249 of 307 people found the following review helpful:

Reviewer:

William Hughes (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews

For openers, Brenner showed how the Zionists had a long history of shameless cooperation with the Nazis, especially after the dictator Adolph Hitler had came to power in 1933. The Zionists were also in bed, to some extent, with the other members of what later became known as WWII's "Axis of Evil," that included Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Tojo Hideki's Japan. For example, in March 29,1936, Zionists praised Il Duce, and his regime, at the opening of a maritime school, funded by the Fascist government, at Civitavecchia. This is where a Zionist youth group, the "Betar," trained its sailors for the future Revisionist state. The speakers ignored the fact that on Oct. 3, 1935, Italian troops had invaded Abyssinia.

On another front, the "Third Congress of the Jewish Community of the Far East," was held in Jan., 1940, in Harbin, Manchuria, then reeling under a brutal military occupation by the Japanese imperial forces. At that time, too, Tokyo was already aligned with Hitler and Italy's Mussolini, in the notorious Anti-Comintern Pact. Also, keep in mind, that the Japanese's murderous "Rape of Nanking," had occurred in Dec., 1937, and the "Crystal Night" incident on Nov. 9, 1938. Nevertheless, the Zionist confab went out of its way to legitimize the Japanese occupation by certifying it as a guarantor of the "equality of all citizens," in that beleaguered land.

The Zionist also had a trade plan with the Berlin government by which German Jews could redeem their property in Nazi goods exported to then British-occupied Palestine. And to top it all off, the infamous SS-Hptscharf. Adolf Eichmann, had visited Palestine, in October, 1937, as the guest of the Zionists. He also met, in Egypt, with Feivel Polkes, a Zionist operative, whom Eichmann described as a "leading Haganah functionary." The chain-smoking Polkes was also on the Nazis' payroll "as an informer."

Brenner isn't the first writer to address the mostly taboo subject of how the Zionist leadership cooperated with the Nazis. Rolf Hilberg's seminal "The Destruction of European Jews"; Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"; Ben Hecht's "Perfidy"; Edwin Black's "The Transfer Agreement"; Francis R. Nicosia's "The Third Reich and the Palestine Question"; Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic's "I Cannot Forgive"; and Rafael Medoff's "The Deadening Silence: American Jews and the Holocaust," also dared, with varying public success.

After the Holocaust began in 1942, Eichmann dealt regularly with Dr. Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jew, whom he considered a "fanatical Zionist." Kastner was later assassinated in Israel as a Nazi collaborator. At issue then, however, was the bargaining over the eventual fate of Hungary's Jews, who were slated for liquidation in the Nazi-run death camps. Eichmann said this about Kastner, the Zionist representative, "I believe that [he] would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. `You can have the others,' he would say, `but let me have this group here.' And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful. I would let his groups escape."

Readers, too, will be surprised to learn, that after the Nuremberg Anti-Jewish Race Laws were enacted in Sept., 1935, that there were only two flags that were permitted to be displayed in all of Nazi Germany. One was Hitler's favorite, the Swastika. The other was the blue and white banner of Zionism. The Zionists were also allowed to publish their own newspaper. The reasons for this Reich-sponsored favoritism was, according to the author: The Zionists and the Nazis had a common interest, making German Jews emigrate to Palestine.

As early as June 21, 1933, the German Zionist Federation was sending a secret memorandum to the Nazis, which said, in part:

"It is our opinion that an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state [German Reich] can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims as a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry- -indeed, that such a national renewal must first create the decisive social and spiritual premises for all solutions..."

Incredibly, Avraham Stern, the leader of the notorious "Stern Gang," late in 1940, made a written proposal to Hitler, by which the Jewish militias in Palestine, would fight on "Germany's side," in the war against England, in exchange for the Nazis help in resolving the "Jewish Question" in Europe, and their assistance in creating an "historic Jewish state." By this date, German troops had already marched into Prague, invaded Poland, and had built the first concentration camp at Auschwitz. The deranged Stern had further bragged about how the Zionist organizations were "closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in [their] ideology and structure." Stern's obscene proposal was found in the German embassy, in Turkey, after WWII.

Finally, I think Brenner was right, when he wrote, "This book presents 51 historic documents to indict Zionism for repeated attempts to collaborate with Adolf Hitler. The evidence, not I, will convince you of the truth of this issue...Exposing the Zionist role in the Nazis era is part of the scrutiny of the past, required of historians."

171 of 209 people found the following review helpful:

Reviewer:

Ronald Bleier "DESIP" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

An important Nazi document succinctly expresses the underlying idea for the Zionist -Nazi connection. It is a 1937 report on Eichmann's 1937 trip to Palestine and Egypt. The Nazi writer found that "In Jewish nationalist circles people were very pleased with the radical German policy since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority of the Arabs in Palestine."

In his famous document of 1923, "The Iron Wall," Vladimir Jabotinsky makes explicit the Zionist view that "justice" demands a majority of Jews in Palestine. At the same time, he expresses his clear understanding that the Arabs will never willingly agree to the massive Jewish immigration that would be required to make the Arabs a minority in their own country.

One of the most important documents, Brenner reprints, is one that is based on Eichmann's testimony originally published two parts in Life Magazine under the title, "'I Transported Them to the Butcher,' Eichmann's Own Story," published after Eichmann was captured in 1960. The material comes from taped interviews Eichmann originally gave to a Dutch Nazi journalist in 1955 in connection with the trial in Israel of Dr. Renzo Kastner. At that time, Kastner was an Israeli government official who during the war, had collaborated with Eichmann in order help a few thousand Jews escape to Palestine. Eichmann's motivation to agree to the deal was to avoid another Warsaw Ghetto style uprising in Hungary. In the end, Eichmann successfully transported more than 600,000 Hungarian Jews to the ovens of Auschwitz. The few who escaped, he later said, were a cheap price to pay for the smooth Hungarian operation.

Eichmann openly says that at a certain moment, Hitler ordered the "liquidation" of the Jews and hints that he didn't necessarily believe that it was a correct decision. Part of Eichmann's job entailed his presence at a number of executions of Jews. (One would think that Eichmann's testimony alone would be sufficient to silence the Holocaust deniers, but alas, things don't seem to work that way in the real world.)

The 1978 memoir of Nathan Yellin -Mor, one of the leaders of the Stern Gang, is a fascinating example of how ideology shapes reality. He explains the wartime motives behind the Stern gang's drive to fight the British and make an alliance with the Nazis despite the clear understanding that "Germany had declared war on the Jewish `race." Yellin-Mor quotes Yair, (Avraham Stern's underground name), who made a distinction between the "foe" (Britain) and the "arch enemy" (Nazi Germany). Since the "foe is in control of our homeland and denies the Hebrew people statehood and freedom... the presence of the arch enemy must not put off the struggle against the foe ... even for a single day." Implicit is the fascist ideology of the Stern Gang which dismissed the humanity of the Arabs to be displaced in Palestine just as the Nazis dehumanized the Jews in order to destroy them.

One of the most affecting documents was written by one of the heroes of the Holocaust, Rabbi Michoe Ber Weissmandel, an Oxford student who returned to his native Slovakia when war broke out. His "Personal Story" printed in 1986 in the Jewish Guardian recounts how he was able to use Jewish money from abroad to save Jewish lives in Europe and how his pleas for more money from rich Jews abroad fell on deaf ears.
***

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Reviewer:

T. Gorski (Arlington, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

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