Kaufman plan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kaufman Plan or Kaufman's Plan is a term used in National Socialist propaganda for a treatise by the American Theodore Newman Kaufman , which he wrote in early 1941 under the title Germany must perish! 'Germany must perish!' in Selbstverlag published. Kaufman had in it for a sterilization in the event of a war between the US and Germany and a US victory in that warof all Germans pleads to save the world from what he believes is an innate war tendency. The writing was hardly noticed in the USA, but stylized by the Nazi propaganda to a plan from the circle of the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and, since Kaufman was a Jew, to a document of Jewish extermination intentions. It served as material in a large-scale campaign by the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that covered all media.

Theodore N. Kaufman and his brochure Germany must perish!

prehistory

Little is known about Kaufman - so little that it has already been suspected that this person was an invention or an agent of National Socialist propaganda. Kaufman really existed, however. Born on February 22, 1910 to Anton Kaufman, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle in Newark , he graduated from South Side High School and then seems to have tried his hand at Newark in various fields: as an office worker, in advertising, as Seller.

In 1939 he first made a name for himself with a political activity. On behalf of an American Federation of Peace, he sent out a pamphlet to the media, politicians and friends of peace under the title Life – Liberty – Pursuit of Happiness – Where? In The Graves of European Battlefields? . There were photos of war casualties and starved war victims on glossy paper and, as part of a “ possible plea ” to the United States Congress , flaming calls against American participation in war in bold. Among other things, it said: “Let's all sterilize! If you plan to send us into a war abroad, we will save every opportunity to bring children into the world - in this our country! ”The pamphlet has apparently hardly been heeded. The only proven public reaction is a short note in Time of 23 October 1939 in the category "War and Peace" under the heading Slick Stuff that mocks tone and style and some "selected abomination" ( sample atrocities cited).

In the same year Kaufman published a ten-page appeal under his own name, A Will and Way to Peace: Passive Purchase , the American Federation of Peace was again the publisher . Again, the tenor of this appeal was isolationist : The citizens of the USA should hold back for two weeks when buying domestic goods, i.e. practice renouncing consumption and thus emphasize the demand for neutrality and abstinence from war by the USA. The American Federation of Peace was presented in the appendix : It is apolitical, affirms the right to military self-defense, but resolutely opposes the participation of American troops in imperialist adventures. The contact address given was an office building in Newark, Kaufman's home. Wolfgang Benz summarized the thrust of the text as follows: “Kaufman wanted to realize the American dream of a great future of material prosperity for Americans with the help of his fundamentalist understanding of democracy.” A reception of this brochure is nowhere documented.

These two scriptures are the only traces of an American Federation of Peace . This cannot be proven anywhere else, and it has nothing to do with the established peace organizations in the USA, such as the American Peace Society . Kaufman was probably its only member.

Germany must perish!

Cover picture of Germany must perish! (1941)

Kaufman's sometimes shrill neutralistic tones had hardly received any attention up to this point. At first, that did not change much when, presumably in February 1941, he published a hundred-page brochure in the publishing house Argyle Press , which he himself had founded , entitled Germany must perish! carried (in German, for example: 'Germany must perish!'). In an introduction ( Introductory Note ), Kaufman reaffirmed his conviction that the United States' entry into the war was only permitted as a means of military self-defense. In the following he argued that the world war that had meanwhile started was by no means the war of Hitler, but the war of the German people. Kaufman then tried to show in the majority of the text by means of a collection of quotations (including from Friedrich Nietzsche , Heinrich von Treitschke , Karl Lamprecht , Paul Rohrbach ) that the Germans had been attacked by aggressive Germanism from the early Germanic period until today and therefore ineradicable to war , Racism and barbarism.

In the last chapter ( Death to Germany ) he offered his solution: the Germans had to be prevented with a “modern method” from continuing to reproduce as a people. “This modern method, known to science as eugenic sterilization, is at the same time practicable, humane and thorough.” Specifically, after the victory of Great Britain and its allies, all German women under 45 and all German men under 60 should be forcibly sterilized . He also advocated the division of Germany among its neighboring states on the basis of a map he had drawn himself. From the opening chapters it can be seen that the attacks by the Nazis on various European states (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway and France are named) brought him to his radical solution.

For the purpose of promoting this elaborate to reviewers, Kaufman sent black cardboard coffins by post containing a card with a reference to his brochure. At least the New York Times and Time received review copies, of which only Time responded . The magazine published a sarcastic article in its book column on March 24, 1941 , which was titled A Modest Proposal , alluding to Jonathan Swift's satire . The article presented Kaufman's " grisly " idea, which, unlike Swift's "humble suggestion," was by no means meant ironically. It went on to say: "Stunned readers wondered whether the strange little book was a milestone, the first appearance of the Streicher -geist in the USA." But the Time author had unearthed the two-year-old call for sterilization that the magazine received from Kaufman at the time had, and commented dryly: "The sterilizer Kaufman had kept pace with the times and simply transferred his basic idea to the enemy." The reviewer was also interested in the background of this curiosity, so he added a number of personal details about Kaufman, the apparently came from a conversation with him. He emphasized that Kaufman was “not a Nazi” and had self-published the book as a one-man job so that he would not have to accept any editing of his text; he also completely took over the production , advertising and shipping himself and is hoping to just get his costs back.

This was the only documented reception of the brochure until July 23, 1941, the beginning of the Nazi campaign on Kaufman - apart from a short review (probably by Erika Mann ) in the New York magazine Decision published by Klaus Mann . The Time review was also believed to be the source for all of the information about the book's content in the first few weeks of this campaign.

National Socialist Propaganda

How news about Kaufman's brochure got to Germany in the first place is not clear. The Chargé d' Affaires of the German Embassy in Washington , Hans Thomsen , may have been involved. In any case, since the attack on the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, there was fear in Berlin that the USA might extend its support under the Lending and Lease Act to the Soviet Union or even enter the war directly. Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop urged the Federal Foreign Office subordinate to him to influence American public opinion and even told Thomsen on July 19, 1941 that this would have opportunities for the Jewish population in the USA, because they would increase if the USA entered the war fear of anti-Semitic moods. The Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, in turn, had already chosen the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the target of his attacks at this point ; This was insulted on July 23 in the Völkischer Beobachter in a full-page article as “the main tool of the Jewish world freemasonry ” after Goebbels had obtained a photo of Roosevelt in Masonic clothing.

Start of the press campaign

On July 23, 1941, a large Nazi propaganda campaign , which had "Kaufman's plan" as its subject, began with a press conference by the Reich government . This body, known as the Reich Press Conference , was usually used to issue instructions to journalists, but not to publish government opinions. The thrust given here was again against Roosevelt, from whom Kaufman's book was supposedly inspired; “The excerpts available” should be “strongly emphasized and denounced”. Paul Karl Schmidt , who was involved in the conference as spokesman for the Foreign Office, stated that it was known “that Roosevelt had dictated individual chapters himself”, that it was “actually a program of Roosevelt's policy” that had “reached a huge circulation”. He demanded that the whole of “Europe must stand up against the USA”. All of this had to remain a mere assertion, of course, as there was no evidence then or now that Roosevelt knew Kaufman at all.

On the same day, the German News Office published an official press release to this effect, which was immediately picked up by all major media in Germany and abroad. The Völkischer Beobachter continued its anti-Roosevelt campaign on July 24 with the headline : Roosevelt demands sterilization of the German people . The related article stated:

“Germany must be annihilated” has recently been published in the United States, a sensational book that reveals and propagates in great detail a monstrous plan for the extermination of the German people and the complete dismemberment of Germany. The author of this document, the American conception of law and justice, freedom and democracy, is none other than the Jew Theodor Kaufmann, President of the American Peace League [...] In New York's Jewish literary circles it is an open secret, and one even boasts of the fact that Roosevelt himself inspired the main theses of this book and personally dictated the most important parts of this disgrace. "

Numerous other German daily newspapers, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten, distributed similar false information that almost literally matched the DNB report .

The international press also took notice of the new anti-Roosevelt campaign on the same day, for example the Neue Zürcher Zeitung with an article Blickektiven der German diplomacy and the Associated Press with a short message entitled Nazis attack Roosevelt , which was published in New York among others Times was reprinted. Spurred on by this worldwide reception, the heads of the Reich Foreign Ministry and the Reich Propaganda Ministry immediately thought about continuing and expanding the campaign. Goebbels obtained Hitler's consent to publish parts of the book in German translation and commissioned his ministerial advisor Wolfgang Diewerge , head of the broadcasting department in the Propaganda Ministry, to prepare a corresponding brochure. Curiously enough, Goebbels decided not to publish it in full for copyright reasons . On July 24th, Ribbentrop informed his ministerial office that he wished "that every day one or two very clever reports of lies about the intentions of Roosevelt or Churchill should be made".

Thomsen, the head of the German embassy in Washington, made a suggestion: It could be “useful” to distribute Kaufman's brochure there “with the camouflage tendency to propagate the hideous idea” on a large scale. The cheapest way to do this is to organize "a special edition of around 150,000 copies by the only New York Sunday paper", as he wrote in a letter to the Foreign Office in Berlin on September 17, 1941 . Thomsen hoped so by supporting anti-Jewish resentment one against a war entrance of the USA directed isolationist to stir up sentiment in the American population. However, his suggestion was not taken up. Even more drastic ideas came up in other institutions of the diplomatic service: Carltheo Zeitschel , “Jew expert” at the German embassy in Paris, asked Ambassador Otto Abetz in a memorandum on August 21, 1941, when he next visited Ribbentrop and Hitler “to be sterilized of all Jews residing in the occupied territories ”(meaning the territories of the Soviet Union conquered since June 1941). One should take the "book of Mr. Kaufman for the given occasion", "to carry out his proposal first of all to the 6 to 7 million Jews in our hands".

Meanwhile, the German press campaign continued. On August 3, the Reich published excerpts from Kaufman's writing, some of which were also read out on the radio. The Völkischer Beobachter followed up on August 17 with an editorial by Goebbels against the Atlantic Charter and made the absurd assertion that the “implementing provisions of the 'Atlantic Charter'” were already “right down to the smallest” in the “Book of the Jew Theodor Kaufmann “Present. In the striker , Julius Streicher offered under the headline The fight against the devil and the subtitle " Alljuda reveals his plan of annihilation" on September 11th a double-sided inflammatory article about the alleged "spokesman for world Jewry".

Persecution of Jews in Hanover and the Kaufman Plan

The subject reached the American press one last time in September 1941, this time not as a result of Nazi propaganda, but as a result of research by the Associated Press. In the course of the Lauterbacher campaign , over 1,000 Hanoverian Jews were expelled from their homes and forcibly sent to a total of 16 Jewish houses , the prelude to their deportation to the Riga ghetto in December of the same year. Formally it was an official act on the part of the city ​​administration ; On September 3, the affected Jews received an evacuation order from employees of the “mobilization department” of the city of Hanover, which they had to comply with by 6 p.m. on September 4. This eviction order bore the letterhead "The Lord Mayor - Mob Department" and the signature of the head of the housing department and superior of the "Mob Department" Wilhelm Bakemeier , but also contained a reason that in style and content did not match the image of a sober administrative act. She pointed to the real driver of the Lauterbacher action, namely the Gauleiter Hartmann Lauterbacher :

“Through the agitation of Judaism abroad, the current war has been forced upon the German people. The enemy air force is attacking open cities and dropping explosive and incendiary bombs indiscriminately at the homes of the civilian population. The Jew merchant [sic] in New York [sic], in his excessive agitation, calls for the sterilization of all Germans and the use of German soldiers as work coolies in foreign countries. In order to alleviate the emergencies caused by the war, I feel compelled to further narrow the living space that is still available to the local Jews. "

An Associated Press report dated September 8th covered both this anti-Jewish action and the fact that Kaufman's writing served as a pretext for it. The text appeared on September 9 in the New York Times under the title Jews Of Hanover Forced From Homes - Mayor Cites American Book "Germany Must Perish" , on the same day in a slightly different version in the Washington Post and three days later under construction . The short report contained a number of consistently correct information: the expulsion of the Jews from their apartments, the preaching hall of the Jewish cemetery as one of the newly furnished Jewish houses and some quotes from the eviction order itself, in particular the justification with Kaufman's writing and the determination that the proceeds for the furniture sold, the displaced were supposed to be given “in due time”. The conclusion was formed by a quote from a conversation with Kaufman himself, which the journalist in question must have had; Kaufman saw himself as a “scapegoat” and “transparent pretext” for the Nazi crimes that had been going on for a long time. So the author of the report was well informed; at least the text of the eviction order must have been available to him. Kaufman himself took advantage of the short-term publicity for a second edition of his brochure at a reduced price, which was again self-published and which he advertised on the back of the cover with references to the enormous attention it received from Nazi propaganda.

It was not until the middle of September that the Hanoverian Gauleiter brought his "action" to the local public at a rally in Hanover-Wülfel , again using the Kaufman plan as a justification. The NSDAP organ Niedersächsische Tageszeitung quoted Lauterbacher's speech in the issue of 13./14. September like this:

“But it was intolerable for us that […] a thousand Jews in Hanover had made good themselves in apartments with some five, six, eight or more rooms. The Gauleiter recalled that this war was the war of Judaism against the German people and once again described the sadistic intention of the American Jew Kaufman to exterminate the people by means of sterilization and to enslavement until their final annihilation. "

In the summer of 1943 Lauterbacher came back to the Kaufman story during a persistent speech in Hildesheim.

Diewerges propaganda work

At the end of September 1941, the propaganda brochure commissioned by Goebbels from Diewerge appeared: The war goal of the world plutocracy. Documentary publication on the book of the President of the American Peace Society Theodore Nathan Kaufman "Deutschland muss die" ("Germany must perish") . Diewerge had already done anti-Semitic public relations work for the Propaganda Ministry since 1934 and was particularly subscribed to inflammatory pamphlets on Judaism abroad (for example on the assassination attempt by David Frankfurter on Wilhelm Gustloff and on Herschel Grynszpan's assassination attempt on Ernst vom Rath ). The title collage came from Hans Herbert Schweitzer , the " Reich Commissioner for Artistic Design " who publishes under the pseudonym Mjölnir . Jeffrey Herf describes it as one of the trend-setting anti-Semitic images of the era of war and the Holocaust: A photo (apparently taken from the Associated Press) shows a man at a typewriter, probably Kaufman himself, while on the lower right Roosevelt and Churchill singing at the signing ceremony Atlantic Charter can be seen. The point here is no longer that Roosevelt personally dictated the pamphlet; rather, Kaufman is shown responsible for Roosevelt's actions. Herf comments that the composition depicts a key ideologue of anti-Semitism: "The Jewish brain, safely behind the stage, writes the lines that the unsuspecting gentiles sing at the front."

The 32-page brochure contained a German translation of some excerpts from Kaufman's brochure, with Diewerge's comments. In his introduction, Diewerge made two new manipulative changes: He dissolved the "N." in Kaufman's middle name in "Nathan" to emphasize the author's Judaism, although the Time review gave him the correct middle name "Newman" , was obviously known; and he moved the publication date of Kaufman's brochure from February to the summer of 1941, that is, in the context of the Atlantic Charter, in order to suggest a connection between these two events.

As in his earlier pamphlets, Diewerge constructed a fictional actor " World Jewry " who was responsible not only for the publication of the Kaufman brochure, but also for the politics of American " plutocracy " as well as for Bolshevism . Correspondingly, he claimed that Kaufman was "not a mentally ill eccentric" but "a leading and well-known Jewish figure in the United States" who was "part of the so-called 'Roosevelt brain trust'". Diewerge did not even shrink from interpreting the usual copyright notice (prohibition of reproduction and translation without the consent of the author and publisher) on the imprint page of the brochure as a conspiratorial attempt to keep the Kaufman plan secret from the Germans. The thrust of Diewerg's argument was to impose a plan for the “complete annihilation of the German people” on “world Jewry”, which was now revealed by Kaufman's publication. From this he derived a blatant justification for the mass murder of the Jews. He put his comment on Kaufman's fantasies about sterilization under the heading Who should die - the Germans or the Jews? and wrote:

“How about treating these 20 million Jews instead of 80 million Germans according to the recipe of their racial comrade Kaufman? Then peace would be secured in any case. Because the troublemaker, the peacemaker, all over the world is the Jew. "

The final part of the pamphlet presented the recipients with a view of the war that resulted in a simple alternative: "Victory or death - that is what this war is about", because the question to be decided by the war is "who should live in Europe in the future" , the "white race with its cultural values ​​[...] or the Jewish subhumanity". Goebbels wrote an unsigned epilogue to the German people in the form of an appeal to persevere (“There is only one way to counter their plans for extermination: Siegen!”) And expressed himself very satisfied with Diewerges ’elaboration: it will“ finally come with the last rudiments of any existing compliance clean up, because even the stupidest can see from this brochure what threatens us if we become weak ”. He had Diewerg's work printed with an edition of five million copies. As the American journalist Howard Smith, who was still working in Berlin at the time, remarked, the pamphlet initially sold well, but was later distributed free of charge along with the ration cards .

The Kaufman Plan in Nazi propaganda up to 1945

Diewerges brochure was repeatedly used as a kind of quarry for Nazi propaganda in the years to come. In November 1941, for example, a four-page leaflet was published under the title If you see this sign , which on the one hand justified the introduction of the Jewish star (the intended "sign") with the alleged Kaufman plan, and on the other, advertised Diewerg's brochure. Internal intelligence services with instructions for journalists, such as the magazine service or the political service , picked up Diewerges pamphlet and encouraged the exploitation of the story. The Political Quotation Service , which produced index cards with propaganda ratings for journalists every two months, took quotes from Kaufman several times in 1943. The same applied to the quick information for speakers , which was intended to train Reich speakers of the NSDAP and in this way to spread NS propaganda verbally. After all, the wall newspapers Parole of the Week provided the German population with propaganda about Kaufman at regular intervals. Hans Diebow included a full-page photograph of Kaufman with a caption largely borrowed from Diewerge in the numerous updated reprints of his racist illustrated book Die Juden in USA, originally published in 1939 . Until 1945 this topic was addressed again and again, for example in the booklet Never! Written by Heinrich Goitsch at the end of 1944 . which, among a multitude of other alleged Allied extermination plans, also contained a five-page passage on the Kaufman plan. Even in January 1945, there are still Kaufman quotes in the armaments for propaganda in the local group , published by the Reich Propaganda Office , under the title Death to the Jew .

After September 1941, nothing fundamental changed in the content of the propaganda. The degree of dissemination was so high, however, that Randall Bytwerk says: "Back then, a German could hardly have avoided encountering this message repeatedly."

The effect can be partially assessed on the basis of confidential reports from the SS Security Service (SD) . One of these reports, dated July 1941, stated that the Kaufman reports in the newspapers were read with interest but without particular concern; after all, they seemed to strengthen anti-Semitic attitudes. In November 1941, an SD report certified Diewerges pamphlet had a positive effect, but the message was slow to seep in. In the spring of 1942, a report from Detmold said that even less Nazi-friendly people had been convinced by the Kaufman brochure that one should fear Jewish revenge. Another report from the same time attested to the “dissemination of the handwriting of the Jew Kaufmann”, that it had contributed to the penetration of the opinion in large sections of the population “that the Jew is the instigator of this war and he is responsible for the nameless misery that the war caused many national comrades with it. ”Bytwerk suspects that the effect of the propaganda increased in the years 1942 and 1943, as fears of actual retaliation were obvious because of the course of the war, while anti-American propaganda in particular lost its effectiveness in the last two years of the war - Hopes for a final victory seemed increasingly unrealistic.

It is also proof of the effectiveness of the propaganda that the Kaufman plan was mentioned in denunciation letters. For example, a letter from a Kempten resident of May 2, 1942 to the striker contained the complaint that a named Jew was occupying valuable living space that was urgently needed. The author of the letter takes up the models of Nazi propaganda: “The American Jew Kaufmann ( sic !) Propagates the sterilization of the entire German people, the full Jew Kohn still lives in a city-owned apartment in the - tenth - years after the seizure of power and does not need to wear a Jewish star . "

There were still a few mentions of the National Socialists' Kaufman propaganda in American publications. The American journalist Howard K. Smith, who stayed in Berlin until Germany declared war on the USA and then took the Last Train From Berlin , reported in his book of the same name in 1942 on the effects of propaganda publications: “The Kaufman brochure became Issued as part of the declaration of the new anti-Jewish campaign. And although it certainly caused an echo of fear in the German people, its value as an explanation for the attack on the impoverished, decrepit Jews within Germany was zero. ”Klaus Mann returned to Kaufman in an article for the magazine Tomorrow in 1943. In his text Germany's Education , 'Die Erzieh Deutschlands', he stated that Goebbels had no choice but to' rely on a rather obscure contemporary named Theodore N. Kaufman to convince the Germans that they would doom are consecrated if they do not stand by their leader ”, since official American sources have never reported anything even remotely comparable. Mann's conclusion was, “What Dr. Goebbels likes to call it 'the notorious Rosevelt-Kaufman Plan', but in reality it is either the bloodthirsty caprice of a political dilettante or a clever maneuver that Goebbels hatched himself. "

Kaufman after 1941

While Nazi propaganda cannibalized the Kaufman issue until 1945, Kaufman himself was no longer publicly noticed in the United States and elsewhere from September 1941. There is only one known activity on his part: In March 1942 he published a 16-page brochure in his self-published Argyle Press under the title No more German wars! Being an outline of suggestions for their permanent cessation 'No more German wars! A draft of proposals on how to prevent them permanently '. It no longer contained any hints about sterilization or land division, but made extremely moderate proposals for the democratic re-education of the German population. Even behind the Allied war aims, Kaufman's new demands fell far short of; All that was demanded from Germany was the return of the occupied territories; there was no longer any talk of territorial concessions. The work received no press coverage.

Wolfgang Benz tried to find the strange contrast between this last Kaufmans brochure and Germany must perish! to interpret. He formulates two assumptions: Either Kaufman wanted to show that he had taken the rejection of his book in the American public to heart, or he was “simply a naive idealist” who “was once with barbaric surgical and another time with mild homeopathic recipes, the effects of which he could not assess in any case, had sought to improve the world ”.

After that, Kaufman's trail is completely lost: Nothing is known about his subsequent life, just as little about the American Federation of Peace or the Argyle Press publishing house .

aftermath

The Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals already indicated that the Kaufman Plan would continue to be used as an argument to justify the Nazi extermination policy even after the war: Julius Streicher referred to it in Nuremberg. The striker's appeals of hatred against the Jews were only a reaction to Jewish threats of extermination, such as Kaufman's brochure, according to Streicher: "If in America a writer Erich Kauffmann [sic] can publicly demand that all German men of childbearing potential should be sterilized to avoid German To exterminate people, then I say: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. "

In the history revisionist propaganda, the topic was brought up again and again. In 1963 Paul Rassinier's book On the Eichmann Case or: What is Truth? again that Kaufman's pamphlet "announced the imminent entry into war of the United States on the side of England, France and Russia". In the same year Erich Kern also interpreted Kaufman's brochure as part of a series of “massive Jewish threats and declarations of war”. Adolf Eichmann himself wrote in his memoirs published posthumously in 1980: “On the other hand, the Jewish part and motivation must never be disregarded in killing measures against Jews. This is also evident in the case of Kaufman. [...] It can be assumed that the Kaufman Plan acted in our highest management circles as a triggering factor for our own extermination measures. "To this day, radical right-wing circles speak of the" Kaufman Plan "and bring it, similar to the alleged" declaration of war by the Weltjudentums ”, as evidence for the absurd claim that what the Nazis called“ World Jewry ”wanted to destroy the Germans.

A map drawn by Kaufman, which provided for a division of Germany among its neighboring states, was also printed in a GDR magazine in 1952 with the misleading source note “Plan of the USA politician TN Kaufmann” [sic] in order to admit that the USA intended to break up Germany occupy. However, no reference was made to Kaufman's fantasies of sterilization.

Research results and interpretations

The justifying references by right-wing extremists and historical revisionist authors in particular to the so-called Kaufman Plan have led historical research to examine the topic in more detail. In his essay, the extermination of the Jews in self-defense? In the quarterly journal for contemporary history in 1981, Wolfgang Benz examined, among other things, the undaunted assertions about Kaufman's importance in the USA, which have been repeated to this day.

The result was clear: Kaufman does not appear in a single local or national reference work in the USA, and neither does his short-lived Argyle Press . There is no mention of his name in either Roosevelt's papers or the files of the American Peace Society ; the same is true of the files of all major Jewish organizations. The repeated assumption that Kaufman might have been a Nazi agent could not be refuted, but is considered very unlikely in research. It is closer - also in view of the previous history - to see him as a lonely eccentric with rather naive political intentions, who, for a reason that is not exactly known, launched this hateful tirade in his self-publishing, which then happened to fall into the lap of Goebbels' propaganda machine .

Wolfgang Benz comments: "Whether you characterize him as a fanatical muddlehead or a naive idealist, the political impact of the loner Kaufman consisted solely in supplying Nazi propaganda with ammunition that could be used in a variety of ways."

swell

Kaufman's writings

  • American Federation of Peace: Life – Liberty – Pursuit of Happiness – Where? In The Graves of European Battlefields? Newark, New Jersey, n.d. (1939).
  • Theodore N. Kaufman: A Will and Way to Peace: Passive Purchase . American Federation of Peace, Newark, New Jersey, 1939.
  • Theodore N. Kaufman: Germany must perish! Argyle Press, Newark, NJ, 1941 ( full text from Wikisource ).
  • Theodore N. Kaufman: No more German wars! Being an outline of suggestions for their permanent cessation. Argyle Press, Newark (NJ), 1942.

review

  • Anon .: A modest proposal. In: Time. March 24, 1941 ( online ).

Nazi propaganda

  • Wolfgang Diewerge: The war goal of the world plutocracy. Documentary publication on the book of the President of the American Peace Society Theodore Nathan Kaufman "Deutschland muss die" ("Germany must perish"). Rather, Munich 1941.

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz : Extermination of Jews out of self-defense? The legends of Theodore N. Kaufman. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Volume 29, 1981, No. 4, pp. 615-630 ( PDF ).
  • Wolfgang Benz: Theodore N [ewman] Kaufman . In: ders. (Ed.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Volume 2/1: People A – K. de Gruyter, KG Saur, Berlin 2009, pp. 424-425.
  • Randall Bytwerk: The Argument for Genocide in Nazi Propaganda. In: Quarterly Journal of Speech. Volume 91, 2005, pp. 37-62.
  • Jeffrey Herf : The Jewish Enemy. Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Harvard 2006.
  • Jeffrey Herf: Narratives of Totalitarianism: Nazism's Anti-Semitic Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust. In: Telos. No. 135, 2006, pp. 32-60.
  • Berel Lang: The Jewish "Declaration of War" against the Nazis. In: The Antioch Review. Volume 64, 2006, No. 2, pp. 363-373.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lang 2006, p. 372; see also Benz 1981, p. 619.
  2. ^ William B. Helmreich : The Enduring Community. The Jews of Newark and Metrowest . New Brunswick (New Jersey), Transaction Publishers, 1999, pp. 30 and 46 (footnote 51).
  3. ↑ Benz 1981, p. 626. Further information from the review by Time of March 24, 1941, such as that Kaufman had published a New Jersey Legal Record , could not be verified because the magazine could not be found; it is not certain that it ever existed.
  4. ↑ Time of October 23, 1939, Slick Stuff , cf. also Time of March 14, 1941, A Modest Proposal , and Benz, p. 628. The pamphlet can be found in the library of McMaster University, Ontario, in the MILLS Research Collections, call number D 753 .A48 1940. Cf. https: / /discovery.mcmaster.ca/iii/encore/record/C__Rb3092990?lang=eng .
  5. ^ Time of October 23, 1939, Slick Stuff .
  6. ↑ a b Benz 1981, p. 628.
  7. ^ The copyright deposit copy was deposited in the Library of Congress on February 28, 1941 . See Benz 1981, p. 619.
  8. ↑ Kaufman 1941, quoted here from Lang 2006, p. 366.
  9. ↑ See Kaufman 1941, Time of March 24, 1941 and Benz 1981, pp. 622f.
  10. ↑ See Time of March 24, 1941 and Benz 1981, pp. 626–628, and Herf 2006, p. 111.
  11. ↑ It appeared in the April issue of Decision (vol. 1, p. 72); see. on this Stuart Ferguson: Language Assimilation and Crosslinguistic Influence. A study of German Exile Writers . Tübingen, Narr, 1997, p. 272 ​​(Appendix II, which contains a chronology of Erika Mann's work).
  12. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 617, 621, 626, 627.
  13. ↑ Benz 1981, p. 619f, reports an unsuccessful search for evidence in the Political Archives of the Foreign Office .
  14. ↑ This assumption, based on a letter from Thomsen to the Foreign Office in Berlin, which was written in September, can be found in: Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The Office and the Past . German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Blessing, Munich 2010, p. 194. Berel Lang (p. 368) also makes comparable assumptions.
  15. ↑ Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews. CH Beck, Munich, 2006, p. 234.
  16. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. CH Beck, Munich, 2007, p. 234.
  17. ↑ Benz 1981, p. 619, quoted from the Singer collection of the Koblenz Federal Archives.
  18. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 615-517.
  19. ↑ Herf 2006, p. 112.
  20. ↑ Lang 2009, p. 128.
  21. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 618f., Quoted from a telegram from Ribbentrop to the office of the Reich Foreign Minister of July 24, 1941, documented in: Files on German Foreign Policy , Series D, Volume XIII. 1, Göttingen 1970, p. 172f.
  22. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Blessing, Munich 2010, p. 194. The letter is available in the Yad Vashem Archive, Jerusalem, JM 3121.
  23. ↑ On Zeitschel see also Conze et al .: The Office and the Past , p. 191.
  24. ^ Serge Klarsfeld : Vichy - Auschwitz . 1989, p. 390 (document V-8).
  25. ↑ Bytwerk 2006, p. 43.
  26. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 617 and 622.
  27. ↑ Representation after Marlis Buchholz: Die hannoverschen Judenhäuser. On the situation of the Jews in the period of ghettoization and persecution from 1941 to 1945 . Sources and presentations on the history of Lower Saxony, Volume 101, 1987, pp. 44f. and pp. 49-52.
  28. ↑ Facsimile in: Marlis Buchholz: Die hannoverschen Judenhäuser. On the situation of the Jews in the period of ghettoization and persecution from 1941 to 1945 . Sources and presentations on the history of Lower Saxony, Volume 101, 1987, p. 50. As Buchholz researched, an empty copy of the eviction order has been preserved in the Hanover City Archives (main registry VII C 1 Stöcken No. 5), a filled-in copy in the files of the preliminary proceedings by the Hanover public prosecutor's office against Hartmann Lauterbacher 1947 (2 Js 550/47; sheet 84).
  29. ↑ Buchholz, p. 47f .; Benz 1981, p. 627; Lang 2006, p 371. The report of the building was under the heading of terrorism measures in Hannover ; It can be read online in the Exilpresse digital directory of the German Library (composition, 7th year, no. 37, p. 3, online ( memento of the original from May 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and still not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / deposit.ddb.de
  30. ↑ Benz 1981, p. 619.
  31. ↑ Quoted from Buchholz: Judenhäuser. S. 45. Italics: blocked in the original.
  32. ↑ Buchholz: Jewish houses. P. 46.
  33. ↑ The publication was announced on September 28th by the Völkischer Beobachter under the heading: Roosevelt and World Jewry demand: Germany must die. See Benz 1981, p. 620.
  34. ↑ Herf 2006, p. 113. The title collage can be seen on the German Propaganda Archive page by Randall Bytwerk: online .
  35. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 620-621.
  36. ↑ Diewerge 1941, p. 5, quoted here. after Benz 1981, p. 620.
  37. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 621-623. This interpretation was later used for a wall newspaper that can be seen on the website of the “German Propaganda Archive” [1] .
  38. ↑ Diewerge: Kriegsziel der Weltplutokratie , p. 14, quoted here from Benz 1981, p. 623.
  39. ↑ Elke Fröhlich (ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . KG Saur, Munich. Part II: Dictations 1941–1945 . 1993-1996. Volume 1, p. 334.
  40. ↑ a b Elke Fröhlich (Ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . KG Saur, Munich. Part II: Dictations 1941–1945 . 1993-1996. Volume 1, p. 328.
  41. ^ Howard K. Smith: Last Train From Berlin. An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War. London, Cresset Press, 1942, p. 145.
  42. ↑ The leaflet can be found in Bytwerk's German Propaganda Archive: online .
  43. ↑ Bytwerk, pp. 44-46; see. also the German Propaganda Archive , which contains examples of all these forms of distribution.
  44. ^ Bytwerk, p. 52.
  45. ^ Bytwerk, p. 46.
  46. ↑ Bytwerk 2006, p. 53f. The literal quote comes from an SD report from March 15, 1942 and is reproduced here after Saul Friedländer: The Years of Destruction. The Third Reich and the Jews 1939–1945 . Munich, Beck, 2006, p. 365.
  47. ↑ Quoted from: Gernot Römer: Julius Streicher (Fleinhausen) - A teacher becomes Jew-hater No. 1. In: Gernot Römer: There are always two possibilities ... Fighters, followers and opponents of Hitler using the example of Swabia. Wißner, Augsburg 2000, pp. 12-19, here: p. 16. The letter can be found in the Nuremberg City Archives, E39 / 2253-1.
  48. ^ Howard K. Smith: Last Train From Berlin. An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War . London, Cresset Press, 1942, p. 145.
  49. ^ Howard K. Smith: Last Train From Berlin. An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War . London, Cresset Press, 1942. Klaus Mann: Germany's Education . In: Tomorrow , April 1943, New York. Quoted here from: Klaus Mann: The education of Germany . In: ders .: In a losing position. Articles, speeches, reviews 1942–1949 . Rowohlt, Reinbek, 1994, pp. 40-49. The two quotations are on pp. 45f and 46.
  50. ↑ a b Benz 1981, p. 629.
  51. ↑ The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg November 14, 1945–1. October 1946. Official wording . Volume XII, pp. 398f.
  52. ↑ Druffel Verlag, Leoni, p. 116f., Here cited from Benz 1981, p. 624.
  53. ↑ Germany in the Abyss. The wrong judgment. Göttingen 1963, p. 204f .; quoted here from Benz 1981, p. 624.
  54. ↑ I, Adolf Eichmann. A historical witness report. Edited by Rudolf Aschenauer , Druffel Verlag, Leoni, p. 177; quoted here from Benz 1981, p. 625.
  55. ↑ Neue Berliner Illustrierte . 40/1952. The map was changed insofar as the German eastern territories already appear there as part of Poland.
  56. ↑ Benz 1981, pp. 629f.