Summary
German Zionist rabbi whom foreign Jewish observers saw, in Lenni Brenner’s account, as the Zionist Federation of Germany’s most strident volkist propagandist in the first years of the Third Reich, arguing that a Nazi state built on purity of nation and race could respect only Jews who saw themselves the same way (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.40-41).
Details
- Prinz, a Social Democratic voter before 1933, became rabidly volkist after Hitler took power; some of the violent hostility towards Jews in his book Wir Juden could, Brenner writes, have been inserted directly into Nazi propaganda, including his description of the Jew as a “psychopathological arsenal of rare abundance” (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.40).
- He welcomed liberalism’s death: “Parliament and democracy are increasingly shattered. The exaggerated harmful emphasis on the value of the individual is recognised to be mistaken; the concept and reality of the nation and the volk is gaining, to our happiness, more and more ground” (PDF p.41).
- He held that an accommodation between Nazis and Jews was possible only on the basis of a Zionist-Nazi accord: “A state which is constructed on the principle of the purity of nation and race can only have respect for those Jews who see themselves in the same way” (PDF p.41).
- His 1937 account in Young Zionist alludes to the ZVfD’s 21 June 1933 memorandum to the Nazi Party (PDF p.37, Chapter 5 note 8).
- After coming to the United States he abandoned these notions, which Brenner takes as further proof that the German Zionists had simply adapted ideologically to Nazism; Brenner interviewed him on 8 February 1981 (PDF p.41, Chapter 5 note 19).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, Zionist Federation of Germany, Racism, Negation of the Diaspora