Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (17 page)

This is only one example of the necessary, and often unavoidable, cooperation of Jewish organizations with the Nazi regime. Not every one of these examples posed a dilemma. The Reichsausschuss der jüdischen Jugendverbände (Reich Committee of Jewish Youth Associations) was recognized by the Nazi Reichsjugendführung (Reich Youth Leadership), and every leader of a Jewish youth group was equipped with a Swastika-stamped identification card. Thanks to this recognition, Jewish youth could continue to have reunions and, for some years, even use youth hostels and other facilities that were later denied them. on another level, officials of the legal and economic advisory offices of the Centralverein intervened to safeguard the legal rights of dismissed workers or civil servants in labor courts or in official silent negotiations. often, they just continued to remain connected to their former contacts of well-meaning or at least law-abiding bureaucrats with whom they had dealt before and who now received them in a matter-of-fact way as negotiation partners, whether they came as officials of the Centralverein or of the Reichsvertretung
.

The Dilemmas of the Zionists

Contact with the Nazi regime was also necessary for the officials of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation for Germany, or ZVfD) and for the Palästina-Amt (Palestine office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine) in Berlin, especially in matters of vocational training (
hachschara
) and emigration to Palestine. The German Zionists were (and sometimes still are) criticized for cooperating with the Nazi government. The preferential treatment of the Zionists by many Nazi agencies, including the Gestapo, is an undeniable fact. It is evident from the many contemporary documents and later personal accounts referred to and quoted by our colleague Francis Nicosia in his pilot study of 1985 and in his later writings. To mention only two examples: a circular letter of the German Foreign Ministry from February 1934 stated that “Zionism comes closest to the goals of German Jewish policy. official German authorities are cooperating fully with Jewish organizations, especially in the promotion of emigration to Palestine.” And a prominent Zionist leader confirmed in 1957: “The Gestapo did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine. we often received their help when we required anything from other authorities.”
¹¹
In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, there were numerous antiSemites who supported Zionism. only after the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948 have Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism become indistinguishably intertwined.

It is true that there are some similarities in the symbols and termi-nology of both German and Jewish nationalism, if one views them as purely philosophical constructions. But those similarities were not the reason for the preference granted by the Nazis to Zionist organizations and their work. Their motives were more practical in that the Nazis wanted to expel the Jews from Germany, and the Zionists wanted them to go to Palestine. Many contemporary sources, often quoted from both Jewish and official Nazi documents,
¹²
prove that it was a temporary common interest arising from completely opposite motives. It is also evident that the Zionists in Germany and in Palestine did not hesitate to take advantage of this preferential treatment. The question is whether they were, at the time or merely in retrospect, right to do so. I have chosen two examples to deal with this dilemma, namely, the vocational (mainly agricultural) training centers for young emigrants, and the capital transfer agreement, both known by their Hebrew names of
hachschara
(training) and
haavara
(transfer), respectively.

Since the early nineteenth century, the “abnormal” vocational structure of the Jews in Germany, mainly their concentration in the financial and commercial sectors and the professions, had troubled Jewish and non-Jewish “emancipationist” reformers who meant well; it also fueled the vicious antiSemitism of the day. The former founded associations for the promotion of agriculture and the crafts among Jews, while the latter accused them of being a tribe of bloodsucking usurers who should best be eliminated, one way or the other. For the Zionists, the return to the soil and to manual labor was regarded as a precondition to a “normal” Jewish society in the “old-new” Jewish homeland. Vocational training or retraining in agriculture and the manual trades was a central aim in the program of the Zionist movement and its youth organizations and movements everywhere, and not just in Germany. Tens of thousands of young men and women awaited their turn for
aliyah
to Palestine in the
hachschara
farms of eastern europe.
¹³
In Germany, too, a few such farms existed before the Nazis attained power; after 1933, more occupational training and retraining programs and camps were established for the rapidly growing numbers of German Jews, mainly young people, who sought immigration certificates for Palestine.

In Nazi Germany, agriculture was ideologically romanticized. Farmers were cherished as the preservers of German
Blut und Boden
(blood and soil), and were tightly organized and economically protected. Their leaders were ardent Nazis who abhorred any contact of Jews with German soil, and even more so with the “honored maidens” of German blood. Therefore, the Ministry of Agriculture opposed the
hachschara
programs, even on separate collective farms and especially in the households of individual German farmers. However, the Zionist functionaries succeeded in overcoming this opposition with the help of other Nazi authorities, particularly within the SS. Francis Nicosia has rightly called the SS “the national executioner of Jewish policy between 1933 and 1945.”
¹⁴
Although the Judenreferat (Jewish desk) of the SS
-
Sicherheitsdienst (SS-Security Service, or SD) was founded only in 1935 and became the launching pad for the ominous careers of Adolf eichmann and his henchmen, the Gestapo had already intervened in 1933, and was in favor of what it termed the
jüdisches Umschulungswerk
(work of Jewish retraining), assuming control over its activities. Paradoxically, this included not only the ‘good behavior’ of the young people in the
hachschara
programs and their isolation from other Germans, but in some cases meant the expansion of Hebrew language courses as well.

Thanks to this “protection,” the
hachschara
farms continued to exist even after November 1938, some of them even until 1943.

In a recently published and very informative article on the
hachschara
and the disagreements among German governmental and party agencies about Jewish occupational retraining, Nicosia demonstrates the manner in which the Gestapo and the SS gained the upper hand in the debates.
¹⁵
There is nothing I would add to this, but I wish to deal briefly first with the internal Jewish aspects, and second with the experience of the young people who lived and worked on the
hachschara
farms. I personally shared in this experience in 1936–1937. It is true that the Gestapo’s “sponsorship” and ultimate control over the programs required detailed reports about all persons who lived and worked in those programs. In 1939, however, the
hachschara
farms were forced to give up most of their own production and to serve essentially as liv-ing quarters for their members, young Jews who performed forced la-bor in the surrounding farms and factories. If one insists on fitting the
hachschara
farms into a particular scheme, one may certainly classify them as part of what Hilberg has defined as the stage of “concentration.” However, even according to Hilberg’s matrix, the next step from there led not only to extermination but, at least until the end of 1941, to the alternative of emigration. The leaders of the Hechaluz (Hebrew for the Pioneer, the association of all Zionist youth movements) and of the Reichsvertretung, who struggled for the continuity and expansion of the
hachschara
farms in cooperation with the police and the Gestapo, could not, of course, foresee what was to come. Still, I wonder if they would have given up their struggle and closed down the
hachscharoth,
even if they knew or had some foreboding for the future.

It is unlikely that the Hechaluz would have done this because they would have foreseen at the same time that the
hachschara
programs helped many thousands of young Jews to escape with their lives. In the meantime, the programs also enabled the trainees to spend their remaining time in Germany, before emigration or deportation, in an oasis of creative work, learning, and the comradeship of young Jews. Reading Nicosia’s article, I was glad to note that he no longer used the terms
Lager
or
Umschulungslager
(camps, or retraining camps), terms that appeared in his 1985 book, except when quoting Nazi documents. He also omitted describing the programs as “rigorous retraining programs.”
¹⁶
Having spent over a year at the
hachschara
in Steckelsdorf, I do not remember anything “rigorous” about the experience and re-gard it as the happiest time of my life in Nazi Germany. There were no

relations with the Germans around us, except for the periodic control visits of the rural policeman.

I left Steckelsdorf and Germany early in 1938, and did not suffer the fate of many of my comrades who remained there during and, for some of them, even after the pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. But we have a vivid description of the life there in the autobiography of a survivor who lived in Steckelsdorf from December 1939 until April 1942. Published in 1967, his book became an acclaimed German movie. This is what he wrote about Steckelsdorf in its last years, before his comrades shared the fate of the remnants of German Jewry: “In the midst of Germany, crowded with uniforms and weapons, there was a peaceful enclave in which neither policemen nor SA-storm troopers were to be seen. And there we were allowed to live.” Furthermore, as all Jews had to turn in their radios at the beginning of the war:

we were saved from listening to Goebbels’ propaganda that was transmitted day after day over all stations . . . we rarely paid attention to what the papers had to report during the first winter of the war. But we were alert to every piece of news from the Palästina-Amt [the Palestine office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine]. Little did we care about our ignorance, as our existence in Germany was in any case regarded as temporary. Internally we felt we belonged to the Holy Land, which we did not know, but which we painted with all the beautiful colors of our yearning.
¹⁷

Toward the end, it was, of course, a very sad enclave of hungry, hard-working young people, always worrying about their parents and relatives. But compared with Jewish life elsewhere in Germany, it nevertheless was still an oasis.

Finally, it is necessary to consider the Haavara Transfer Agreement, perhaps the most prominent case in which the Zionists were, at the time and later, openly accused of collaboration with the Nazis. Some have said that the Haavara Agreement served the interests of German Jews and the Jewish
yishuv
(community) in Palestine at the expense of any chance of bringing down the Nazi regime early on through a worldwide economic boycott. The agreement’s rationale was the assumption that the new Nazi government in Germany, with over 6 million unemployed and almost no reserves of foreign currency, could be brought down by blocking German exports. The Haavara Agreement evidently under-cut this boycott since it was based on the continued export of German goods and equipment to Palestine and neighboring countries in the

Middle east. Undermining this boycott was indeed one of the central arguments of the German supporters of the Haavara. They claimed that German exports to Palestine would expand German foreign trade to additional countries, and promote German economic growth and employment. Therefore, the Foreign and economic Ministries and the SS closely followed the Jewish debates outside of Germany with regard to the boycott. They even sent observers to the Zionist world congress-es of 1933 in Prague and 1935 in Lucerne where the Haavara agreement was discussed and debated. Aware of this dilemma, the world Zionist organization and its Jewish Agency avoided openly admitting its leading role, and the Haavara Transfer Agreement operated until 1935 under the cover of private firms (Hanotiah Ltd. and the Anglo-Palestine Bank). only in 1935 was the Haavara Transfer Agreement officially confirmed at the world Zionist Congress in Lucerne as being controlled by the world Zionist organization and the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
¹⁸

In the space allowed for this essay, it is not possible to go into the details of the agreement and its results; nor is there any need to do so here. The subject has been dealt with extensively and in great detail elsewhere. However, I will make a few remarks based on the present state of research on the topic. First, I believe that both the boycott movement and the alarmed reaction of the Germans in response to it were based on presumptions that turned out to be incorrect. The surprisingly fast recovery of the German economy was not caused by the growth of its foreign trade, but rather by the expansion of aggregate demand on the home-market. It resulted mainly from increased “defi-cit spending” by the public sector, which as early as 1934 was based mainly on rearmament.
¹⁹
Between 1933 and 1939, Germany’s exports never exceeded 10 percent of GNP. True, thanks to the Haavara agreement, which served all sectors of the Palestinian economy, including the Arabs and the approximately 2,500 German-Christian settlers, Germany ranked first among the countries exporting to Palestine. But all of these transactions accounted for no more than a mere half percent of all German exports. These facts demonstrate that the boycott of German goods never had any chance of bringing down the new regime in Berlin, and that the Haavara Agreement played absolutely no role in, and therefore was not responsible for, its survival.