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Rating: 
Summary: Lenni Brenner is a Courageous Speaker of the Truth
Review: History can be deceptive. It's fair to say that some of the sensational never-published-before documents, in this book, will shock those who have accepted Zionism and its supposed history, at face value, as a political movement that was the hope of the Jews. Lenni Brenner, the intrepid author of "Zionism in the Age of Dictators," reveals disturbing new evidence in his latest effort, that suggest just the opposite. In fact, he makes a compelling case that the Zionist record was "dishonorable." You can consider this excellent tome as a worthy sequel to his first expose' on the myopic Zionist zealots of that bygone era. For openers, Brenner showed how the Zionists had a long history of shameless cooperation with the Nazis, especially after the dictator Adolph Hitler had came to power in 1933. The Zionists were also in bed, to some extent, with the other members of what later became known as WWII's "Axis of Evil," that included Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Tojo Hideki's Japan. For example, in March 29,1936, Zionists praised Il Duce, and his regime, at the opening of a maritime school, funded by the Fascist government, at Civitavecchia. This is where a Zionist youth group, the "Betar," trained its sailors for the future Revisionist state. The speakers ignored the fact that on Oct. 3, 1935, Italian troops had invaded Abyssinia.
On another front, the "Third Congress of the Jewish Community of the Far East," was held in Jan., 1940, in Harbin, Manchuria, then reeling under a brutal military occupation by the Japanese imperial forces. At that time, too, Tokyo was already aligned with Hitler and Italy's Mussolini, in the notorious Anti-Comintern Pact. Also, keep in mind, that the Japanese's murderous "Rape of Nanking," had occurred in Dec., 1937, and the "Crystal Night" incident on Nov. 9, 1938. Nevertheless, the Zionist confab went out of its way to legitimize the Japanese occupation by certifying it as a guarantor of the "equality of all citizens," in that beleaguered land. The Zionist also had a trade plan with the Berlin government by which German Jews could redeem their property in Nazi goods exported to then British-occupied Palestine. And to top it all off, the infamous SS-Hptscharf. Adolf Eichmann, had visited Palestine, in October, 1937, as the guest of the Zionists. He also met, in Egypt, with Feivel Polkes, a Zionist operative, whom Eichmann described as a "leading Haganah functionary." The chain-smoking Polkes was also on the Nazis' payroll "as an informer." Brenner isn't the first writer to address the mostly taboo subject of how the Zionist leadership cooperated with the Nazis. Rolf Hilberg's seminal "The Destruction of European Jews"; Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"; Ben Hecht's "Perfidy"; Edwin Black's "The Transfer Agreement"; Francis R. Nicosia's "The Third Reich and the Palestine Question"; Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestic's "I Cannot Forgive"; and Rafael Medoff's "The Deadening Silence: American Jews and the Holocaust," also dared, with varying public success. After the Holocaust began in 1942, Eichmann dealt regularly with Dr. Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jew, whom he considered a "fanatical Zionist." Kastner was later assassinated in Israel as a Nazi collaborator. At issue then, however, was the bargaining over the eventual fate of Hungary's Jews, who were slated for liquidation in the Nazi-run death camps. Eichmann said this about Kastner, the Zionist representative, "I believe that [he] would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. 'You can have the others,' he would say, 'but let me have this group here.' And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful. I would let his groups escape." Readers, too, will be surprised to learn, that after the Nuremberg Anti-Jewish Race Laws were enacted in Sept., 1935, that there were only two flags that were permitted to be displayed in all of Nazi Germany. One was Hitler's favorite, the Swastika. The other was the blue and white banner of Zionism. The Zionists were also allowed to publish their own newspaper. The reasons for this Reich-sponsored favoritism was, according to the author: The Zionists and the Nazis had a common interest, making German Jews emigrate to Palestine. As early as June 21, 1933, the German Zionist Federation was sending a secret memorandum to the Nazis, which said, in part: "It is our opinion that an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state [German Reich] can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims as a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry- -indeed, that such a national renewal must first create the decisive social andspiritual premises for all solutions..." Incredibly, Avraham Stern, the leader of the notorious "Stern Gang," late in 1940, made a written proposal to Hitler, by which the Jewish militias in Palestine, would fight on "Germany's side," in the war against England, in exchange for the Nazis help in resolving the "Jewish Question" in Europe, and their assistance in creating an "historic Jewish state." By this date, German troops had already marched into Prague, invaded Poland, and had built the first concentration camp at Auschwitz. The deranged Stern had further bragged about how the Zionist organizations were "closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in [their] ideology and structure." Stern's obscene proposal was found in the German embassy, in Turkey, after WWII. Finally, I think Brenner was right, when he wrote, "This book presents 51 historic documents to indict Zionism for repeated attempts to collaborate with Adolf Hitler. The evidence, not I, will convince you of the truth of this issue...Exposing the Zionist role in the Nazis era is part of the scrutiny of the past, required of historians."
Rating: 
Summary: Brenner Documents Zionism
Review: Lenni Brenner supplements his extraordinary contribution to studies in Zionism with 51 Documents. His new book serves as a documentary ally to his previous work on this issue, especially Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983). He introduces each document economically with relevant headnotes and he includes a brief introduction, a concluding "Final Word on the Final Solution" and a glossary. An important Nazi document succinctly expresses the underlying idea for the Zionist -Nazi connection. It is a 1937 report on Eichmann's 1937 trip to Palestine and Egypt. The Nazi writer found that "In Jewish nationalist circles people were very pleased with the radical German policy since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority of the Arabs in Palestine." In his famous document of 1923, "The Iron Wall," Vladimir Jabotinsky makes explicit the Zionist view that "justice" demands a majority of Jews in Palestine. At the same time, he expresses his clear understanding that the Arabs will never willingly agree to the massive Jewish immigration that would be required to make the Arabs a minority in their own country. One of the most important documents, Brenner reprints, is one that is based on Eichmann's testimony originally published two parts in Life Magazine under the title, "'I Transported Them to the Butcher,' Eichmann's Own Story," published after Eichmann was captured in 1960. The material comes from taped interviews Eichmann originally gave to a Dutch Nazi journalist in 1955 in connection with the trial in Israel of Dr. Renzo Kastner. At that time, Kastner was an Israeli government official who during the war, had collaborated with Eichmann in order help a few thousand Jews escape to Palestine. Eichmann's motivation to agree to the deal was to avoid another Warsaw Ghetto style uprising in Hungary. In the end, Eichmann successfully transported more than 600,000 Hungarian Jews to the ovens of Auschwitz. The few who escaped, he later said, were a cheap price to pay for the smooth Hungarian operation. Eichmann openly says that at a certain moment, Hitler ordered the "liquidation" of the Jews and hints that he didn't necessarily believe that it was a correct decision. Part of Eichmann's job entailed his presence at a number of executions of Jews. (One would think that Eichmann's testimony alone would be sufficient to silence the Holocaust deniers, but alas, things don't seem to work that way in the real world.)
The 1978 memoir of Nathan Yellin -Mor, one of the leaders of the Stern Gang, is a fascinating example of how ideology shapes reality. He explains the wartime motives behind the Stern gang's drive to fight the British and make an alliance with the Nazis despite the clear understanding that "Germany had declared war on the Jewish `race." Yellin-Mor quotes Yair, (Avraham Stern's underground name), who made a distinction between the "foe" (Britain) and the "arch enemy" (Nazi Germany). Since the "foe is in control of our homeland and denies the Hebrew people statehood and freedom... the presence of the arch enemy must not put off the struggle against the foe ... even for a single day." Implicit is the fascist ideology of the Stern Gang which dismissed the humanity of the Arabs to be displaced in Palestine just as the Nazis dehumanized the Jews in order to destroy them. One of the most affecting documents was written by one of the heroes of the Holocaust, Rabbi Michoe Ber Weissmandel, an Oxford student who returned to his native Slovakia when war broke out. His "Personal Story" printed in 1986 in the Jewish Guardian recounts how he was able to use Jewish money from abroad to save Jewish lives in Europe and how his pleas for more money from rich Jews abroad fell on deaf ears.
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Rating: 
Summary: Lenni Brenner regurgitates the same old slanders
Review: Lenni Brenner writing about Zionism is about like Osama Bin Laden explaining the US revolution.
Brenner is an anti-Zionist because he is a doctrinaire communist.
What the documents mostly show is that at the start, the Nazis played with the idea of removing Jews by sending them to Palestine or elsewhere. For the most part, only the Zionist Yishuv in Palestine was willing to take German Jews. Under the "Hesder" agreement they ransomed German Jews who were allowed to leave if they gave up all their property.
This arrangement came to an end when Nazi policy changed and when the British blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine.
There was no cooperation with Nazism and no betrayal of the Jews by the Zionists. There was a desparate attempt to save whoever could be saved. The Kastner allegations were likewise disproved in an Israeli court. Kastner and the Zionists were faced with the possibility of rescuing a few hundred Jews or no Jews at all. They chose to rescue those who could be rescued. The falsification of the historical record by people like Brenner is regrettable. The association of Zionism with Nazism is sick. Don't waste your money on this book.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: Lenni Brenner's intellectual reach far-far exceeds his grasp. Collaboration? Ridiculous. Jews wanted a homeland, sure, but this book imagines that Zionists would join Hitler and sell out the free world in order to achieve statehood?! That is not a premise for a book -- it's insanity. If anybody in the Mandate of Palestine was collaborating with Adolf Hitler, it was the Grand Mufti Muhammed Amin al-Husseini and his followers, including his nephew, an Egyptian boy we know today as Yasser Arafat. According to Nuremberg trials documentation, Nazi Germany financed al-Husseini's efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann visited al-Husseini in Palestine and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin. In 1940, al-Husseini requested the Axis powers grant him the right to settle the Jewish question in Palestine and other Arab countries the same way Germany was solving the Jewish question -- through extermination. While in Baghdad, Syria al-Husseini aided the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941. He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims to wipe out Jewish communities throughout the region. At Nuremberg, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that the Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. Wisliceny said he heard the Mufti say he had visited the gas chamber of Auschwitz. With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. It is true Jews immigrated to Palestine in droves, starting with 35,000 from Russia in 1919, 60,000 mainly from Poland from 1924-32, and rapidly escalated in 1934, when Hitler became fuhrer and the first concentration camp opened at Oranienburg outside Berlin. More than 165,000 arrived in Palestine from western and central Europe between 1934-1938. Why? In order to collaborate with the Nazis? Laughable. They were fleeing Nazism, fascism and antisemitism. It is true that Great Britain opposed this Jewish immigration, especially during the early war years, and that made them targets of Jews who desperately needed a safe haven from the impending Holocaust. But would Jews have collaborated with the Nazis against the British? Outrageous. And why would Britain oppose Jewish immigration to Palestine? Because they didn't want to drive the Grand Mufti and his Arab followers into the arms of the Nazis. Ironically, this attempt at appeasement of the Arabs resulted in the British Colonial Office's war within World War II against Jews fleeing the Holocaust for Palestine. Naturally, there were Jews who opposed the British Colonial Office's seemingly cruel and inhuman acts of actually turning back Jews fleeing the Holocaust. But does that make the Jews who opposed the British blockade collaborators? Hardly. Lenni Brenner's premise of "Zionist collaboration" is a twisted perversion of a complicated wartime situation. Amazing what idiocy finds its way into print! Forget about this book until you can buy it at a flea market for a quarter.
Rating:
Summary: Changing history
Review: Perhaps it will be meaningful that I am a Holocaust survivor, making me, at least somewhat, qualified to speak of the period largely dealt with in this book. Mr. Brenner calls himself in its last paragraph a historian, beside contending there that he speaks the truth and asserts facts.
One should indeed expect truthfulness from a historian, relating facts determined objectively and without bias. But one can hardly regard as a historian an author who consistently engages in what may be considered hatemongering.
His attacks are directed mainly at Zionism, as the title of the book indicates, and I may note at the beginning that inasmuch as he obviously means to oppose today's Zionism and corresponding Israeli policies, it is irrelevant what certain Zionists allegedly did more than half-a-century ago during the horrible upheavals of World War II. But although I was just a little pawn then, having no knowledge of any machinations higher up, it is clear to me that Mr. Brenner does not establish his case in the book. He precedes his cited documents--purported to prove him right--with introductions that make much more damning claims than the documents do, and without any support.
And those claims are unbelievably venomous. He doesn't even spare Einstein (e.g. p.29), suggesting him to be, of all people, moronic. Why? Because Einstein somehow favored the preservation of Jewish national identity, conflicting with the internationalism of Mr. Brenner's declared communist ideology. Another target of his is Churchill (e.g. p.23), evidently for similar nonconformance with the far left. But Stalin is praised (p.326) as anti-Nazi, notwithstanding his anti-aggression pact with Hitler, and his "reviled" status is bemoaned, disregarding the multitudes of deaths he was found to be responsible for. And Eichmann is said (p.116) to give "a careful rendering" in a report, while authors on the other side are called liars. Mr.Brenner, further (p.326), calls Franklin Roosevelt a war criminal for putting 140.000 Japanese-Americans into "concentration camps". I am understandably sensitive to terms like "concentration camp" used loosely, and Mr. Brenner admits that Roosevelt "didn't kill" the internees, but considers the difference "mincing of words". If there was something to complain about more gravely regarding President Roosevelt, it was his unwillingness to accept a shipload of Jewish refugees from Nazism, resulting in their ultimate extermination. But even here one can magnanimously assume that he was too naïve to realize what the fate of the refugees would be.
One could ascribe a naiveté as well to Mr. Brenner's distant view of happenings surrounding wartime Europe, were it not for what appears an underlying political fanaticism. As an example can serve an interview (p.103) he conducted in America in 1981 with a Zionist from Germany.
Mr. Brenner is somehow steadfast that the interview demonstrates Zionist collaboration or the attempt of it with the Nazis. He asks what I cannot characterize as other than stupid or at least naïve questions. The interviewee, Dr. Prinz, spoke of a "Jewish problem", and Mr. Brenner asked "What Jewish problem?" When Dr. Prinz said "The uncertainty of Jewish existence outside of the Jewish state", Mr. Brenner asked "Well, do you feel there is a Jewish problem in New Jersey, for example?" He seemingly thought that a "Jewish problem" as here understood didn't exist in the world and was synonymous with its Nazi formulation, the "Jewish question" (Judenfrage), and that accordingly Dr. Prinz accepted Nazism.
Another attempt in the interview was Mr. Brenner's branding the Zionists in Germany as embracing Nazism because they didn't fight it. And although Dr. Prinz explained that Zionists were few, and notwithstanding helplessness in general of Jews under Nazi power, Mr. Brenner seemed to fancy that conflicts among people are settled by movie-like "fighting it out", regardless of the realities. This agrees with his revolutionary attitude, which understands human conflicts in terms of one class overthrowing another. Those who don't agree are considered enemies, and accordingly Mr. Brenner cannot imagine that Zionists may have tried to somehow accommodate Nazis in order to benefit the Jewish people. "Collaboration" with Nazis meant in fact participation in their brutalities, not the attempt to achieve legitimate goals by such as diplomacy.
As a small boy in Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland I belonged to a Zionist scout group, and we were taught of the ideal of a Jewish state in Palestine, existing in harmony with other states. The same idealism is expressed in documents by Zionists cited by Mr. Brenner, and it is only he who in his introductory remarks turns these into villainy. He also appears to object to--beside Zionism's consciousness of Jewish nationality, forced on Jews by the treatment received in the Diaspora--the "colonization" by Jews of Palestine. He seems to confound the concept with the formation of colonies by existing states through conquest. The colonization by Zionists simply meant establishing residence. There can, of course, be disputes over the rightness of forming a state in a region, but these are in my eyes lesser matters. Most countries in the world originated if not by conquest then by gradual settlement, and at this stage of history these matters seem best resolved by negotiation and interest. The suffering of Jews has been recognized to merit the state of Israel, supported by historical justifications.
Unfortunately, Israel has been accused of other wrongdoings besides, with Mr. Brenner obviously among the accusers. I would like here to complain more generally about writings alongside his that attack Israel. Israel has been accused of as much as committing genocide on Palestinians, accusers thus turning truth upside down in the fashion of Goebbels, who accused Jews of raping German women. It is well known that Israel, unlike Palestinian attackers, does not kill any innocent civilian by intention, let alone wanting to annihilate a people. A book like Mr. Brenner's should accordingly be far from recommended, unless one wants to be amused by how an otherwise good mind can veer into fanatic falsehoods and assaults.
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Summary: Hilarious!
Review: This book is funny. Its so hilariously anti-semitic and filled with half-truth, unsupported facts and fully incorrect facts (not just about Zionism, but about WWII as well). I have to say I actually enjoyed reading it for all the wrong reasons. Its kind of like reading an Al Qaeda speech. You'll get a strange sense of enjoyment from realising how screwed up people can be. All I can say is "Wow". What's disturbing about this book isn't so much the book itself (Let's face it: there world has, and always will have a percentage of jew-hating nutballs, but the reviewers on this site who seem to *not* understand that fact: Now that's some scary sh*t yo).
Rating:
Summary: Tells the truth!
Review: This excellent book exposes how the Zionists and Nazis collaborated together against poor Jewish people. The Zionists represented the rich portion of the Jewish people against the majority of poor and working class Jews, and had more in common with the Nazis, who represented the rich of Germany, than they did with the majority of Jewish people. Today, this continues, as the Zionists oppress the Palestinians just like the Nazis oppressed the Jews. As the grandson of four grandparents who died in Hitler's concentration camps, due in part to the collaboration of rich Zionists and their "Judenrat" police who helped round up poor and working class Jews for the gas chambers, I am glad that finally someone is documenting and telling the truth!
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