Capitalism in Decay

Quoting Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of Dictators, chapter 7:

It was only after his mother died, and he moved from provincial Linz to Vienna, that Hitler found occasion to question the glib assumptions of his youth. For there he wandered through the old inner city and encountered a Galician Hasid, ‘an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.’ But the more he thought about what he had seen, the more his question assumed a new form: ‘Is this a German?’¹⁶⁷ It is in the context of his earliest ruminations on what was, for him, the central question of existence that he introduced Zionism into his opus.

And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves. Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the Zionists.
It looked, to be sure, as though only a part of the Jews approved this viewpoint, while the majority condemned and inwardly rejected such a formulation. But… the so‐called liberal Jews did not reject the Zionists as non‐Jews, but only as Jews with an impractical, perhaps even dangerous, way of publicly avowing their Jewishness.¹⁶⁸

There is no better proof of Zionism’s classic rôle as an outrider to anti‐Semitism than Hitler’s own statement. What more, the reader was to ask, could any reasonable person need? However, before 1914 Hitler had no need to concern himself further with Zionism, as the prospects of a revived Jewish state seemed very remote. It was the Balfour Declaration, Germany's defeat and the Weimar revolution that made him think again about Zionism.

[…]

By 1919 Rosenberg had already explained Zionism in his book, Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Trace of the Jews in the Wanderings of Time)[.] It was just another Jewish hustle; the Zionists only wanted to create a hide‐out for the international Jewish conspiracy. Jews were, by their racial nature, organically incapable of building a state of their own, but he felt that Zionist ideology served wonderfully as a justification for depriving Germany’s Jews of their rights and that, perhaps, there was the possibility of future use of the movement for the promotion of Jewish emigration.

Hitler soon began to touch on these themes in his talks, and on 6 July 1920 he proclaimed that Palestine was the proper place for the Jews and that only there could they hope to get their rights. Articles supporting emigration to Palestine began appearing in the party organ, the Volkischer Beobachter, after 1920, and periodically party propagandists would return to the point, as did Julius Streicher in a speech given on 20 April 1926 before the Bavarian Landtag.¹⁶⁹ But for Hitler the validity of Zionism only lay in its confirmation that the Jews could never be Germans. In Mein Kampf, he wrote:

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 for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation 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.¹⁷⁰

Jews lacked the essential racial character to build a state of their own. They were essentially leeches, lacking in natural idealism, and they hated work. He explained:

For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always presupposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state‐race, and especially a correct interpretation of the concept of work. In the exact measure in which this attitude is lacking, any attempt at forming, even of preserving, a spatially delimited state fails.¹⁷¹

In spite of any early musings about Zionism’s efficacy in eventually promoting emigration, the [German Fascists] made no effort to establish any relationship with the local Zionists. On the contrary, when the Zionist Congress met in Vienna in 1925, the [German Fascists] were among those who rioted against their presence.¹⁷²

(Those of us who have studied Fascism in depth know that such vacillations were usually only temporary, as we shall soon see.)

[T]he [German Fascists] primarily focused on denouncing the Jews, rather than explaining what they would do about them after they won. However, for decades ‘[insert slur here] to Palestine!’ had been the slogan of European anti‐Semitism, and the [Fascist] propagandists used it in their own agitation. In June 1932 the centrepiece for one of their largest anti‐Jewish rallies, in Silesian Breslaw, was a huge banner telling the Jews to ‘get ready for Palestine!’¹⁷⁴ During the anti‐Jewish boycott on 1 April 1933, pickets at the department stores handed out an imitation ‘one‐way ticket to Palestine’ to Jewish‐looking passers‐by.¹⁷⁵

[…]

Not only would wholesale Jewish emigration make Berlin unpopular among other capitals, but what would happen after the arrival of large numbers of Jews in any of the major cities of the world? They would incite others, and not just Jews, against the Reich and the effect they could have on Germany’s trade might well be devastating. It was within this context that the Zionists, Sam Cohen of Hanotea and the ZVfD in Germany, first appeared with their proposals.

Haʻavara had several obvious advantages to the [Fascists]. If Jews went to Palestine, they would only be able to complain to other Jews. In fact, they would even be a moderating influence there, since the fear of worse consequences for their relatives in Germany, if anything were done to make the [Fascists] cancel the Transfer, would make them reluctant to agitate on a large scale. But the most important use of the Haʻavara agreement was for propaganda. The [Fascists] now had something to show their foreign detractors who said they were incapable of any policy toward the Jews other than physical brutality.

[…]

[The Third Reich] regarded the will of the Führer as having the force of law, and once Hitler had pronounced, an avowedly pro‐Zionist policy developed. Also in October Hans Frank, then the Bavarian Minister of Justice, later the Governor‐General of Poland, told the Nuremberg parteitag that the best solution to the Jewish question, for Jews and Gentiles, alike, was the Palestinian National Home.¹⁷⁸ […] Jews could still leave for any country that would have them, but now Palestine became the propagandists’ preferred solution to the Jewish question.

[…]

By 1934 the SS had become the most pro‐Zionist element in the [NSDAP]. Other [Fascists] were even calling them ‘soft’ on the Jews. Baron von Mildenstein had returned from his six‐month visit to Palestine as an ardent Zionist sympathiser. Now as the head of the Jewish Department of the SS’s Security Service, he started studying Hebrew and collecting Hebrew records; when his former companion and guide, Kurt Tuchler, visited his office in 1934, he was greeted by the strains of familiar Jewish folk tunes.¹⁸²

There were maps on the walls showing the rapidly increasing strength of Zionism inside Germany.¹⁸³ Von Mildenstein was as good as his word: he not only wrote favourably about what he saw in the Zionist colonies in Palestine; he also persuaded Goebbels to run the report as a massive twelve‐part series in his own Der Angriff (The Assault), the leading [Fascist] propaganda organ (26 September to 9 October 1934). His stay among the Zionists had shown the SS man ‘the way to curing a centuries‐long wound on the body of the world: the Jewish question’.

It was really amazing how some good Jewish boden under his feet could enliven the Jew: ‘The soil has reformed him and his kind in a decade. This new Jew will be a new people.’¹⁸⁴ To commemorate the Baron’s expedition, Goebbels had a medal struck: on one side the swastika, on the other the Zionist star.¹⁸⁵

(Emphasis added in all cases.)