Summary
Leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, whose vote rose from 2.6 per cent in 1928 to 18.3 per cent on 14 September 1930 and who came to power on 30 January 1933. In Brenner’s account no Zionist wanted him in power or voted for him, but the Zionist Federation of Germany’s decades of abstention from anti-Nazi defence left German Jewry without a Zionist-led resistance, and after 1933 the ZVfD repeatedly solicited his regime’s patronage for emigration to Palestine (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.23, p.29, p.35).
Details
- Hitler’s Depression-era mass following came first from indebted peasants, then Christian professionals and small shopkeepers resentful of large Jewish department stores, not from the working class, which had revolted against the war and remained trade unionist (PDF p.23).
- In 1930 the SPD and KPD combined outpolled him 37.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent; their failure to unite on militant joint defence let him come to power, a responsibility Brenner extends to the ZVfD (PDF p.24).
- Hitler used Mussolini’s example from the Fascist take-over as proof a terror dictatorship could overthrow weak bourgeois democracy, and in March 1933 told the Italian ambassador Mussolini was the spiritual head of his movement as well; in Mein Kampf (1926) he had praised Fascist Italy’s struggle against the three main weapons of the Jews (PDF p.33-34).
- He did not care what Jews thought of themselves; he wanted them out of Germany and, preferably, dead, so the ZVfD’s hoped-for ‘dignified’ coexistence on a separate-national-minority basis was no solution (PDF p.26).
- After he came to power the ZVfD solicited his patronage repeatedly, seeking an ‘orderly retreat’ with Nazi backing for emigration of at least the younger generation of Jews to Palestine (PDF p.35).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, Zionist Federation of Germany, Benito Mussolini, Fascism