Long C&P re WW II origins: barely known connection - Nazi & Likud relationship

Jun 4, 2025, 9:02 PM

This is a whopping (long) C&P from a credibly researched history of details pertaining to the origins of WW II. The purpose for this C&P is to focus on the barely known (outside of Israel) favorable relationship of ‘convenience’ between Hitler’s Germany and Zionist German Jews.

This ‘relationship of convenience’ has credibility due to the common objective of Zionists and Nazis; both parties wanted Jews to get out of Germany. This led to the Nazis providing manufactured goods to the very early Zionist settlements in Palestine; this activity in effect encouraged Zionist Jews to leave Germany of their own accord. Given the fragile nature of Zionist colonies of the 1930’s in Palestine, the assistance from Hitler’s Germany played a huge role in the eventual successful formation of today’s Israel. Comm8n interests make for strange bedfellows; Nazi Germany remained respectful to Zionist Jews and did not suppress the Zionists as he did with the other Jews. Grateful for how Hitler had helped them, the roots of what had evolved into today’s Likud party were strongly influenced by … Hitler.

OK, here is the C&P. I’m neither suggesting that every thing in the piece is true nor am I suggesting that it is false. It is, however, very interesting.

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The Nazi-Zionist Economic Partnership of the 1930s

The vast majority of Jews and Jewish organizations across the world were fiercely hostile to Nazi Germany and just as Beaty claimed, they played a central role in leading the U.S. and Britain to war against that country. But there was one very notable and surprising exception to this pattern.

During the 1930s, the Zionist movement represented a relatively small fraction of Jews in most countries, with an overwhelming majority of that community being non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. And that same decade saw the establishment of an important Nazi-Zionist economic partnership that played a huge role in the growth and development of the Palestine colonization project that eventually culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. This thoroughly documented but long-suppressed history only came to widespread attention with the 1983 publication of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner, an anti-Zionist Jew of the Trotskyite persuasion.

In many respects, there was a natural commonality of interests between Nazis and Zionists. After all, Hitler regarded Germany’s one percent Jewish population as a disruptive and potentially dangerous element that he wanted gone, and the Middle East seemed as good a destination for them as any other. Meanwhile, the Zionists had very similar objectives, and the creation of their new national homeland in Palestine obviously required both Jewish immigrants and Jewish financial investment.

After Hitler had became Chancellor in 1933, outraged Jews worldwide had quickly launched an economic boycott, hoping to bring Germany to its knees, with London’s Daily Express famously running the banner headline “JUDEA DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY.” Jewish political and economic influence, then just like now, was very considerable, and in the depths of the Great Depression, impoverished Germany needed to export or die, so a large scale boycott in major German markets posed a potentially serious threat. But this exact situation provided Zionist groups with an excellent opportunity to offer the Germans a means of breaking that trade embargo, and they demanded favorable terms for the export of high-quality German manufactured goods to Palestine, together with accompanying German Jews. Once word of this major Ha’avara or “Transfer Agreement” with the Nazis came out at a 1933 Zionist Convention, many Jews and Zionists were outraged, and it led to various political splits and controversies. But the economic deal was too good to resist, and it went forward and quickly grew.

The importance of the Nazi-Zionist pact for Israel’s establishment is difficult to overstate. According to a 1974 analysis in Jewish Frontier cited by Brenner, between 1933 and 1939 over 60% of all the investment in Jewish Palestine came from Nazi Germany. The worldwide impoverishment of the Great Depression had drastically reduced ongoing Jewish financial support from all other sources, and Brenner reasonably suggested that without Hitler’s financial backing, the nascent Jewish colony, so tiny and fragile, might easily have shriveled up and died during that difficult period.

Once Hitler consolidated power in Germany, he quickly outlawed all other political organizations for the German people, with only the Nazi Party and Nazi political symbols being legally permitted. But a special exception was made for German Jews, and Germany’s local Zionist Party was accorded complete legal status, with Zionist marches, Zionist uniforms, and Zionist flags all fully permitted. Under Hitler, there was strict censorship of all German publications, but the weekly Zionist newspaper was freely sold at all newsstands and street corners. The clear notion seemed to be that a German National Socialist Party was the proper political home for the country’s 99% German majority, while Zionist National Socialism would fill the same role for the tiny Jewish minority.

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In 1934, Zionist leaders invited an important SS official to spend six months visiting the Jewish settlement in Palestine, and upon his return, his very favorable impressions of the growing Zionist enterprise were published in Joseph Goebbel’s Der Angriff, the flagship media organ of the Nazi Party in Berlin, with that massive 12-part series bearing the descriptive title “A Nazi Goes to Palestine.” The Nazi newspaper even struck a commemorative medal in honor of the partnership, with a Star-of-David on the front face and a Swastika on the obverse.

In his very angry 1920 critique of Jewish Bolshevik activity, Churchill had argued that Zionism was locked in a fierce battle with Bolshevism for the soul of European Jewry, and only its victory might ensure amicable future relations between Jew and Gentile. Based on available evidence, Hitler and many of the other Nazi leaders seemed to have reached a somewhat similar conclusion by the mid-1930s.

The very uncomfortable truth is that the harsh characterizations of Diaspora Jewry found in the pages of Mein Kampf were not all that different from what was voiced by Zionism’s founding fathers and its subsequent leaders, so the cooperation of those two ideological movements was not really so totally surprising.

Also quite ironic was the role of Adolf Eichmann, who today probably ranks as one of the half-dozen most famous Nazis in history due to his postwar 1960 kidnapping by Israeli agents, followed by his public show-trial and execution as a war-criminal. As it happens, Eichmann had been a central Nazi figure in the Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and apparently becoming something of a philo-Semite during the years of his close collaboration with top Zionist leaders.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Nazi Alliance

Once war broke out in 1939, trade relations between Nazi Germany and British-ruled Palestine were immediately severed, so the economic partnership between Hitler’s Germany and the main Zionist movement necessarily came to an end. But around that same time, an even more surprising relationship developed.

From its earliest origins, the mainstream Zionist movement led by Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had always had leftist roots and a Marxist ideology, but during the early 1930s there also appeared smaller, rightwing Zionist factions. These eventually gave rise to the Likud Party that currently governs Israel, and their early leaders of that era included future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Rather than Marxism, these factions drew their political inspiration from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, with one of their top ideologists even writing a weekly newspaper column under the heading “Diary of a Fascist.”

Thus, it was not entirely surprising that after World War II broke out, Shamir’s small Zionist faction made repeated attempts during 1940 and 1941 to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine affiliate. Shamir offered to undertake a campaign of sabotage attacks and espionage against the local British forces, hoping to share in the political booty after Hitler’s inevitable triumph.

Shamir was Israel’s prime minister during the 1980s when Brenner’s ground-breaking book appeared, so there was naturally something of a scandal when these facts came to light in the international media. Among other things, Western newspapers published long excerpts from the official letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent” democratic systems of Britain and France and assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would have no future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state that he and his colleagues hoped to establish under Fascist auspices in Palestine.

As it happens, both Germany and Italy were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the time, and given the small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of those efforts. But the idea of the sitting prime minister of the Jewish State having spent his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly something that sticks in one’s mind, not quite conforming to the traditional narrative of that era that most people had always accepted.

Most remarkably, the revelation of Shamir’s pro-Axis past seemed to have had only a relatively minor impact upon his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that any American political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the resulting political scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians in Britain, France, or most other western nations. But although there was certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press, especially after the shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year, then later served a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during 1986-1992. The Jews of Israel apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite differently than did most Americans, let alone most American Jews.

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Essentially, the Nazis (Hitler) wanted the Jews to leave Germany via immigration. So, they supported allowing some version of "Zionism" to exist inside of Germany during the 1930's.

Hitler always wanted the Jews out of Europe. He was an eliminationist antisemite. Inside of Germany, the Jews were only 1% of the population, and less than a million. So, it was possible to envision an immigration "solution", combined with killing some people that wouldn't leave.

The problem for him came when he implemented the invasion of the East. The number of Jews in Eastern Europe was in the millions, and that's when they turned to Genocide. At one point, they considered dumping all European Jews on the island of Madagascar. But due to logistical concerns, they settled on genocide. And once they settled on that, they started mass murder of Jews from Western Europe, too. To the Nazis, these people were not human really, but subhuman. So, they were OK with the genocide.

One additional point, in case some mis-interpret: Jews are not to blame for their own demise in Europe. Zionists in Palestine were not to blame for the Holocaust. The Holocaust is rightly blamed on the Nazis, and their antisemite "helpers" in Europe.

Long C&P re WW II origins: barely known connection - Nazi & Likud relationship

Ill have to upgrade my phone

Re: Ill have to upgrade my phone

Been a while since I read books about the Nazis....

Re: Been a while since I read books about the Nazis....

Re: Been a while since I read books about the Nazis....

In the East, the Germans did some of the killing themselves obviously....

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