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Lenni BRENNER
ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF DICTATORS
12
GEORG KARESKI, HITLER'S ZIONIST QUISLING BEFORE QUISLING
The fact that Jabotinsky opposed Hitler, and was able to convince Abba Achimeir
to stop praising him, did not mean that all Revisionists accepted this position.
Some Revisionists were still convinced that collaboration was the way forward
for Zionism. The most notorious of these was Ceorg Kareski, whom (as we
have seen) Jabotinsky tried to curb in l933.
By 1919-20 Kareski had already disregarded the ZVfD's preoccupation with
Palestine work and concentrated on Jewish community politics. In an age
of declining faith, when many German Jews were opting for mixed marriages
and atheism, those who clung to the sectarian Jewish community became even
more inward-looking. In 1926 Kareski's introverted Zionist Judische Volkspartei,
in alliance with other religious isolationists, was able to upset the reformed
'Liberal' German-nationalist leadership, and in January 1929, he became
Chairman of the Berlin Jewish community. But his success was short-lived,
and the liberals defeated him in November 1930. Kareski had entered German
politics in the September 1930 Reichstag elections as a candidate of the
Catholic Centre, which was attractive to him both for its concern
for religious education and its social conservatism. With Hitler's coming
to power, Kareski joined the Revisionists, which he now saw as the potential
Jewish equivalent of the successful Nazis. They had been an insignificant
faction within the ZVfD, gaining only 1,189 of the 8,494 votes in the delegate
election for the 1931 World Zionist Congress. By 1933 the Revisionists were
reduced to further futility by their division into rival cliques. Kareski,
with his prestige as a notable member of the community, had no difficulty
in becoming the leader of these dispirited forces and merging them into
a new Staatzionistische Organisation.
In May 1933 he attempted his ludicrous putsch at the Berlin Jewish community
centre and was expelled from the ZVfD. His career and his association with
the Nazis developed further after the Revisionist split from the WZO, following
the defeat of the anti-Nazi boycott at the Prague Congress. As the Revisionists
were no longer de facto a part of the WZO, the Palestine Office in
Berlin was ordered to exclude Betarim from consideration for immigration
certificates. The Revisionists responded by starting brawls at ZVfD meetings,
shouting: 'You Marxist swine! You are all sympathizers of the Histadrut
which belongs to the Second International!' [(1)] As a result of this the
ZVfD headquarters were temporarily closed in June 1934. By 6 August, one
of the State Zionist leaders, Dr Friedrich Stern, sent the Nazis a letter
explaining that the growth of their anti-Marxist youth group, the Nationale
Jugend Herzlia, was stunted by their exclusion from emigration by the
Palestine Office staffed by allegedly pro-Marxist Histadrut supporters from
the ZVfD. Stern proposed that the Palestine Office be turned over to them.
The ZVfD found out about the plot through Hechalutz spies in the Herzlia
and through their own contacts in the regime and hence the scheme failed.[(2)]
The Nazis quickly realised that if they gave the Palestine Office to the
State Zionists the WZO would not give out any certificates in Germany. As
long as the Nazis needed the WZO and the Jewish charities to organise the
emigration, they could not impose a collaborator on the Jewish community.
Kareski's campaign put Jabotinsky in an impossible position: while he was
denouncing the WZO for the Ha'avara, his own movement in Germany was working
for the Nazis, and he soon had to announce that from then on 'the wing of
Zionism who share our Herzlian views also know that "Marxist"
is a word never to be used in polemics'.[(3)]
The Nazis had decided on a general policy of favouring Zionists over non-Zionist
Jews, and within that line they decided that open encouragement of the State
Zionists rather than suppression of the 'Marxists' of the ZVfD would have
to be their strategy. On 13 April 1935, the Gestapo notified the regular
police that, henceforward, the State Zionists would receive:
exceptionally and always revocably, permission
to let its members belonging to the 'National Youth Herzlia' and
'Brith Hashomrim' wear uniforms indoors... because the State Zionists
have proven to be the organisation which had tried in any way, even illegally,
to bring its members to Palestine, and which, by its sincere activity directed
towards emigration, meets half-way the intention of the Reich Government
to remove the Jews from Germany. The permission to wear a uniform should
spur members of the German-Jewish organisations to join the State Zionist
youth groups where they will be more effectively urged to emigrate to Palestine.[(4)]
Despite the relationship between the State Zionists and the Gestapo, Kareski
was still welcome at the NZO Congress in Vienna in 1935. When the Revisionists
had decided to support the anti-Nazi boycott, they had formally disaffiliated
their German unit in an effort to protect it; thus it was obvious that Kareski
was there with the encouragement of the Gestapo to lobby against the boycott.
The uneasy ranks wished to distance themselves from the State Zionists and
they compelled a resolution that, under the circumstances, there was not
and could not be a Revisionist movement in Germany.[(5)] Kareski made the
mistake of travelling to the following Betar Congress in Cracow in the company
of a known Jewish Gestapo agent, and some German Betarim reported them to
Jabotinsky.[(6)] He was asked to leave, and Jabotinsky was compelled to
call on him to defend himself publicly and deny any connection to the Nazis.[(7)]
However, later, in 1936, he used Kareski as his go-between with the German
publishing house holding the copyright to one of his books. Jabotinsky assumed
no further responsibility for Kareski after Cracow, but as long as he remained
in Germany Kareski was in contact with the minority within the world Revisionist
movement, notably those around von Weisl in Vienna, who continued to agree
with his pro-Nazi line.
'The Zionists as the "Racial Jews" have at least Given us a
Formal Guarantee'
Kareski's repeated failure to get the German Jews to accept his approach
never discouraged the Nazis from trying to impose him on the community.
In late 1935, they forced him on the Reichsverband judischer Kulturbunde.
These Culture Leagues had been set up to provide jobs for Jewish musicians,
writers and artists who had been thrown out of their positions, and the
Gestapo had decided that a genuine Zionist spirit would do the Leagues some
good.[(8)] Benno Cohen of the ZVfD had been appointed assistant to their
director, conductor Kurt Singer, but that was not enough: the performers
were still really cultural assimilationists, and in October 1935 Kareski,
who had nothing to do with the arts, was appointed to a more senior position
than Singer, and Cohen was dismissed. The conductor told the Nazis that
he would resign rather than work with Kareski, and the Leagues were closed
down in an attempt to force them to accept Kareski. The refusal of the Jews
to concur with Nazi policy gained attention in the Nazi press, and Hans
Hinkel, the bureaucrat in charge of the Leagues, publicly explained his
choice of a new director.
I have consciously allowed the Zionist movement
to exert the strongest influence upon the cultural and spiritual activities
of the Kulturbund because the Zionists as the 'Racial Jews, have at least
given us formal guarantees of cooperation in acceptable form.[(9)]
The Zionists to whom Hinkel referred were the State Zionists, even less
popular at that time than in 1931; realistically they did not number much
more than a few score adult party members and 500 youth.[(10)] However,
the Nazis made much of Kareski in their propaganda. As the former head of
the Berlin Jewish community, the head of the State Zionists, and now the
head of the Culture Leagues, he sounded a very impressive figure. Der
Angriff interviewed him on 23 December:
I have for many years regarded a complete separation
between the cultural activities of the two peoples as a condition for a
peaceful collaboration... provided it is founded on the respect for the
alien nationality... The Nuremberg Laws... seem to me, apart from their
legal provisions, entirely to conform with this desire for a separate life
based on mutual respect. This is especially so when one takes into account
the order for separate school systems which has been issued previously.
The Jewish schools fill an old political demand of my friends, because they
consider that the education of the Jew in accordance with his traditions
and his mode of life is absolutely essential.[(11)]
However, the Culture Leagues were too important to the Nazis as a model
of cultural separatism to be abandoned because of Kareski, and eventually
the Nazis allowed them to be reorganised without him. By 1937 Kareski and
the Gestapo were ready for another manoeuvre. This time their target was
the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (the Reich Representation
of German Jews). Kareski formed an alliance with discontented conservative
assimilationists within the Berlin community, and they proposed a programme
whereby the State Zionists would take over the political work of the organisation
and the religious congregations would run the charitable functions. Max
Nussbaum, rabbi of the Great Jewish Congregation of Berlin, later told of
the Nazi pressure for the Revisionist line. The Gestapo's Judenkommissar,
Kuchmann, took it into his head to become an expert on the Jewish question,
reading every available book on modern Jewry. Now determined to do the right
thing by his charges, he summoned Nussbaum.
As a result of his diligence, he suddenly fell
in love with Revisionism, asserting to each of us who had the misfortune
to be summoned to his office, that this was the only solution of the Palestine
problem and constantly blaming official Zionism for being 'red' and 'left'.
One day in the Spring of 1937, he called me to his office and told me bluntly
that I had to take over the leadership of the Revisionist group, to make
Revisionism more popular with German Jewry, to drop my propaganda for the
'Meineckestrasse-Zionism' [ZVfD]... When I refused... he 'punished' me by
a speaking and writing prohibition for one year.[(12)]
Again the attempt failed; foreign Jews could not be made to subsidise a
German Jewish central organisation run by a traitor, and the Nazis backed
down. As a consolation prize the Nazis, in spring 1937, made the Staatzionistische
Organisation the only authorised Jewish representative for dealing with
the German public-relief agencies. [(13)]
Kareski's usefulness to the Nazis came to an end in July 1937, when a scandal
was uncovered in his Iwria bank. He had been making illegal loans
to members of its board and his personal friends, and he tried to cover
himself with a cheque on the account of the Berlin Jewish community, making
one of his clerks accept it with only his signature in violation of the
requirement that it be countersigned. The cashier took the cheque under
protest and notified the Berlin congregation. There is no evidence that
Kareski personally profited from his manipulations --he used the loans as
chits to gain allies within the Jewish community-- but in the end the bank
failed and Kareski decided to visit Palestine.[(14)]
His visit was not a success. On 6 October 1937, the German Jewish community
in Haifa discovered that he was there and a large mob turned out to greet
him, chasing him through the streets. He finally had to barricade himself
into a house until he was rescued by the police.[(15)] The German Immigrants
Association (the HOG) publicly accused him of seeking to be appointed leader
of German Jewry with the aid of the Nazis, of trying to incite the murder
of the ZVfD's chairman, of trying to destroy the Zionist organisation, and
of corruption in his bank. Kareski made the mistake of denying the charges
and insisting on a trial in the rabbinical courts. In June 1938 the court,
headed by the chief rabbi, found the HOG's charges to be fully borne out
by the evidence.[(16)] The decision effectively ended his active political
career.
'A Jewish Legion to Protect the Jews in Palestine from Attack'
Despite Jabotinsky's disowning him, Kareski always had his apologists within
the Revisionist movement. There had always been those who disagreed with
Jabotinsky's anti Nazism. If it was permissible for Jabotinsky to try to
deal with Simon Petliura in the Slavinsky agreement when the Ukrainian Army
had already butchered 30,000 Jews, why was a deal with Hitler unacceptable?
Prior to Kristallnacht Hitler had killed no Jews as Jews. These Revisionists
were convinced that Hitler's victory foretold a Fascist age and that the
Jews simply had to understand that and come to terms with it. The circle
around von Weisl, who was Jabotinsky's negotiator with the other authoritarian
dictatorships in Eastern Europe, agreed with Kareski's approach. In 1936,
von Weisl, apparently acting on his own, contacted the British Fascists
and proposed a fantastic wartime alliance between Britain, Japan, Poland
and Germany, together with a future Revisionist state, against the Soviets
and the Arab and Asian colonial revolutions.[(17)]
It would be pleasant to report that the rabbinical court's decision finally
ended Kareski's career, and that he died alone and hated, but on 2 August
1947, the 68 year-old Kareski was the chairman of a Revisionist health fund
in Palestine. Some friends even tried to have a street named after him in
Ramat Gan.[(18)] He even has his latter-day apologists who suggest that,
given what we know of the abandonment of the Jews by the rest of the world,
as soon as Hitler took over rapid emigration was the only solution.
Kareski, a classic Revisionist, albeit of an extreme brand, was a traitor
to the German Jewish community. His vision ran to nothing more prophetic
than a Revisionist state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates
with Mussolini as its Mandatory protector.[(19)] He certainly did not foresee
the Holocaust. In 1935 he was proposing a 25-year evacuation plan from Germany
with 20,000 emigrants per year. His concern was to use the Jugend Herzlia
as 'a Jewish Legion to protect the Jews in Palestine from attack'
(my emphasis).[(20)]
It is not surprising that the Nazis used Kareski as their collaborator in
Germany. His rival amongst the assimilationists, Max Naumann, was totally
unacceptable for his insistance on full Jewish participation in the Third
Reich. Kareski appeared before the Nazis as if sent by central casting:
the caricature of the stage Jew, a crooked usurer, as zealous as any medieval
rabbi to keep the Jews apart from unbelieving humankind, and at the head
of a brownshirted emigrationist movement.
Notes
[(1)]. 'Revisionists Cause Crisis in German Zionism', Palestine Post
(25 June 1934), p. 1.
[(2)]. Herbert Levine, 'A Jewish Collaborator in Nazi Germany: The Strange
Career of Georg Kareski, 1933-37', Central European History (September
1975), p.262.
[(3)]. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Jews and Fascism', Jewish Daily Bulletin
(11 April 1935), p. 2.
[(4)]. Kurt Grossmann, 'Zionists and non-Zionists under Nazi Rule in the
1930s', Herzl Yearbook, vol. IV (1961-2), pp. 341-2.
[(5)]. Author's interview with Shmuel Merlin, 16 September 1980.
[(6)]. Author's interview with Paul Riebenfeld, 17 January 1978.
[(7)]. 'See Kareski's Hand in Leader's Ousting', Congress Bulletin
(24 January 1936), p. 4.
[(8)]. Levine, 'Jewish Collaborator in Nazi Germany', pp. 266-7.
[(9)]. 'Kareski Again', American Hebrew (21 February 1936), p. 406.
[(10)]. Solomon Colodner, Jewish Education under the Nazis, p. 111.
[(11)]. 'Georg Kareski Approves of Ghetto Laws - Interview in Dr Goebbel's
"Angriff '", Jewish Chronicle (London, 3 January 1936),
p. 16.
[(12)]. Max Nussbaum, 'Zionism under Hitler', Congress Weekly (11
September 1942), p. 13.
[(13)]. A.M.H., 'The Jewish Year in the Diaspora', Palestine Post
(S September 1937), p. 5.
[(14)]. Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain, p. 213.
[(15)]. 'Mr Kareski Abused by Haifa Crowd', Palestine Post (7 October
1937), p
[(16)]. 'Kareski's Charge Dismissed', Palestine Post (10 June 1938),
p. 8.
[(17)]. Levine, 'Jewish Collaboration in Nazi Germany', p. 272.
[(18)]. Ibid., p. 253.
[(19)]. Ibid., p. 272.
[(20)]. Jacob de Haas, 'The Sharp End of the Axe', Chicago Jewish Chronicle
(15 November 1935), p. 9.
++++++++++++++++++
This text is a chapter of <Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
a Reappraisal>, by Lenni Brenner.
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