to buy planes, ships or tanks. Germany had virtually depleted its foreign currency reserves. Hitler would have to rebuild the defense industry from scratch. The Nazi regime wanted to withhold payment to foreign creditors and eventually force them to accept drastically revised currency conversion rates. The money saved would be used to buy raw material for rearmament.

The speed with which the Zionist leadership adopted the Nazi agenda was astounding. On March 31, 12 days after the Goering meeting, the Jewish Agency Executive sent a telegram to Hitler that pledged to neutralize any Jewish boycott. The telegram by Martin Rosenbluth, Blumenfeld’s envoy, did not set any conditions for cooperation.

"Official Palestinian Jewry has not proclaimed boycott [of] German goods. [Agency officials] Are sure boycott so far spontaneous action by individuals and may be stopped if German authorities will not continue actions against Jews.”

On the day of the Zionist telegram, Weizmann was in Palestine briefing the Jewish Agency and others of the opportunity to work with Hitler. He met David Ben-Gurion who controlled the Haganah, the militia that protected Zionist interests, particularly those of the Histadrut.

In Washington, major Zionist leaders were pressured to withdraw from any boycott. Stephen Wise, a Reform rabbi close to the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had supported an embargo of Germany. But after meeting Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Wise urged the "temporary suspension" of the boycott of Nazis. [1]

For his part, Goering took measures to facilitate the Zionist campaign to torpedo the boycott. On March 27, the day of the Madison Square Garden protest, he denied that Germany discriminated against Jews. That was enough for Britain's Board of Deputies to announce that it would not participate in a boycott. [2]

Days after Goering's statement, the Nazis launched a nationwide boycott of the Jews and their enterprises. Jews were beaten and arrested, their stores vandalized. Jewish shopkeepers were simply taken away, their businesses sold to Aryan competitors next door. Some 60,000 people, many of them Jews, were imprisoned in four concentration camps established by Goering.

Zionist institutions, however, were left alone. A Zionist delegation began negotiating with the Reich and proposed that deported German Jews would be unable to transfer their money abroad with the exception of Palestine. Months later, the Zionists and Hitler's regime would sign what was called the Transfer Agreement, which made Germany the leading trading partner of Palestine.

The partnership would require a major public relations campaign to transform the Nazis into an asset for Zionism. Sam Cohen, a Zionist envoy of Weizmann, bought an interest in the Revisionist newspaper Doar Hayom, or the Daily Post, in an effort to turn it into a pro-German organ. The Zionist media controlled by Ben-Gurion came out against a boycott of Germany as catastrophic for German Jews. [3] Zionist leaders consistently played down or even denied Nazi atrocities and instead highlighted the benefits of working with Berlin for the economy of Palestine. [4]

Trade between Germany and Palestine grew rapidly. By 1937, Germany became the leading exporter to the holy land, surpassing Britain, which controlled the territory. Under the Transfer Agreement, the Jewish community became the consumer of everything German -- whether aluminum, iron, steel, cement, machinery or food. At one point, London pressed the Zionists to cancel orders and instead buy British. [5]

The Zionists envisioned a summit with Hitler. Haim Arlosoroff tried to arrange a separate meeting through Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Weizmann was urged to meet the fuhrer, but the latter declined. Still, Hitler maintained his agreement with the Zionists throughout the 1930s and into World War II.

Blumenfeld did not stay long in Germany after the Transfer Agreement. By February 1936, he was formally expelled and arrived in Palestine, where he was appointed to an executive position at the Hebrew University. [6]

But Blumenfeld's partner continued his job as persecutor of Jews. Although he said he found it distasteful, the incredibly ambitious Goering formed the Gestapo and in 1941 ordered Reinhard Heydrich, nominally the deputy of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, to draft a "total solution" to "the Jewish question." A year later that would result in the gas chambers that killed up to 14,000 Jews a day, not a few of them members of the Zionist movement. On the eve of his hanging on Oct. 16, 1946, Goering swallowed a cyanide pill.

Blumenfeld, who died in 1963, lived to see the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He became an admirer of Hannah Arendt, a celebrated German author who dismissed the trial as a public relations stunt to cover up for Zionist cooperation with Hitler. [7]

Goering's memory lived on through his brother Albert. U.S. Army records and Holocaust survivors attested that the younger sibling born of a Jewish father had saved at least hundreds of Jews throughout the Third Reich. Israel's Yad Vashem was urged to recognize Albert as a so-called Righteous Gentile. Yad Vashem, which reflected Israel's pro-German foreign policy, refused. [8]

Notes

1. "Nazis hesitate over anti-Jewish boycott." Palestine Post. April 2, 1933. Page 1

2. "Goehring Denies Any Anti-Jewish Discrimination" Palestine Post. March 27, 1933. Page 1.

3. "Hitlerist Germany and the Jews." Palestine Post. March 30, 1933. Page 8

4. "*Germany and the Jews." */The Christadelphian. April 1, 1933. /http://www.recoveringourhistory.com/the-christadelphian-magazine---1933.html

5. Public Records office, Colonial Office Papers 733/33: Minutes, 99 Feb. 1922, and Churchill to Military Secretary, 21 Mar. 1999.

6. "Kurt Blumenfeld, Zionist Leader, Expelled from Germany." Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Feb. 11, 1936

7. "Hannah Arendt, the Holocaust and Zionism" Elhanan Yakira. Israel Studies. Vol. 11, No. 3. Fall 2006

8. "Yad Vashem prize for top Nazi’s brother?" Renee Ghert-Zand. Times of Israel. March 13, 2013. "Top Israeli honor eludes Goering’s brother, who heroically saved Jews." Stuart Winer and Sue Serkes. Times of Israel. Jan. 25, 2016

Below: Hermann Goering and his military aides.