Theodore Newman Kaufman
Theodore Newman Kaufman (born February 22, 1910 in New York City , † April 1986 in East Orange , New Jersey) was an American businessman and author.
Kaufman, the operator of a small advertising and ticket agency in South Orange , was politically a lonely eccentric who wanted his core pacifist beliefs to be implemented by extremely radical means. On behalf of his American Federation of Peace , of which he was himself president and probably the only member, he turned to the United States Congress in 1939, demanding: “1. keep the United States out of Europe's wars, or 2. sterilize all Americans so their children don't become murderous monsters ”.
Two years later he translated the completely unrealistic demand for mass sterilization in his book Germany Must Perish! on the Germans . Since Kaufman was a Jew, this book, self- published by him and without any public notice in the USA (apart from a negative criticism in Time magazine ), served the Nazi propaganda as the basis for the construction of the so-called Kaufman Plan and one allegedly extermination of the German people planned by American Jews in cooperation with the US government. Since the political loner Kaufman neither had the contacts with the White House claimed by the National Socialist propaganda , nor was the American public notably noticed, his statements were in truth irrelevant, but are still used by history revisionists as evidence of an alleged conspiracy of the so-called World Jewry used against Germany.
In some, sometimes right-wing extremist press products, Kaufman's middle name is incorrectly given as "Nathan" and his family name as "Kaufmann".
literature
- Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews. Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56681-3 , p. 587.
- Wolfgang Benz : Kaufman, Theodore Newman , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, p. 424f.
Web links
- Theodore N. Kaufman: Germany must perish! (Wikisource)
- Kaufman portrait at the US Library of Congress
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Time of October 23, 1939, Slick Stuff .
- ^ Anon .: A modest proposal . In: Time , March 24, 1941. Online , in full at http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?people/k/kaufman.theodore.nathan/press/time-review-perish-194103
- ↑ As an example of this mistake without a right-wing extremist background, see Rudolf Augstein : “On the inclined plane to the Republic” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 1985 ( online Jan. 7, 1985 ).
- ↑ Jürgen Langowski: How a nerd becomes an enemy of the state. Holocaust Reference, undated, accessed October 27, 2012.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kaufman, Theodore Newman |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American businessman and author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 22, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 1986 |
| Place of death | East Orange , New Jersey, USA |