Debunking John Newsinger's Claims of 'Nazi-Zionist Collaboration'

John Newsinger is a jewish academic historian (1) and a communist who wrote one of the standard texts of leftist interpretations of the British Empire in 2006 titled ‘The Blood Never Dried’ which contains a significant albeit short section on the alleged ‘Nazi-Zionist collaboration’ from 1933 to 1939 which he frequently uses to attack Britain and its people (2) as well as any other non-jewish country he can find such as Poland. (3)

In ‘The Blood Never Dried’ Newsinger writes:

‘One other point worth making here is the extent to which the Zionist movement actually collaborated with the Nazis in the 1930s, in particular with the SS. To be blunt, they found they had a shared interest in the eviction of Jews from Germany. Reinhard Heydrich no less, later to be the architect of the Holocaust, in September 1935 proclaimed his solidarity with Zionism in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps. The Nazis, he made clear, were “in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas”. Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the destruction of Europe’s Jews, actually visited Palestine in 1937 at the invitation of the Zionists. The Gestapo worked closely with Mossad, the Zionist agency handling illegal immigration. In 1939 Heydrich was demanding that Mossad should be sending off “400 Jews per week…from Berlin alone”.

This cooperation extended to the SS providing the Haganah with smuggled arms.’ (4)

Now me being me; I checked Newsinger’s references and he cites three works to support these statements: Francis Nicosia’s ‘The Third Reich and the Palestine Question’, Gunther Deschner’s ‘Reinhard Heydrich’ and Klaus Polkehn’s ‘The Secret Contacts-Zionism and Nazi Germany 1933-1941’ with the latter being a non-specific citation.

However typically Newsinger’s claims mispresent his source material since what Nicosia actually says is that:

‘The SD and the Gestapo were receptive to the Mossad’s initiatives for cooperation. After November 1938, Mossad agents in Berlin, Vienna, and later Prague dominated the Palestine offices in each of those cities. They were provided with farms and other facilities to set up vocational training camps for prospective immigrants. Mossad agents in Vienna worked through Wolfgang Karthaus, a high-ranking Austrian Nazi who was sympathetic to the Jewish plight, to secure the cooperation of Gauleiter Josef Burckel and Gestapo agents Lange and Kuchmann. Though them, Yugoslav transit visas were obtained, enabling Austrian Jews to make their way to Palestine via Mossad ships that took on illegal immigrants in Yugoslav ports. Eichmann soon bought the Mossad operation under his control and urged the movement of greater numbers of illegal emigrants out of Austria. Jews were also smuggled down the Danube, through Black Sea ports in Rumania and Bulgaria and through Greece to Palestine. In 1939, the SD put pressure on Mossad agents in Berlin and Prague to move large numbers of Jews out of the Reich, with Heydrich demanding that 400 Jews per week be prepared and sent off from Berlin alone. In the summer of 1939, Mossad agent Pino Ginzburg concluded an agreement in Berlin with the Gestapo to move 10,000 Jews by ship from the ports of Emden and Hamburg. The outbreak of war in September forced the abandonment of the operation.’ (5)

While noting contextually what the Third Reich was actually doing was:

‘An almost blind utilization of Zionist ideology and the movement for the promotion of purely German domestic and economic ends, with little or no concern for the effect that policy was having on the situation in Palestine itself.’ (6)

Since - as Nicosia further notes - the entire point was to stop jews ‘identifying as Germans’ (7) but Newsinger fails to note any contextual information at all. Such as that the architect of the very limited 'Nazi-Zionist Collaboration' and Adolf Eichmann’s mentor Leopold von Mildenstein (8) was an ardent anti-Zionist from mid-1936 and headed up the Near East Propaganda at Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry.

As Verbovszky writes:

‘After Mildenstein left the SD in 1936, he completely reversed his position on Zionism. The choice of the Propaganda Ministry as his destination was indicative of a shift in Mildenstein’s thinking. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry was known for its heavily pro-Arab stance. Mildenstein became the Chief of Near East Propaganda. While working at the ministry, Mildenstein wrote two travel books, Rings um das brennende Land am Jordan (1938) and Naher Osten-vom Strassenrand erlebt (1941), about subsequent visits to Palestine that he made in those years. Both of these books present an overwhelmingly pro-Arab and anti-Zionist stance. Furthermore, the books fit the specific model of propaganda from Goebbels’ ministry which was violently anti-Semitic toward Jews in Palestine. Mildenstein’s work at the Propaganda Ministry undermined the very policies which he had initiated earlier while working at the SD.’ (9)

The point is that Newsinger presents the Third Reich’s relationship with Zionism as being one of complete agreement when Mildenstein – who he doesn’t mention - was only a Zionist for a short time and a violent anti-Zionist and backer of the anti-Zionist movement (10) and fails to mention contextual information such as Deschner’s point that Heydrich and Eichmann were also heavily involved in deporting roughly 15,000 jews with Polish citizenship to Poland in 1938, (11) which is the time Newsinger is specifically talking about but yet he refuses to mention because it demonstrates that the Third Reich was actually getting rid of jews any way it could and its relationship with the Zionist movement was both limited and completely utilitarian.

Hence Nicosia’s point that it was the Mossad – not to be confused with the later Israeli intelligence agency – who approached the SD and Gestapo about assisting jews who wished to emigrate to Palestine out of Austria, which the SD and Gestapo happily complied with.

Unsurprising he fails to cite Deschner’s point about the context to this where he states that:

‘Although from 1933 and 1937 only 24,000 Jews had been able to emigrate to Palestine, the turning-point arrived at the beginning of 1938.’ (12)

And qualifies about the difference in situation in Austria in 1938 that Newsinger uses as primary evidence for his claims about close ‘Nazi-Zionist Collaboration’:

‘The system of indirect pressure which had characterized the immigration policy of the Heydrich machine up until then was replaced for the first time by the large-scale use of direct force.’ (13)

The reason why Newsinger doesn’t cite this information is because it disrupts his predetermined narrative that the German authorities were actively working for Zionists while there were other options, because – as von Mildenstein had realised in 1936 – (14) jewish emigration from Germany and collaboration with the Zionists wasn’t actually working.

This is also why we hear nothing from Newsinger about the Rublee Wohlthat Plan of 1938 and 1939 which planned to allow the jews in Germany and Austria to freely immigrate to countries other than Palestine primarily Great Britain and the United States.

As Weckert explains it was basically a non-Zionist repeat of the Haavara Agreement of 1933:

‘The basic idea of the agreement was: By establishing trust funds which would comprise 25 percent of the wealth belonging to Jews in Germany, Jewish emigration would be financed through foreign loans. Each emigrant would, in addition to receiving the requisite amount of cash for entry (“Vorzeigegeld”), receive a minimum amount of capital necessary to establish oneself. About 150,000 able-bodied Jews were marked for emigration, and their next of kin were to follow later. The Intergovernmental Committee would concern itself with which countries Jews could migrate to. All Jews over 45 were to be able to remain in Germany and be protected from discrimination. Residential and work restrictions for these Jews were to be lifted. The text of the memorandum on the Rublee-Wohlthat Agreement was an official contract. Rublee wrote it up after his return to London, and sent it to Wohlthat.

Weizsäckerhesitated to sign it, because the Foreign Ministry had not been involved in the negotiations – something he himself had prevented. Therefore, it was Hermann Göring who presented the text to Adolf Hitler, who wholeheartedly assented to it. For his part, Rublee passed the text to the Intergovernmental Committee, made up of the representatives of 30 countries. The committee gave Rublee the task of informing Wohlthat that these countries had taken note of the agreement with interest, and that they would do everything to facilitate the emigration of Jews from Germany on its basis. In practice this support proved less than promised, but that was not the fault of the agreement or of its German initiators. After successfully concluding the negotiations, the 72-year-old Rublee resigned from his post as director of the Intergovernmental Committee. In England a finance company was founded with start-up capital of one million dollars. In the United States, Jewish bankers pledged to raise enough capital to guarantee the realization of every settlement project. The new director of the Intergovernmental Committee, Sir Herbert Emerson, was convinced that the emigration of Jews had been secured and that it would be completed in three to five years’ time.

In January 1939 the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration was founded in Berlin. Its work was based on the Rublee-Wohlthat agreement. It cooperated closely with the Reich Jewish Association in order to simplify the emigration process.

The process began slowly, because most countries refused to take in Jewish immigrants. But at least the Rublee Wohlthat agreement had removed the financial barriers.’ (15)

It is thus unsurprising that Newsinger doesn’t mention this, because it completely blows his thesis of ‘close collaboration’ out of the water precisely because Zionism had largely failed to facilitate the mass emigration of German jews by 1938 and its last gasp were the desperate efforts of 1938 and 1939 in Austria recorded by Deschner, while the Third Reich was working on a non-Zionist emigration plan to other countries in the form of the Rublee Wohlthat Plan of 1938/1939.

This goes back to Deschner’s point that Heydrich saw in the Zionism versus Assimilationism dispute among jewry a lever by which to give the Zionists what they wanted: the jews out of Germany… fast. (16)

Now moving on to more specific misrepresentations; Newsinger misrepresents Deschner about Heydrich’s attitude to Zionism when he claims Heydrich was uncritically supportive but what Deschner actually says is:

‘As a National Socialist,’ he announced in intimate circles, ‘I am a Zionist.’ And even in his manifesto, Die Wandlungen unseres Kampfes (The Fortunes of our Struggle), he wrote that one should not allow oneself to be deceived by Zionism over the ‘basically’ hostile attitude of the Jews. But in contrast to the assimilationists, ‘who disown the Jewish race’, he was ready to praise the Zionists.’ (17)

Put another way: Heydrich viewed Zionists as enemies of the Third Reich but less objectionable than assimilationists because they didn’t pretend to be Germans but were instead proud to be jews. An attitude that was incidentally also echoed by Eichmann. (18)

So, in other words: Newsinger is being completely dishonest in trying to claim Heydrich (and others) were proponents of Zionism.

Polkehn by contrast is an almost useless source that – for example – fails to mention American Zionists were the ones behind the boycott of German goods from 1933 onwards (19) and yet complains that the Haavara Agreement ‘doomed the boycott to fail’ (20) as if it were an ‘anti-Zionist’ boycott! (21)

Indeed, when Newsinger writes that ‘this cooperation extended to the SS providing the Haganah with smuggled arms’ none of his sources mention or support this claim, but he does further make the additional claim that:

‘The Yishuv was increasing in wealth and numbers and, courtesy of the Nazis, was taking steps to arm itself. This became common knowledge in October 1935, when a secret shipment that included 254 Mauser pistols and 50,000 rounds of ammunition was discovered in Jaffa. Arab opinion was outraged.’ (22)

He lists the source for this assertion that this was ‘from the Nazis’ as Nevill Barbour’s 1946 book ‘Nisi Dominus’ but Barbour’s book actually states:

‘At the moment a fresh cause of trouble arose. In the middle of October some cement cases consigned to Tel Aviv via the Jaffa Custom-house were discovered to contain 254 Mauser pistols, 90 revolvers, 500 bayonets, and 500,000 rounds of ammunition. The impression on Arab minds can well be imagined: the Arab Labourers Federation of Jaffa sent the following telegram to the Officer administering the Government:

What is the purpose of the contraband ammunition? Is it to kill the Arabs or expel the English?

We demand emphatically equality in armament or the confiscation of Jewish arms, both legal and illegal.’ (23)

So, what Barbour actually states is that this shipment contained 254 Mauser pistols, but also 90 revolvers, 500 bayonets and 500,000 rounds of ammunition were discovered in a ‘secret shipment’ not that they came from Germany let alone was ‘courtesy of the Nazis’.

Hence why Newsinger leaves out the 90 revolvers and 500 bayonets as it implodes his claim that this shipment was ‘courtesy of the Nazis’.

Thus, we can see that Newsinger is – typically for a jewish communist – utterly and completely dishonest and misrepresents the Third Reich’s jewish emigration policies, Heydrich’s motivations and sometimes outright lies to try and buttress his claims.

References

(1) https://beastrabban.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/john-newsinger-on-the-zionists-collaboration-with-anti-semites-and-the-nazis/

(2) For example: https://socialistworker.co.uk/comment/the-kindertransport-myth-the-british-government-didnt-want-to-save-jewish-refugees/

(3) For example: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/newsinger/2018/xx/comrade.html

(4) John Newsinger, 2006, ‘The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of The British Empire’, 1st Edition, Bookmarks: London, p. 125

(5) Francis Nicosia, 1985, ‘The Third Reich and the Palestine Question’, 1st Edition, University of Texas Press: Austin, p. 161

(6) Ibid., pp. 60-61

(7) Ibid., p. 60

(8) David Cesarini, 2004, ‘Eichmann: His Life and Crimes’, 1st Edition, William Heinemann: London, pp. 46-48

(9) Joseph Verbovszky, 2013, ‘Leopold von Mildenstein and the Jewish Question’, Published Masters Thesis: Case Western Reserve University, p. 10

(10) Ibid., pp. 8-13

(11) Gunther Deschner, 1981, ‘Reinhard Heydrich: A Biography’, 1st Edition, Stein and Day: New York, p. 155

(12) Ibid., pp. 151-152

(13) Ibid., p. 153

(14) Verbovszky, Op. Cit., pp. 8-13

(15) Ingrid Wecket, 2004, ‘Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich’, 1st Edition, Theses & Dissertations Press: Chicago, pp. 42-44

(16) Deschner, Op. Cit., pp. 149-150

(17) Ibid., p. 151

(18) Cesarini, Op. Cit., p. 56

(19) Klaus Polkehn, 1976, ‘The Secret Contacts-Zionism and Nazi Germany 1933-1941’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, p. 54

(20) Ibid., p. 65

(21) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-the-german-boycott

(22) Newsinger, Op. Cit., p. 127

(23) Nevill Barbour, 1969, [1946], ‘Nisi Dominus: A Survey of the Palestine Controversy’, 1st Edition, The Institute for Palestine Studies: Beirut, p. 161