Did the Nazis murder Victor “Chaim” Arlosoroff?
Victor “Chaim” Arlosoroff was a major figure in the history of 1920s and 1930s Zionism who is best known for being the boyfriend of Magda Behrend - later Magda Goebbels - in the early 1920s. (1) Arlosoroff was a rising star in Zionist politics having made a political coup d'état in becoming a protégé of both Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion (2) as well as supplanting Colonel Kitsch as the political secretary of the Jewish Executive in 1931. (3)
During the late 1920s and early 1930s Arlosoroff had been a kind of informal ambassador of the Zionist cause to the British government forming a friendship with the then governor of Palestine fellow jew Herbert Samuel and other interested foreign parties. (4) We also know that Arlosoroff - in spite of being a Marxist as well as a Zionist - (5) was trying to wheedle money out of German industrialists to 'support' his vision of a Zio-Communist state (to coin a term) (6) much as Lenin had famously done during the period before and after the February and October revolutions in the Russian Empire.
In early 1933 Arlosoroff had also gone back to Europe to attempt to open negotiations with various foreign governments - as well as to attend the 1933 Zionist Congress in Warsaw - and as part of this he had - after accidentally realizing that Magda Goebbels was indeed his old flame Magda Behrend - tried to gain an entrée to senior National Socialist figures by attempting to convince Magda to help him. (7) Although Magda was unwilling to help: Arlosoroff did manage to lay the ground work for what became known as the Ha'avara (lit. 'Transfer') agreement whereby some 50,000 jews voluntarily emigrated from Germany to Palestine. (8)
Before Arlosoroff returned to Palestine he famously wrote to his sister Lisa that he felt that his trip to Germany had been the biggest mistake of his life and that he didn't know whether he would see his loved ones again. (9)
In the light of his murder soon after this had been oft regarded - wrongly in my opinion - as prophetic, but this is incorrect as Arlosoroff is only referring here to the fact that he thought he might be picked up in Europe by the Germans because of his harassment of Magda Goebbels. The wording of this note to his sister Lisa is often deliberately misconstrued (most famously by Israeli journalist Haviv Kanaan) to mean that he was afraid of the Germans having him assassinated.
This - as I have above intimated - is incorrect for the simple reason that this note is describing his approach of Magda Goebbels and he felt in danger while in Europe (which was after all where he was): hence his immediately leaving Germany after making the failed approach and writing the letter. (10) Arlosoroff was frightened of the Germans imprisoning him British passport or no British passport (the claim that this would have somehow prevented them by advanced by Kanaan (11) is simply absurd); hence his rather hurried itinerary of flying stops in Paris and London before arriving back in Palestine on 14th June 1933 (after having written the letter to Lisa on either the 29th or the 30th of May). (12)
Arlosoroff was simply flying to safety from the German sphere of influence for fear of imprisonment as a jew harassing the high profile wife of a senior National Socialist figure: he wasn't fleeing assassination, but rather a concentration camp (hence 'I might not see my loved ones again'). To understand this we need but realise that there was much propaganda about how jews were being mistreated by the nascent National Socialist state doing the rounds. (13) It is hardly surprising that Arlosoroff would have believed such claims given his own hostile reception in the Third Reich and first-hand observation of the tidal wave of anti-Semitism that had been unleashed in Germany by the accession to power of the National Socialists in January 1933.
We should also recall that in spite of the letter's alleged prophetic qualities: it is in fact an unfulfilled prophecy given that Arlosoroff did indeed see his family again as he arrived back in Palestine safe and sound. It was only two days later on the 16th June that Arlosoroff was assassinated when he was out walking on a beach near Tel Aviv with his wife Sima by two unknown men.
Therefore we can see that - in spite of the claims made by Kanaan - there is simply no reason to connect the letter (which we only know existed and the rough outline of because it disappeared after the death of Lisa Arlosoroff) and Arlosoroff's death.
The idea that Goebbels sent hit men in the form of two National Socialist intelligence operatives named Gronda and Korth who had ostensibly been sent to find buried treasure and whom then hired two Arab hit men to do the deed (14) is in my view absurd.
The reasons for this are quite simple: in that if the Germans were - as Kanaan suggests - too squeamish to pick up Arlosoroff in Germany because of his British mandate passport: then why on earth would they take the even bigger risk of having Arlosoroff assassinated in Palestine? The risk of discovery would obviously be high and if diplomatic relations with Britain were such a concern: the step would have been completely counter-intuitive as well as the expending of precious party reasons for revenge killings.
Gronda and Korth were not likely to be in Palestine to murder Arlosoroff. After all it is a rather speedy decision on the part of the Germans to go from the offence being committed on the 29th May to successfully organizing the assassination to a major Zionist leader on his home ground some eighteen days later on the 16th June!
Things in the intelligence world - especially those with political and diplomatic implications of this type that are according to Kanaan's thesis so important to them to avoid - just don't work like this as the action has to scoped out, budgeted for, analysed and then approved even before the mission can begin.
How on earth did this get so fast-tracked by the National Socialists given that they were only just consolidating their power at home (with all the resultant chaos in their industrial-military-intelligence complex): why provoke the British government and the Zionists by assassinating jewish leaders in Palestine because of their old relationships with the wives of National Socialist leaders?
Another outstanding question that has yet to be answered by those who support Kanaan's thesis of the 'Nazis did it' is how on earth Goebbels ordered a foreign assassination? At the time he was merely the Gauleiter of Berlin: he was a figure in the ascendant to be sure, but at the time he simply didn't have the power to order assassinations in foreign countries and nor did Gauleiter Koch who Gronda and Korth received their orders from.
Further most of the 'evidence' advanced by Kanaan is of an absurdly circumstantial character such as the idea that because the two killers were seen fleeing in the general direction of the German settlement of Sarona to north of Tel Aviv then they 'must' have been German agents or hired by the Germans. (15) Intellectually that is on the level of claiming that Adolf Eichmann's visit to Palestine in the 1930s was to investigate methods of mass murdering jews because while he was there he met with Arab leaders who believed that this was the solution to the jewish question!
It simply isn't tenable and if one wishes to argue this then you would have to first demonstrate the viability of the utilization of the pricking of moles with a needle as a test to divine whether or not a woman was a witch as it uses exactly the same logic.
Add to that the lack of any mention in Goebbels' famous and remarkably honest diaries (16) of either ordering this assassination or reacting to it (17) and there is absolutely no actual proof Goebbels or the Third Reich was even involved. (18)
What were Gronda and Korth doing in Palestine? What was their mission?
I'd suggest that this is fairly obvious given the overall historical context since in Germany: the National Socialists were consolidating their influence and governmental apparatus. Thus it makes sense for their agents to be dispatched to German expatriate communities around the world with local National Socialist groups - such as those in Palestine - to consolidate their influence within their communities and also co-ordinate with them in relation to the removal of dissidents, subversives and undesirables. This would also serve to create the nascent intelligence networks that the Third Reich later used with varying levels of effectiveness in the Second World War. (19)
Thus we can see that there is no reason; let alone any actual evidence, to suppose that the Third Reich was in any way involved in the murder of Victor “Chaim” Arlosoroff.
References
(1) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/did-magda-goebbels-have-jewish-ancestry
(2) Anja Klabunde, 2003, 'Magda Goebbels', 1st Edition, Time Warner: London, pp. 181-182
(3) Neil Caplan, 1988, 'Zionist Visions in the Early 1930s', pp. 256-257 in Jonathan Frankel, Peter Medding, Ezra Mendelsohn (Eds.), 1988, 'Studies in Contemporary Jewry: The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914-1921', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York
(4) Ibid., pp. 258-259; Klabunde, Op. Cit., pp. 79-80
(5) Ibid., p. 50
(6) Ibid., pp. 91-92
(7) Martin Gilbert, 1999, 'Israel: A History', 1st Edition, Black Swan: London, p. 71; Guido Knopp, 2003, 'Hitler's Women', 1st Edition, Psychology Press: Hove, p. 80
(8) https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2013-06-16/ty-article/.premium/1933-the-murder-of-chaim-arlosoroff/0000017f-f777-ddde-abff-ff77872f0000
(9) Klabunde, Op. Cit., p. 192
(10) Knopp, Op. Cit. p. 80
(11) Klabunde, Op. Cit., p. 198
(12) Ibid., p. 192
(13) For example see Edgar Mowrer, 1933, 'Germany puts the Clock Back', 1st Edition, Penguin: London, pp. 182-187
(14) Klabunde, Op. Cit., pp. 195-199
(15) Ibid., p. 195
(16) Toby Thacker, 2009, 'Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death', 1st Edition, Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke, p. 3
(17) Klabunde, Op. Cit., p. 198
(18) Knopp, Op. Cit., p. 81
(19) David Kahn, 1978, 'Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II', 1st Edition, MacMillan: New York, pp. 98-100