By 1934 the SS had become the most pro-Zionist element in the Nazi Party. Other
Nazis 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.[(16)] There
were maps on the walls showing
the rapidly increasing strength of Zionism inside Germany.[(17)] 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 Nazi 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."[(18)] To commemorate the Baron's expedition, Goebbels had
a medal struck : on one side
the swastika, on the other the Zionist star.[(19)] In May 1935 Reinhardt
Heydrich, who was then the chief of the
SS Security Service, later the infamous 'Protector' of the Czech lands
incorporated into the Reich, wrote an
article, 'The Visible Enemy', for Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the
SS. In it Heydrich assessed the
various tendencies among the Jews, comparing the assimilationists quite
invidiously with the Zionists. His
partiality towards Zionism could not have been expressed in more unmistakable
terms : "After the Nazi seizure of
power our racial laws did in fact curtail considerably the immediate influence
of Jews. But... the question as
the Jew sees it is still : 'How can we win back our old position' ... We must
separate Jewry into two
categories... the Zionists and those who favor being assimilated. The Zionists
adhere to a strict racial
position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own
Jewish state." Heydrich wished them
a fond farewell : "The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be
able to accept its sons who have
been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our
official good will go with
them."[(20)]
[(16)]. Jacob Boas, 'The Jews of Germany: Self-Perception in the Nazi Era as
Reflected in the German Jewish
Press 1933-1938', PhD thesis, University of California, Riverside (1977), p.
110.
[(17)].Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head, p. 333.
[(18)]. Leopold von Mildenstein (pseudonym von Lim), 'Ein Nazi fahrt nach
Palastina', Der Angriff (9 October
1934), p.4.
[(19)]. Jacob Boas, 'A Nazi Travels to Palestine', History Today (London,
January 1980), p. 38.
[(20)]. Hohne, Order of the Death's Head, p. 333; and Karl Schleunes, The
Twisted Road to Auschwitz, pp. 1934.
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/zad/zad7.html
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