This is a study of the ideological and political relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism in modern Germany, from the nineteenth century through the Third Reich, focusing on the years between 1933 and 1942. It considers three contentious issues in post-Holocaust historiography and debate: the nature of modern German anti-Semitism; the decision-making process leading to the Nazi mass murder of the Jews of Europe; and the nature and role of German Zionism in German-Jewish history before the Holocaust. This study sheds more light on both the ideological and practical assault of German anti-Semitism and Nazi Jewish policy on the Jews of Central Europe, as well as the ideological and political response of some German Jews, the Zionists, to that assault. It concludes that the attitudes and policies of German anti-Semitism and National Socialism toward Zionism reflect a relatively consistent ideology that was applied in an inconsistent and contradictory manner.
1. Introduction; 2. The age of emancipation in imperial Germany; 3. The Weimar years; 4. 1933: Nazi confusion, Zionist illusion; 5. Zionism in Nazi Jewish policy, 1934–8; 6. German Zionism, 1934–8: confrontation with reality; 7. Revisionist Zionism in Germany, 1934–8; 8. Zionist occupational retraining and Nazi Jewish policy; 9. From dissolution to final solution; 10. Conclusions.
"The author has succeeded in laying to rest impressions and politically inspired arguments about an ideological proximity and real collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists, except when the Nazis shared temporarily and with growing limitations the Zionist goal of allowing Jews to leave Germany and to settle in the Jewish National Home."
Shlomo Aronson, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and University of Arizona, Tuscon
"With careful precision Francis Nicosia has unraveled the complex relationship between German Zionists and their Nazi interlocutors. Both rejected the legacy of Jewish emancipation and both called for Jews to leave Germany. But while Zionists understood Nazism as a traumatic prelude to eventual Jewish renewal in Palestine, Nazi officials grotesquely used Zionism toward their goal of Jewish ruination. That German Zionists operated under extreme pressures while overestimating their prospects for success makes the story all the more tragic. Nicosia’s book is an essential read for anyone interested in German and Jewish history."
Norman J. W. Goda, Ohio University
"Professor Nicosia’s expert knowledge of the Nazi connection with the Middle East and Palestine in particular has long been honored. In this book he again demonstrates his mastery of the field, focusing on the relationship between the Nazis eager to rid Germany of Jews and German Zionists eager to steer them toward Palestine. It was never a relationship of equals, of course; the Nazis despised the Zionists no less than any other Jews. He tells the story of Zionists who, from a position of weakness, were dealing with a regime that scorned them and eventually tried to murder them all. To tell this story Professor Nicosia has mined some two dozen archives in Germany, Israel, the United States, England and Russia. It is a compelling story and a depressing one indeed."
Karl A. Schleunes, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
"Nicosia has made an important contribution to both the history of Zionism and Nazism (and more broadly to the fields of German and Jewish history), while correcting misconceptions about the limits of actual Jewish and Zionist power."
Avinoam Patt, H-Judaic
"University of Vermont historian Francis R. Nicosia has presented an impressive study of the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Third Reich … Nicosia vehemently rejects the argument that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis. The necessary contact and the level of cooperation of the German Zionists with the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1941 can in no way be construed as a secret arrangement or collaboration."
"Nicosia has analyzed an impressive number of documents from German and Zionist archives … In [the] important … chapter [on] the cooperation between Zionists and National Socialists, Nicosia emphasizes that in no way was it about equal parties, but rather about the persecutors and those they persecuted - and that the latter were sent to their deaths as soon as the Nazi state no longer had any use for them."
Translated from Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung