Banality of Evil 2: When Zionists Loved Nazis
November 17, 2025
by William P. Meyers

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Nationalism the root of much evil

Zionists loving Nazis? Nazis loving Zionists? I must be kidding. All those Jews in ovens, how could Jewish Zionists have loved Nazis?

I admit, I was as floored when I read about Zionists in Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Just within this last month. I had previously read so much about history and politics. I majored in Political Science in college, read about 20 books for each course. I even read the Hannah Arendt book American political scientists like best: The Origins of Totalitarianism. I am now ancient, so I have had decades of opportunities to read this famous book on the Banality of Evil.

When it was published many people found Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil, offensive. For a variety reasons. Jews thought it was way too soft on Eichmann, and way too harsh on Jews. [Note that in my argument below the numbers in brackets refer to pages in the Eichmann book, so you can verify when I am summarizing Arendt's facts.]

Timeline/background: Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933. Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, setting off World War II and the mass killings of Poles and Jews in occupied Poland. The Final Solution, the systemic killing of Jews and others in death camps, was authorized in January 1942.

[56-57] Eichmann claimed at the trial that he was working with the Jews, particularly the Zionists, to help them achieve the agreed-upon goal of getting Jews out of Germany. Some Jewish functionaries were Zionists, so helping Jews emigrate to Palestine was in their interest. "Who but he, Eichmann, had saved hundreds of thousands of Jews? What but his great zeal and gifts of organization had enabled them to escape in time?" [This was of the period before the Final Solution]

[58-60] Arendt quotes Hans Lamm: "It is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish policy the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude." Arendt: "the German Jews themselves . . . flocked into the ranks of the Zionist movement," between the Nazi takeover and the beginning of the war. One indicator is that subscriptions to the Zionist Die Judische Rundschau increased from seven thousand to about forty thousand within a year of Hitler coming to power. Zionist fund raising increased by a factor of three between 1932 and 1936. The Jewish star that Hitler would require Jews to wear starting in 1939 was made popular by Zionists in 1933: "Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Star." The non-Zionists were labeled assimilationists, and could not negotiate with German authorities. The Zionists saw Hitler's triumph as "the decisive defeat of assimilationism." Nazi anti-semites and Zionists agreed that the best mutual solution was emigration of Germany Jews to Palestine. "Zionists, according to the Nazis, were the decent Jews since they too thought in national terms."

[60-61] "There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine — a Ha'avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in Germany goods and exchange them for [British] pounds." Emissaries from Palestine approached the Gestapo, the S.S., and Eichmann for help in emigration. They were picky, wanting young Jewish volunteers for their communal settlements. This "eventually led to a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies — the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities."

[30] Eichmann's Zionist contacts included Dr. Kastner, vice-president of the Budapest Zionist organization. Eichmann claimed no personal hatred of the Jews. His mother had Jewish relatives, he had a Jew schoolboy friend in Linz, and at one point a Jewish mistress from Linz.

[41] After being put in charge of Jewish relations, Eichmann learned some Hebrew and Yiddish. He read two books on Zionism: Adolf Bohm's History of Zionism and Theodore Herzl's Der Judenstaat.

[62] Adolf Eichmann himself was so friendly with Zionists that he frequently was taken out to dinner by Zionists. One invited him to visit Palestine. He got permission from his superiors and went with a journalist from his office, Herbert Hagen. The British expelled the pair quickly, to Egypt. There a member of the Zionist terrorist organization Haganah visited with them.

[63] The Nazi government abandoned its pro-Zionist attitude in 1938. But even then the emigration/annihilation apparatus that Eichmann worked in, making trains run where needed, continued working with Zionists. The work varied by nation because Germany had to show some respect for its voluntary allies like Slovakia [see Jozef Tiso, Slovakia's Roman Catholic Fascist Dictator], Hungary and Bulgaria.

[143] Dr. Rudolf Kastner is a notable example of a Zionist who worked with Nazis. Eichmann was transferred to work on deporting Jews from Budapest, Hungary. Heinrich Himmler (leader of the SS) sent Kurt Becher there on a special mission. Among other things Becher made deals with Dr. Kastner to preserve the lives of certain rich Jews, at a price subject to the art of the deal. "The price finally arrived at was a thousand dollars." A group of 1,684 Jews, including Dr. Kastner's family, used this program to escape to Switzerland. "A similar deal, through which Becher and Himmler hoped to obtain twenty million Swiss francs," fell apart.

Details also changed during the Final Solution period, starting in 1942, when emigration of Jews was no longer a goal. Only their destruction. Still, there were exceptions, mostly for the wealthiest. [197-199] There was quite a bit of leading Jews getting permission to emigrate, or at least the right to be last to leave for the death camps, during the Final Solution period. Again using Dr. Kastner as an example, he spoke of how rich Jews in Budapest, at this point, paid up. "Nowhere else did Jews spend so much money without any results whatever." Eichmann and friends met with the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee every morning in a coffee house. They had money; the Nazis wanted it. "The Zionists were free to come and go practically as they pleased, they were exempt from wearing the yellow star." Kastner traveled about Germany with no papers identifying him as a Jew. This is while the death camps were killing Jews from all over Europe.

For some reason Arendt did not compile the total number of European Jews who moved to Palestine during the reign of Adolf Hitler, roughly 1933 to 1945. For true Zionists the choice picks were presumably the most nationalist of the Jews. They would help create the state of Israel and have no sympathy for the fate of native Palestinians. But on the whole Arendt gave me the impression that wealth mattered more than zeal. To be an ordinary working Jew in this period was to be sold down the river to be worked to death, gassed, or cremated alive.

Adolf Eichmann exemplified the banality of evil. He was a nice man, a bit of a social climber, who believed that following orders was a virtue, as was the efficient use of the stock of railroads. The Zionists who worked with the Nazis to get Jews to the future state of Israel illustrated a variation on the banality of evil. To the extent they even thought about it, they reasoned some Jews could be sacrificed to save others. Is that not the way of war?

Still, Hannah gives an example of going too far in criticizing the behavior of Zionists:
[20] A few weeks before the trial, Egyptian Foreign Minister Hussain Zulficar Sabri claimed that "Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews; he was the victim of the Zionists." How so? They had "compelled him to perpetrate crimes that would enable them to achieve their aim — the creation of the State of Israel."

I admit I used a misleading headline to try to get people to read this article. While Nazis varied (I suspect many party members did not support the death camps), as did Zionists, the word love is rather too strong. They each believed in an extreme form of nationalism. They saw no reason to apply their internal rules of ethics to anyone outside their national group. The Nazis wanted to rid Germany of Jews, and the Zionists wanted recruits for their Israel project.

I think we should all think of ourselves as citizens of earth. We have our nations, to be sure. I am very much an American. I love the melting pot of assimilation. I don't like to follow the orders of evil leaders, but I like to cooperate to build a better society. What I see, in these examples of the banality of evil, is that people mostly don't get that they are practicing it. Something give them blinders, perhaps hypocrisy.

In future posts I will continue to explore the banality of evil. I will look at more of Arendt's specific examples from the Nazi era, at the Vietnam War, and at racism in America. But the key issue, I believe, is the destruction of the environment, because too few people are doing enough to prevent it. We are turning the world into our own mass execution chamber.