Between Ideology and Pragmatism: Zionism in Nazi Jewish Policy before the 'Final Solution'

Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Lecture is Free and Open to the Public.

Francis Nicosia, Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont presents Between Ideology and Pragmatism: Zionism in Nazi Jewish Policy before the 'Final Solution'.

This lecture will consider an overlooked example of the tensions between ideology and pragmatism in Nazi Jewish policy. Hitler’s regime incorporated three key Zionist initiatives into its Jewish emigration policy before the final solution. This produced often bitter debates among party and state agencies over the relationship between ideology and policy. Those initiatives included the Haavara Transfer Agreement, the Hachschara (occupational retraining) programs, and the Aliyah-beth, or “illegal” Jewish immigration into Palestine. These three Zionist initiatives, designed to facilitate Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany, became central components of Nazi emigration policy until 1941, despite their obvious violation of fundamental tenets of modern anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Nazi ideology taught that Jewish wealth was stolen from the German people, yet the Haavara Transfer Agreement of August 1933 permitted Jews emigrating from Germany to Palestine to take a small portion of their assets with them. Moreover, the insistence that Jews were incapable of “honest work,” and that all contact between Jews and “Aryans“ cease, was compromised by promoting Zionist occupational retraining programs in agriculture and the manual trades. And the vehement opposition of the Nazis to the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine was compromised by their strong encouragement of Jewish immigration into Palestine, including the Gestapo’s cooperation between 1938 and 1941 in Zionist efforts to promote “illegal” Jewish immigration, past British restrictions and blockades, into Palestine.