Zionism during the Holocaust

It is certainly true, prior to 1937, that Zionists had a cooperative agreement with the Nazis.  It was designed to enable and strongly encourage Jews to leave Germany and emigrate to Palestine.  (Not many Jews in Germany either had the means or wanted to leave their longstanding homes).  It was because of this agreement that Zionists, often rich and connected with department stores and other international businesses, blocked and weakened the Jewish Boycott of Germany which started in 1933.  Would Nazi Germany have collapsed if it hadn't been for Zionist support in ways such as these?  I don't know but I think it could have made a big difference.  But Zionists also intervened in other ways.

Here are some quotations posted on twitter:

Rudolf Vrba was a heroic antifascist Jew who wrote I Escaped From Auschwitz

He was a survivor of  Majdanek and Auschwitz. He escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 in order to warn the Jews of Hungary about the Nazi extermination programme. Here is part of his testimony about Zionism.

1 “The Zionist movement of Europe played a very important role in the mass extermination of Jews. Indeed, I believe that without the cooperation of Zionists it would have been a much more difficult task….

The Zionists said that we are not Czechoslovaks or we are not Germans, we are not French, we are Jews and we must, as Jews, go back to our country, to Israel or to Palestine and found our state …

Then came the Nuremberg Law, which was a law, issued by a nominally civilized state [Nazi Germany], which said that Jews do not belong to Europe, but to Palestine. …

So, on one platform, Nazism and Zionism had something in common: they both preached that Jews don’t belong to Europe but to Palestine. ...

And naturally, the Germans said: ‘You see the Jews may not trust us but they will trust you’, to the Zionists, ‘because they have seen that they have always told them actually the truth: that you belong to Palestine, that you are a foreign element here.’ …

And so the Jewish councils were preferably selected from well-known Zionists. And, because the well-known Zionists became respectable, many Jews who were respectable anyway became Zionists. So they formed Jewish councils from a Zionist core, fortified by respectable members of society: top lawyers, top business people, top economists and that was the Jewish councils. ...

They were promised by the Germans or by the local fascist government to be protected from any discrimination because they are needed for administering of the Jewish affairs. …

So you had here already a Zionist clique enforced by money of big Jewish businessmen who would be prepared to go along with the discrimination against the masses of the Jewish population which were neither rich nor Zionist, and in other words did not belong to the clique. …

So I didn’t trust them in spite of the fact that the Nazis gave them the right after the Nuremberg Laws. I considered them plain fascists and I considered them from the very start as despicable creatures who deal with the fascists and take profit out of it in order to be exempted from discrimination conducted against the others. …

So I didn’t trust the Nazis any more or any less than the Jewish Zionist councils. Indeed, I realised that the Zionists and the Nazis are approximately identical enemies of mine who have got both one thing in common, to get me out from home with 25 kilos to an unknown place and to leave my mother completely defenceless at home. …

The young people, the core of resistance, is always 16 to 30. Every soldier knows that they are the best material for fighting. … I was flabbergasted by the fact that the Zionists who pretended to be the protectors of the Jews, the first thing which they agreed to was to let go away a potential core of resistance who could in the last resort protect the families with force if necessary. …

2 I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that – I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war.

This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. [Rudolf] Kastner, leader of the council which spoke for all Jews in Hungary…

While I was prisoner number 44070 at Auschwitz – the number is still on my arm – I compiled careful statistics of the exterminations … I took these terrible statistics with me when I escaped in 1944 and I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers. … Kastner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’

Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kastner up in S.S. uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends. Nor did the sordid bargaining end there.

Kastner paid Eichmann several thousand dollars. With this little fortune, Eichmann was able to buy his way to freedom when Germany collapsed, to set himself up in the Argentine…

3 Why did Doctor Kastner betray his people when he could have saved many of them by warning them, by giving them a chance to fight, a chance to stage the second ‘Warsaw [uprising]’ which Eichmann feared? …

Could it be, therefore that the defeatist mood of Doctor Kastner was reinforced by the memory of words used by Doctor Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, when he addressed a Zionist convention in London in 1937? He said:

I told the British Royal Commission that the hopes of Europe’s six million Jews were centred on emigration. I was asked: ‘Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?’ I replied: ‘No.’ The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world … only a branch will survive … They had to accept it. … If they feel and suffer, they will find the way – Beacharit Hayamim [‘When the Messiah comes, all the dead will be revived’] – in the fullness of time … I pray that we may preserve our national unity, for it is all we have.

‘Only a branch will survive …’. Did Kastner, like Hitler, believe in a master race, a Jewish nation created of Top People for Top People by Top People? Was that the way in which he interpreted Doctor Chaim Weizmann's somber oration and was he right in so doing? If so, who was going to select the branch? Who was going to say which grains would form the heap of moral and economic dust, destined to await the coming of the Messiah? …

My family, presumably, formed the dust which was to be swept into the ovens by the Nazis who used Jewish leaders as their brooms …”

Read his book "I escaped from Auschwitz " to find out more. 

Another heroic antifascist Jew was Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Here what he said about Zionism:

“During the war it never even entered any of our minds that the Zionists were deliberately remaining passive in regard to the physical destruction of the Jews in order to additionally justify the founding of the State of Israel… But today, even acknowledged historians speak out loud about the way that some of the Zionists living in Palestine exploited the Holocaust politically! … The first Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion believed that the worse it is for the Jews in Europe, the better for Israel. He put that into practice… Ben Gurion washed his hands of the Diaspora… As early as a Mapai party conference in December 1942, he said that the tragedy of the European Jews did not ‘directly concern’ them. Those were the words of a leader who was willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews to the idea of a Jewish state. I’m not saying he could have saved thousands of people, but he could have fought for those thousands of people. He did not do so. I don’t know whether this was deliberate.”

Last but not least, Primo Levi was an author and an Auschwitz survivor. He wrote: 

"As for Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ‘Fascist’ is a definition I can accept. I think even Begin would not deny it. He was a student of Jabotinsky, who represented the right wing of Zionism, who called himself a Fascist and was one of Mussolini’s interlocutors. Yes, Begin was his pupil. That is Begin’s history…. The Holocaust is Begin’s favourite defence. And I deny any validity to that defence."