Hitler, the "Greatest Zionist"

Remember Ken Livinsgstone and his Hitler = Zionism claptrap?

Well, the INS correspondent Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker (whose reporting in April 1933 on the situation of Germany's Jews was nigh prescient) used the comparison already on September 28,1938 but seemingly in a sardonic fashion:

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Arabs-called-Palestinians and De-Nazification

As I was saying goodbye to a group of students who had come to Shiloh to hear the 'other side' of the story, an accompanying adult pressed me as to how I saw the future.

I informed him that one of the central elements of the Arab conflict with Israel and Zionism was the inability of the Arabs, it seemed to me, to acknowledge any Jewish national identity in this area. Moreover, with no such groups as a "Peace Now" or "Yesh Din" within the Arab society, without pro-Israel demonstrations in Ramallah and Hebron, the extreme inequality of the populations and their perceptions make the situation worse. In addition, as a result of 25 years of the Oslo Process with the establishment of a "Palestinian Authority", today's 25-year old Arab's thinking has been conditioned by the educational system Arafat and Abbas created.  That system, as has been documented, has inculcated the very worse of the 1920s and 1930s Mufti-thinking along with erasing Israel from maps, calling Jews dogs, inciting to violence and terrorism, glorifying such and excluding any educational programming that would facilitate coexistence, if not peace.

The very first thing I'd suggest is dealing with this younger generation to condition them for peace and acceptance of the Jew-as-Zionist.

I then began saying, "without making any direct comparison, if, after World War II, there was a need by the Allies to institute a de-Nazification program..." but was loudly interrupted.  My interlocutor raised his voice a bit: "you cannot make any comparison with the Nazis." 

I attempted to respond, saying, "I precisely prefaced my remarks by saying I am not comparing Arabs to Nazis but drawing attention to the program that was instituted..." but could not finish. I had wanted to continue and say, "and a similar program should be in place for a decade amongst the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority" but I could not. The man was getting agitated, was refusing to listen and someone thought better to move him, gently, on to the bus and end the exchange.

There surely exists a problem with that post-WW II program, as Frederick Taylor notes:

"Germans loathed the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the allied assumption of superiority"

and so, it cannot be force.  It must come from a realization by the PA leadership that the failure of the PA by developing a consciousness of pure negativism in their attitude to Jews, Israel and Zionism is wrong and needs be corrected.  As with Germany, the PA must accept

how a violent pariah state can cleanse itself

Besides the fact that I did not compare Arabs to Nazis, the subject does come up.  In the first place, I never heard of or read of a Nazi on a suicide mission to kill Jews. It would seem only Arabs are capable of that. So there is no comparison there.

Many books have been published that trace the leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement, Haj Amin El-Husseini, and his identification not only politically and diplomatically with the Nazi movement and its leader, as well as mobilizing Muslim troops for the German armed forces and intervening to prevent Jews escaping Europe but philosophically, too. (See: Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam; The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years; The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini; Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World; and an early study - The Mufti and the Fuehrer: the rise and fall of Haj Amin el-Husseini).

And then there was the Nazi-replicated crematoria plans for Palestine.

Let's recall that

Two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 al-Husseini had his first meeting with German General Consul Heinrich Wolff in Jerusalem. Al-Husseini’s Arab Revolt “took place against the background of the swastika: Arab leaflets and signs on walls were prominently marked with this Nazi symbol; youth organizations… paraded as ‘Nazi-scouts,’ and Arab children greeted each other with the Nazi salute.” On 2 October 1937 al-Husseini met with Adolf Eichmann in Palestine. 

On September 12, 1938, on the eve of the Munich Conference, at the Nuremburg Rally of that year, Hitler drew an analogy and compared the situation of the Sudenten Germans in Czechoslovakia to another:

Under no circumstances, however, am I willing to quietly stand by and observe from afar the continued oppression of German Volksgenossen in Czechoslovakia. 
It’s all tactics. Herr Beneš talks, wants to organize negotiations. He wishes to resolve the question of procedure in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and hands out little favors to placate the people. Things cannot go on this way! This is not a question of empty diplomatic phrases. This is a question of right, the question of a right not granted. What we Germans demand is the right to self-determination, a right every Volk possesses, and not an empty phrase. Herr Beneš is not supposed to grant the Sudeten Germans any favors. They have a right to their own way of life, just as any other people do...I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place.

We would truly regret if this were to cloud or damage our relations to the other European states. Yet the fault would not be ours. It is the business of the Czechoslovakian Government to come to terms with the true representatives of the Sudeten Germans and, in one way or another, to reach some form of understanding with them. Nevertheless, it is my business and, my Volksgenossen, it is the business of all of us to take care that justice not be perverted into injustice. After all, this matter involves our German Volksgenossen. I am not in the least willing to allow foreign statesmen to create a second Palestine right here in the heart of Germany. The poor Arabs are defenseless and have been abandoned by all. The Germans in Czechoslovakia are neither defenseless nor have they been abandoned. Please note this fact.

Indeed, the Arabs of Palestine were very much in Hitler's thinking. Does that make them Nazis? No. But it does indicate that Nazi diplomacy very much had the Arabs of Mandate Palestine in mind. Their's was a situation to be employed to further Nazi aims. They were to be defended by the Nazis.

With all this, something similar to a de-Nazification program is very much a necessity.  Protests withstanding.

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Was Netanyahu Wrong?

After these blogs, here and here, I bring you something I found at Bernard Lewis' 1999 book, "Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice", pages 146-7

The "Final Solution"?

The extermination of World Jewry?

UPDATE

And see now Elder.  And this.

UPDATE II

"There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the Mufti had an important role in the Holocaust," Boris Havel of Croatia's ministry of foreign affairs, the author of a recent journal article about Husseini, wrote The Washington Post in an email. "By the end of 1930s Germany still allowed its Jews to emigrate. No Jews were allowed to emigrate after Mufti established himself in Berlin. The Mufti has been calling on killing Jews since early 1920s, i.e. even before Nazi regime came to power in Germany." (In an email, Havel his views "do not reflect the official policy or position of the Institution by which he is employed.")
One book, "Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam" (2008) - citing Hitler's alleged comment to Husseini "the Jews are yours" - argued that the Mufti's sit-down with the Fuhrer was pivotal.

Spoerl's paper.


And, starting in 1939, we learn from this study:

American diplomats in Cairo began to send reports about Arabic language broadcasts coming from Germany and Italy in summer 1939. Kirk sent the first of his dispatches about them to Washington on September 13, 1941. 

...The transcripts reveal the intertwining of Nazi ideology and the Nazi narrative of World War II with themes of Arab nationalism as well as those of what we would now call fundamentalist or radical Islam. The transcripts reveal Germany, and fascist Italy’s efforts to present themselves as partisans of Arab independence against British colonialism. Husseini celebrates Rommel’s victories. Many broadcasts repeat the general themes of radical anti-Semitism, describe World War II as a Jewish war and some call on the Arabs to kill the Jews in their midst...the Sichherheitsdienst and German military intelligence was reporting back to Berlin that if Rommel’s North Africa Corps was victorious and was able to enter Cairo and Palestine, it could count on support from some elements of the Egyptian officer corps as well as from the Moslem Brotherhood.43 They reveal that an Einsatzgruppe in Rome was armed and prepared to depart to Palestine to murder the Jewish population there had Rommel been successful at Al Alamein ...

_________

UPDATE

"...thanks to Netanyahu's words we come out of this with a benefit, because he dealt with the centrality of the mufti who for some reason has been taken off the historical stage in everything related to the Holocaust...When Haj Amin al-Husseini met Hitler in November 1941, he told him that there's a stark similarity between Nazism and Islam...Husseini was responsible for establishing SS units in the Balkans. He was friendly with senior SS commanders, and was responsible for Berlin Radio broadcasts in all the Islamic lands."

"His Berlin Radio broadcasts would always end by calling to slaughter the Jews.

"...The Prime Minister’s remarks were not far from reality.  There was a plan by the Mufti to burn the Jews from Arab countries and Jews in Palestine after the German victory in the battle of El Alamein in 1943. Haj Amin al-Husseini was an officer in the Turkish army. I have no proof, but apparently he knew about the Armenian Genocide and drew his ideas from that. None of the historians have referred to that...he played a part in the Farhud - the pogrom against the Jewish population of Baghdad on June 1 and 2, 1941, following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War.

“The Mufti was responsible for the killing of hundreds of Jews; he planned to build incinerators in the Dotan Valley to implement the ‘Final Solution’ in the Middle East,”

MORE

An addition

And just as I wrote:

Focusing on the details of the meeting is a key error that has plagued much of the commentary about Netanyahu's statement. The real question is what impact the Grand Mufti and those he ordered, inspired and incited had on the Holocaust. What role did the Grand Mufti and his Palestinian followers have in preventing Jews from escaping the Nazis and getting to the only territory that would take them, the Jewish community in British-run Mandate Palestine?
Here the evidence is clear: The Mufti influenced the Germans to directly prevent the escape of Jews who otherwise might have survived the war, and he provoked his followers to violence in the Palestine Mandate, leading the British to enact the infamous White Paper. That new British policy called for greatly restricting Jewish immigration for five years, after which any further immigration would have required Arab ascent:
This again prevented Jews from escaping from the Nazis in Europe, and thereby helped implement their extermination.
That is, at the very moment when the desperate Jews of Europe most needed a haven to escape to, the Mufti had played a key role in slamming the door.

.

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Dina Porat - Historian

Here is Prof. Dina Porat of Yad Vashem:

“The mufti did not speak to Hitler in terms of ‘you should do this,’ or ‘what do you think of a final solution?’ Nor is it recorded that the mufti told Hitler to ‘burn them.’ Hitler never asked anyone what to do with the Jews,” Porat said. She did say, however, that Hitler told the mufti that he would “’continue his plans,’ meaning that he had already begun, and certainly not because the mufti asked him to.”
According to Porat, “all of the facts show that during Hitler and the mufti’s meeting, the ‘final solution’ was already under way.”
Porat explained that Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jewry dated back to years before his meeting with Husseini, noting references to it in “Mein Kampf,” which was published in 1925, as well as the 1933 Nazi party charter and remarks in the Reichstag in 1939, when Hitler threatened to “exterminate the Jewish people.”

I am not getting into the argument whether Netanyahu was historical correct, I did that here, or whether he simply could have phrased himself better.  I'd just like to point out how Porat herself is misleading.

If she can go no further back than 1925 for the beginning of Hitler's extermination plans, well, then, the Mufti preceded him.

Credit

He instigated, initiated and participated in the April 1920 murderous riots against the Jews of Jerusalem and probably was indirectly involved in the 1921 pogroms.  His hatred of Jews, his religious intolerance for them and his plans to exploit his position as Mufti to kill Jews was much more entrenched politically and administratively than Hitler in those early stages.

You could even read it at Wikipedia:

From as early as 1920, he actively opposed Zionism, and was implicated as a leader of the 1920 Nebi Musa riots. Al-Husseini...was charged with inciting the Arab crowds [in 1920] with an inflammatory speech and sentenced in absentia to 10-years imprisonment by a military court, since by then he had fled to Syria...but was pardoned by the British. Starting in 1921, al-Husseini was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, using the position to promote Islam, while rallying a non-confessional Arab nationalism against Zionism...

So, Prof. Porat, who was actively trying to eliminate Jews more?

__________

P.S.  And the Mufti's plans for crematoria in the Dothan Valley?

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Hitler, al-Husseini and Hungarian Jewry

(this post has been, and will be, updated)

Prime Minister Binyamim Netanyahu is under fire:

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has attracted a storm of criticism for an incendiary speech [only The Guardian would use 'incendiary' in a Holocaust-related story against a Jew - YM] in which he accused the second world war Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem of “inspiring the Holocaust”.  The comments* – made by Netanyahu in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in the context of the current violence between Israelis and Palestinians– were condemned as incorrect by historians and by Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog for trivialising the Holocaust. On the Palestinian side, senior official Saeb Erekat described the remarks as absolving Adolf Hitler.In his speech Netanyahu purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.”

*
"And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, "If you expel them, they'll all come here." "So what should I do with them?" he asked. He said, "Burn them." And he was sought in, during the Nuremberg trials for prosecution. He escaped it and later died of cancer, after the war, died of cancer in Cairo. But this is what Haj Amin al-Husseini said. He said, ":The Jews seek to destroy the Temple Mount." My grandfather in 1920 seeks to destroy…? Sorry, the al-Aqsa Mosque. So this lie is about a hundred years old. It fomented many, many attacks. The Temple Mount stands. The a l-Aqsa Mosque stands. But the lie stands too, persists."


and

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked public uproar when on Wednesday he claimed that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was the one who planted the idea of the extermination of European Jewry in Adolf Hitler's mind. The Nazi ruler, Netanyahu said, had no intention of killing the Jews, but only to expel them.

and

Zionist Union chairman Isaac Herzog took to Facebook, criticizing the premier for "factual errors."

"Even the son of a historian needs to get history right," Herzog wrote. "Yesterday, Netanyahu told the Zionist Congress that the Nazis didn't want to exterminate the Jews, but instead were seeking to expel them, and that it was the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who gave the tyrant Hitler the idea [to commit genocide]."

"This is a dangerous distortion of history, and I demand that Netanyahu correct this immediately since he is trivialiazing the Holocaust," Herzog wrote.  "[Netanyahu] is minimizing Nazism and the role played by that awful tyrant, Adolf Hitler, in the terrible tragedy that befell our people in the Holocaust," the opposition chief wrote. "[The premier's comments] play into the hands of Holocaust deniers and pits them against the Palestinians."

Zevaha Galon of the left-wing Meretz party said Netanyahu's remarks show "the depths to which this man has sunk."

Being that the Mufti was a Nazi sympathizer from 1933 and that contacts between the Mufti and Nazi leaders preceded by years the 1941 decision, I really do not think anyone can exclude a possibility that the Mufti indicated that he demanded of the Nazis to deal with the Jewish Question on European soil and not allow any more Jews into the Palestine Mandate.

But more importantly, the fact is that the Mufti explicitly contributed to the 1944 demise of Hungarian Jewry by a fiery extermination method.

From Bernard Wasserstein's book, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945, page 266:

And I have been sent this now from Barry Rubin's book

(meeting transcript here)

UPDATE


Sorry, I forgot the poisoning the water operation in 1944.

P.S.  and leave it to revisionist historian Saeb Erekat to befoul matter.


And here is Netanyahu's statement of clarification, (Communicated by the PM's Media Advisor) today, (Wednesday 21 Oct. 2015) before departing to Berlin:

...absurd. I had no intention to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry. Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews. He made ​​the decision. It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al -Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler, Ribbentropp, Himmler and others, to exterminate European Jewry. There is much evidence about this, including the testimony of Eichmann's deputy at the Nuremberg trials, not now, but after World War II. He said:

'The Mufti was instrumental in the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The importance of his role must not be ignored. The Mufti repeatedly proposed to the authorities, primarily Hitler, Ribbentropp and Himmler, to exterminate the Jews of Europe. He considered it a suitable solution for the Palestinian question'.

Eichmann's deputy, added:

'The Mufti was one of the instigators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and was a partner and adviser to Eichmann and Hitler for carrying out this plan'.

The attempt by certain scholars and people to be apologists for the key and important role of Haj Amin al-Husseini, is clear. Many other researchers cite this testimony and others regarding the role of Haj Amin al Husseini. 

My intention was not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the so-called 'occupation', without land and without settlements, even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.

Unfortunately, Haj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society, he appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting the murder of Jews - continues. Not in the same format, but in a different one and this is the root of the problem. To stop the murders, it is necessary to stop the incitement. 

What is important is to recognize the historical facts and not ignore them, not then and not today". 

Some other findings:

in June 1941, Hitler briefly mentioned his vague hope of “exploiting the Arab Freedom Movement” after the Soviets were defeated, and in November he agreed to meet Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, to talk about his “uncompromising fight against the Jews”.

____________________

Bostom

During 1938, a booklet Muhammad Sabri edited, Islam, Judentum, Bolschewismus (Islam, Jewry, Bolshevism), was published in Berlin by Junker-Duennhaupt [Dünnhaupt]. Sabri’s booklet included Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 declaration—also deemed by some as a “fatwa” (an Islamic religious ruling)—appealing to the worldwide Muslim umma. El-Husseini’s declaration was extracted and reprinted, separately, by the Nazi regime as Islam und Judentum (Islam and Jewry), and distributed to Muslim SS units in Bosnia, Croatia, and the Soviet Union. As I detailed in a 2103 monograph, which provided, and riveted upon, the first full English translation of el-Husseini’s 1937 “religious edict” (“fatwa’) about the Jews (available here; and as a free pdf here), the former Mufti of Jerusalem exclusively invoked traditionalist Islamic themes, familiar to the Muslim masses, to incite their annihilationist Islamic Jew-hatred. Reiterating foundational Jew-hating motifs from the Koran itself, and embodied by the inflammatory words and murderous actions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad (in the “hadith” or traditions, and earliest piousMuslim biographies of Muhammad), el-Husseini’s traditional Islamic Jew-hatred has remained a staple of contemporary Palestinian Muslim religious discourse, through the present.

___________________

Middle East Forum scholar, historian and author Wolfgang G. Schwanitz added, “It is a historical fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem al-Hajj Amin al-Husaini was an accomplice whose collaboration with Adolf Hitler played an important role in the Holocaust. He was the foremost extra-European adviser in the process to destroy the Jews of Europe.”

Although Schwanitz heard for the first time the dialogue between Hitler and al-Husaini as told by Netanyahu, Hitler was the key architect of the Final Solution. But indeed, it is absurd to ignore the role played by al-Hajj Amin al-Husaini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler and other leading Nazis to exterminate European Jewry. According to the foremost expert on the ties between Nazis and Islamists, there is much evidence that al-Husaini's primary goal was blocking all of the ways out of Europe. He pushed Hitler to slam the last doors of a burning house shut.

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Married

I caught this

Hitler and his henchmen tried their hardest to keep Eva out of the spotlight, and forbade any picture of her to be published, because they were keen to project the idea that he was “married to Germany”. 

I recalled that description as being applied to another:

An assessment of the personality of Yasser Arafat must take into consideration both his deep religiosity and his fierce nationalism (even if he tended to equate Palestinian nationalism with himself). He often said that he was married to the Palestinian cause, and indeed he had no other bride—at least until he married Suhā al-Ṭawīl, a Sorbonne-educated Palestinian woman of Christian origin, in 1990.

And this

A longtime bachelor who declared himself "married to the revolution," a then 62-year-old Yasser Arafat, stunned Palestinians when he wed his 28-year-old private secretary, Suha, in a secret ceremony in Tunisia in 1991.

The problem with this is that he seemed to be engaged in divorcing the Jewish people from their national homeland.

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National Socialists: Anti-Semitism from the Left

So, it was his socialism at the root of his anti-Semitism?

Against a ‘world of enemies’: the impact of the First World War on the development of Hitler’s ideologyBrendan Simms, March 2014

Adolf Hitler's experiences during the First World War have been much discussed, with historians tending to concentrate on his involvement in the fighting and the operational lessons he later claimed to draw. Much less has been written about the impact of the war on his world view, though recent work has tended to suggest that his paranoid anti-Semitism was not yet visible during the conflict.

Drawing on this latest research, but also on newly discovered sources and previously underused material, the author shows that Hitler’s main preoccupation during the war and its immediate aftermath was the overwhelming power of Great Britain and its American ally. He associated these two powers with the alleged international Jewish economic conspiracy that had crushed the German empire. Hitler’s anti-Semitism thus originated in an anti-capitalist, rather than anti-communist, discourse.

Anti-Semitism from the Left.

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Today Is Partition Plan Day. But Yesterday?

Yesterday was Mufti-Hitler Day.

For more info -

There are also good history books

Matthias Küntzel: Djihad et haine des Juifs : Le lien troublant entre islamisme et nazisme à la racine du terrorisme international

Martin Cüppers, Klaus-Michael Mallmann -
Croissant fertile et croix gammée : Le Troisième Reich, les Arabes et la Palestine

Jeffrey Herf -
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World

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Has Hagee Gone Hareidi?

McCain rejects pastor's support after 'God sent Hitler' comment

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has rejected the endorsement of an influential Texas televangelist criticized for his anti-Catholic views. John Hagee, the Texas preacher, withdrew his endorsement at the same time.

McCain issued a statement after audio surfaced in which Hagee said "God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land." McCain said in a statement: "Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well."

Maybe Hagee has adopted, in an awkward way, the Hareidi approach, that the Holocaust was a punishment for Zionism?

Like this:-

Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky, in 1939, stated that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was the fault of non-Orthodox Jews (Achiezer, volume III, Vilna 1939, in the introduction. This is discussed in "Piety & Power: The World of Jewish Fundamentalism" by Orthodox author David Landau (1993, Hill & Wang).

Rabbi Eliahu Dessler had similar views, also discussed in Landau's book.

And (here

Interesting Observations on Weimar & Hitler

From one who was there, Eric Hobsbawm::-

But almost all Germans, including the Communists, were passionately against Versailles and the foreign occupiers. I can still recall as a child seeing from the train the French flag flying on Rhineland fortresses, with a curious sense that this was somehow unnatural. Being both English and Jewish (I was ‘der Engländer’ at school) I was not tempted into the German nationalism of my schoolfriends, let alone into Nazism, but I could well understand the appeal of both to German boys. As Weitz shows, the authoritarian right was always the main danger both politically and, through their persistent and popular hostility to ‘Kulturbolschewismus’, culturally.

and

The fact is that no one, right, left or centre, got the true measure of Hitler’s National Socialism, a movement of a kind that had not been seen before and whose aims were rationally unimaginable. Not even his intended victims fully recognised the danger. After the summer election of 1932 which left the Nazis as much the largest party, but short of a majority, the (Jewish) editor of the Tagebuch, a left-liberal weekly we took at home, published an article whose headline struck me even then as suicidal. I still see it before me: ‘Lasst ihn heran!’ (‘Why not let him in!’) A few months later, with very different intentions, the reactionaries around the aged President Hindenburg manoeuvred Hitler into office thinking that he could be controlled.