REPORT: “The German PEGIDA movement held its largest meeting yet last night to protest what they call the ‘Islamisation of the Western World’, despite stiff opposition from all sections of Germany’s elite including politicians, media, and the arts.”
I read in the news that Germany is becoming more German. I think that’s a good thing for Germans.
Not every people is equally adapted to thrive in every civilization.
During the first seven years of Nazi rule in Germany, they encouraged Zionism. They encouraged German Jews to move to Palestine. Until 1940, the Nazis had elements who were pro-Zionist. They only stopped encouraging this when WWII made the policy impractical.
If non-Jewish Germans became 1% of Israel’s population, but half of the country’s leading academics, lawyers, judges, media barons, satirists, movie makers, that would not be a good thing for Israel. So too if a tiny number of Jews become the elite of a non-Jewish nation, such as Germany or the United States, that might be a challenge for the host nation.
So whenever non-Jews complain about Jewish influence, I transpose the situation to the Jewish state of Israel and wonder how would we Israeli Jews like it if there was a non-Jewish elite in our midst who were frequently hostile to us? How would Orthodox shuls like to have a bunch of non-Jewish Prussians, Zulus and Mexicans with voting rights and equal rights living and breeding in our midst and overrunning our yeshivas with their alien values and practices?
From Wikipedia: “The Haavara Agreement (Hebrew: הסכם העברה Translit.: heskem haavara Translated: “transfer agreement”) was signed on 25 August 1933 after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. The agreement was designed to help facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. While it helped Jews emigrate, it forced them to temporarily give up possessions to Germany before departing. Those possessions could later be re-obtained by transferring them to Palestine as German export goods.”
Born in 1902 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein belonged to the lowest tier of the Austrian nobility and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He trained as an engineer and joined the Nazi Party in 1929, receiving the membership number 106,678. In 1932 he joined the SS, becoming one of the first Austrians to do so. According to his former SS colleague Dieter Wisliceny, from the First World War until 1935 Mildenstein visited the Middle East, including Palestine, several times.[2][3]
Mildenstein had taken an early interest in Zionism, even going so far as to attend Zionist conferences to help deepen his understanding of the movement. He actively promoted Zionism as a way out of the official impasse on the Jewish question: as a way of making Germany Judenrein (free of Jews). Some Zionists, whose movement had grown tremendously in popularity among German Jews since Hitler came to power, co-operated.[citation needed] On 7 April 1933, the Juedische Rundschau, the bi-weekly paper of the movement, declared that of all Jewish groups only the Zionist Federation of Germany was capable of approaching the Nazis in good faith as “honest partners”.[4][5] The Federation then commissioned Kurt Tuchler to make contact with possible Zionist sympathisers within the Nazi Party, with the aim of easing emigration to Palestine, and Tuchler approached Mildenstein, who was asked to write something positive about Jewish Palestine in the press. Mildenstein agreed, on condition that he be allowed to visit the country in person, with Tuchler as his guide. So, in the spring of 1933 an odd little party of four set out from Berlin, consisting of Mildenstein, Tuchler and their wives. They spent a month together in Palestine,.[2][6] Mildenstein came to write a series of articles for Der Angriff, the Berlin newspaper Goebbels founded in 1927. Mildenstein himself remaining for a total of six months before his return to Germany as an enthusiast for Zionism. He even began to study Hebrew.[7]
On his return, Mildenstein’s suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. From August 1934 to June 1936 Mildenstein was put in charge of the Jewish Desk with the title of Judenreferent (Jewish Affairs Officer) in the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Security service of the SS, Section II/112; his title meaning that he was responsible for reporting on “Jewish Affairs,” under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.[8] During those years Mildenstein favoured a policy of encouraging Germany’s Jewish population to emigrate to Palestine, and in pursuit of this policy he developed positive contacts with Zionist organizations. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist provision, allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.[2][6]
Adolf Eichmann, later one of the most significant organizers of the Holocaust, believed that his big break came in 1934, when he had a meeting with Mildenstein, a fellow-Austrian, in the Wilhelmstrasse and was invited to join Mildenstein’s department.[9][10] Eichmann later stated that Mildenstein rejected the vulgar anti-semitism of Streicher. Soon after his arrival in the section Mildenstein had given him a book on Judaism by Adolf Boehm, a leading Jew from Vienna.[11]
Between 9 September and 9 October 1934 the Nazi Party Berlin newspaper Der Angriff, founded and controlled by Joseph Goebbels, published a series of twelve pro-Zionist articles by Mildenstein under the title A Nazi Goes to Palestine. In honour of his visit, the newspaper issued a commemorative medallion, with the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other.[2][6]
In the summer of 1935, then holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer, Mildenstein attended the 19th Congress of the Zionist Organization in Lucerne, Switzerland, as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation.[12] Mildenstein’s apparently pro-Zionist line was overtaken by events, and after a dispute with Reinhard Heydrich in 1936 he was removed from his post and transferred to the Foreign Ministry’s press department. He had fallen out of favour because migration to Palestine was not proceeding at a fast enough rate. His departure from the SD also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East, written by another “expert” on Jewish matters who had been invited to join Section II/112 by Mildenstein himself, Eichmann.[2][13] Mildenstein was replaced as the head of his former section by Kuno Schroeder.[14] Later in December 1939, Eichmann was made chief of the Jewish Department Referat IV B4 of the RSHA, which the SD became a part in September, 1939.[15][16]
As Germany moved into the Second World War, Mildenstein continued to write propaganda articles and books. After the war, his “Around the Burning Land of the Jordan” (1938)[17] and “The Middle East Seen from the Roadside” (1941)[18] were placed on the list of proscribed literature in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the German Democratic Republic.
