On the Internet you can find many publications that claim that representatives of the Zionist movement actively collaborated with the Hitler regime. We checked whether such statements are justified.

Such statements are found not only in resources clearly anti-Israel, but also in publications that claim to have a balanced approach. In particular, the video about the Arab-Israeli conflict, released on March 28, 2023 on the YouTube channel “Herald of the Storm” and which at the time of writing this analysis had collected 486,000 views, included chapter "How Hitler Helped the Zionists."

In themselves, such accusations can hardly be called something new - since the 1970s, they have been widely used in Soviet propaganda directed against Israel. In particular, they were put forward in numerous books and articles by the publicist Lev Korneev - for example, in the article “On the cooperation of Zionists with the secret services of Nazi Germany» (1977) and in the book "The class essence of Zionism"(1982).

In the West, this topic became widely known thanks to the book of the American writer and supporter of Trotskyism Lenny Brenner “Zionism in the Age of Dictators" It was published in 1983, and already in 1984 it was promptly translated and published in the USSR.

Although anti-Semitism was a central element of the Nazis' racial theory from the very beginning of the movement in the 1920s, they did not immediately begin to advocate the physical extermination of Jews (at least publicly). The discriminatory laws passed after Hitler came to power were aimed at depriving German Jews of property, social influence, and promoting their emigration. Objectively, this coincided with the goals of the Zionist movement, which aimed at relocating Jews to Palestine, which was then under the control of the British administration, and creating a national Jewish state there.

This contributed to the conclusion, on August 25, 1933, of the so-called Ha'avara Agreement (resettlement agreement) between the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, the German Zionist Federation and the Anglo-Palestine Bank, closely associated with one of the main Zionist bodies, the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut). Under the terms of the agreement, by 1939, 50,000–60,000 Jews had left Germany for Palestine (about 10% of the country’s total Jewish population as of 1933). At the same time, they exported there a significant amount of German industrial goods, which partly helped the Hitler regime overcome the trade boycott that a number of European countries and the United States tried to organize against it (including on the initiative of the local Jewish population). The Ha'avara Agreement and relations with the Third Reich were hotly debated at the Zionist congresses of 1933 and 1935, where many delegates criticized the decision as immoral. The treaty ended in 1939, when the British authorities first sharply limited and made it difficult for Jewish immigration to Palestine, and then the Second World War began.

As for the cooperation of Zionist organizations with the Third Reich in the military-political sphere, the evidence is much less obvious and unambiguous.

One of the most common arguments in favor of such cooperation is the meetings that took place in 1937 between Feivel Polkes, a member of the underground Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah operating in Palestine, and Nazi functionaries, including one of the main future organizers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. In February 1937, Polkes secretly met with Eichmann in Berlin, where he offered his services as an informant and invited the German official to visit Palestine. October 3, Eichmann and his chief of the Nazi secret service SD, Herbert Hagen, disguised as journalists arrived in Haifa, but due to opposition from the British authorities they were forced to move the meeting to Egypt. The negotiations that took place on October 10–11 in Cairo did not bring results, since Hagen did not agree with Polkes’ demands to ease the conditions for the emigration of Jews from Germany. Moreover, in all likelihood, these negotiations were a personal initiative of Polkes, and not a coordinated decision of the Haganah, since when they became known, his shifted from all the posts he held in the group.

A second frequently cited example of alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis is the negotiations that took place in Beirut in late 1940 between Naftali Lubinczyk, a member of another underground Jewish paramilitary organization, Lehi, and a representative of the German Foreign Office. During the meeting, Lyubinchik handed over the documents compiled by Abraham Stern, the leader of Lehi, offers on a military alliance on the condition that the Third Reich would help create a national Jewish state in Palestine. The very fact of this meeting is indisputable thanks to the surviving German translation of Stern’s proposals, as well as recently released the interrogation protocol of another member of the organization, Efraim Tsetler (he was detained in 1942).

However, firstly, it must be borne in mind that Lehi was small (no more than 200 people) and the most radical group in the Zionist movement. She pursued tactics of individual terror against British officials. It was strongly condemned by other Zionist organizations, including the generally recognized leaders of the Palestinian Jewish community, who publicly expressed support Great Britain in World War II. It is significant that the already mentioned Haganah organization, which in the late 1930s became in fact the military division of the World Zionist Organization, stopped fighting against the British authorities with the outbreak of the war. Many of its members joined Jewish brigade, who fought in Europe in 1944–1945 against the Nazis as part of the Allied forces. Secondly, there is not a single piece of evidence that Stern's proposal was taken seriously in the Third Reich. As a tool against British influence in Palestine, the Nazis decided to use Arab nationalists, a symbol of which became meeting Hitler with the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini in Berlin in November 1941. Third, it should be noted that Stern's proposal was made before the Nazis moved to full-scale genocide of the Jewish people after the attack on the USSR in June 1941, which is now counts the immediate beginning of the Holocaust.

Thus, there are no facts of real cooperation in the military-political sphere between the Zionist organizations and the Nazis both before and during the Second World War. However, some fringe figures of the Zionist movement did try to use Hitler's policies to speed up Jewish immigration to Palestine and fight against Great Britain, then in control of the region. Those individual Zionists who in occupied Europe during the Holocaust tried to collaborate with the Nazi regime (such as Rudolf Kastner in Hungary), after the war were unconditionally condemned in Israel and were considered traitors.

At the same time, in the first years of the existence of the State of Israel, European Jews who went there experienced an unfriendly attitude from earlier settlers and native Israelis. One of the offensive nicknames addressed to them was “sabonim"("bars of soap"). It probably hinted at the widespread although incorrect, the idea that prisoners were made into soap in concentration camps, and was meant to satirize their perceived weakness and inability to fight the enemy during the Holocaust.

Cover photo: Ori Lubin via Wikimedia Commons