12 18 06 Sisters and brothers,
On Feb. 8, 1981, I interviewed Joachim Prinz, in 1933 an enthusiastic German Zionist collaborator with Hitler's new regime. The audio tape can now be heard via the internet:
www.corkpsc.org/db.php?cid=512
It is on standard MP3 files which can be played in any MP3-compatible software application, including Quicktime, iTunes, Winamp, etc. -- most people's browsers are automatically configured to choose an appropriate application from the user's machine.
Prinz (1902-1988) definitely thought that Zionism could come to an accommodation with Nazism.
"Well, we thought, in our discussions with intellectuals in the SS movement, that the time would come when they would say, 'Yes, you live in Germany, you are Jewish people, you are different from us, but we will not kill you, we will permit you to live your own cultural life, and develop your own national capacities and dreams.' We thought, at the beginning of the Hitler regime that such a very frank discussion was possible. We found among the SS intellectuals, some people were ready for such a talk. But of course such a talk never took place because the radical element in the Nazi movement won out."
But he dramatically evolved in the 44 years since he was expelled from Germany. He told me, off tape, that he soon realized that nothing he said there made sense in the US. He became an American liberal. Eventually, as head of the American Jewish Congress, he was asked to march with Martin Luther King and he did so.
I decided that, beyond using the interview in my book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, I wouldn't do anything with it that would embarrass him in his old age. I did the right thing. The wannabe collaborator was very different from the gentleman who invited me into his home and honestly answered what he knew would be probing questions. But if he changed, Zionism didn't. Now it is obligatory for me to bring the interview to the world's attention for the indisputable confirmation it provides re Zionist fantasies about a deal with Hitler.
***
Lenni Brenner is the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Croom Helm, 1983) and The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (Zed Books, 1984), and the editor of 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (Barricade Books, 2002). He blogs at
www.smithbowen.net/linfame/brenner
and can be reached at BrennerL21 at aol.com.