Summary
The German branch of the World Zionist Organization (Zionistische Vereinigung fuer Deutschland, ZVfD), whose weekly organ was the Juedische Rundschau. In Brenner’s account it most fully elaborated the WZO’s abstentionist, volkist doctrine in Weimar, abstained from anti-Nazi defence, and after January 1933 repeatedly solicited Nazi patronage for Jewish emigration to Palestine (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, PDF p.25, p.35).
Details
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The ZVfD had most fully elaborated WZO ideology before 1914 and developed it to its conclusion in the 1920s: Diaspora Judaism was hopeless, there was no defence against anti-Semitism, and its only tasks were instilling nationalist consciousness and training youths for Palestine (PDF p.25).
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Its president Kurt Blumenfeld treated participation in German politics (Grenzueberschreitung, overstepping the borders) as the dreaded sin, accepted that Germany belonged to the Aryan race, and in November 1923 consciously played down a Berlin hunger riot in which a Jew was killed and several hundred Jewish stores looted (PDF p.24-25).
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Membership was small: 9,059 paid-up members in 1930, with nominal dues; some 2,000 settlers went from Germany to Palestine between 1897 and 1933, many of them Russians stranded after the revolution (PDF p.25).
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Its adherence to the 1930 Reichstag Election Committee with the Centralverein was strictly nominal; Siegfried Moses wrote in the Rundschau that defence against anti-Semitism was not its main task beside work for Palestine (PDF p.26).
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After Hitler came to power its goal became an ‘orderly retreat’ — Nazi backing for emigration of at least the younger generation to Palestine — and it sought contacts in the Nazi apparatus on the basis of a volkish appreciation of Zionism, including Kurt Tuchler’s approach to SS Baron von Mildenstein and the March 1933 London delegation sent after Goering’s summons (PDF p.35-37).
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On 21 June 1933 it sent the Nazi Party a memorandum accepting the new state’s principle of race, declaring opposition to mixed marriage and support for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group, and calling boycott propaganda in essence un-Zionist (PDF p.37-38).
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In the Rundschau, editor Robert Weltsch marked the 1 April 1933 boycott with ‘Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride’, blaming Jewry’s guilt in failing to heed Herzl’s call, and attacked left-wing Jewish journalists in terms Brenner sets beside the Nazi press’s own; the Nazis did not force these denunciations (PDF p.39).
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The Rundschau’s 4 August 1933 essay ‘Rasse als Kulturfaktor’ held that Jews, a ‘foreign race’, had to respect German racial consciousness absolutely and that race, ‘blood and soil’, determined the being of a people; Joachim Prinz became its most strident volkist propagandist (PDF p.39-41).
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Not even the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 shook its belief in a modus vivendi: the HeChalutz Centre proposed emigrating the entire Jewish community over 15-25 years in exchange for liberalised currency transfer and training, and on 15 January 1936 the ZVfD executive demanded recognition as ‘the only instrument for the exclusive control of German Jewish life’ (PDF p.41-42).
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There was no anti-Nazi activity by its leaders in the whole pre-war period, and only tiny Zionist youth involvement in the underground; Brenner’s verdict is that, given the Weimar failure to resist and their race theories, the German Zionists ended up ‘as the ideological jackals of Nazism’ (PDF p.42-43).
Related pages
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, World Zionist Organization, Zionism, Negation of the Diaspora, Adolf Hitler