Leopold von Mildenstein

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Leopold von Mildenstein
Nickname(s)LIM
Born(1902-11-30)30 November 1902
Prague
DiedNovember 1968 (aged 65–66)
Allegiance Nazi Germany
Service/branchSS
Years of service1932–1945
RankOfficer
Other workWriter, press officer

Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein (30 November 1902 – November 1968) was an SS officer who is remembered as a lead supporter in the Nazi Party of some of the aims of Zionism during the 1930s.

He sometimes worked as a writer and signed his work with his initials, LIM. In English, he has sometimes been called a "baron", although his rank of Edler means "nobleman" and has no exact equivalent; perhaps the nearest translation is "Esquire".

After the Second World War, Mildenstein continued to live in West Germany, where he joined the Free Democratic Party and was elected to its Press Committee. In 1956, he went to Egypt to work for a radio station, and after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 he claimed immunity as an intelligence agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency, a claim which was neither confirmed nor denied. Nothing was heard of him after 1964, when he published a book on cocktails.

Life up to 1945

Born in 1902 in

British-administered Palestine, several times until 1935.[2][3] On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany.[4]

Mildenstein had taken an early interest in Zionism, even going so far as to attend Zionist conferences to help deepen his understanding of the movement. He actively promoted Zionism as a way out of the official impasse on the "

Hebrew.[6] In August 1933 Hitler's government and German Zionists entered into the Haavara Agreement, which encouraged emigration by allowing Jews to transfer property and funds from Germany to Palestine.[9]

On 24 May 1934, the Judenreferat, then led by Walter Ilges, sent Reinhard Heydrich, the new Director of the Gestapo, a memorandum stating that the only answer to the Jewish Question was the emigration of all Jews from Germany.[10] It recommended investigating all possible destinations and then working on delivery. While there was no mention of Palestine, the Zionists were suggested as a possible key to success. This memorandum, together with the urging of Mildenstein that Zionism was the solution to the Jewish Question, led Heydrich to adopt emigration of the Jews as a firm policy and to hire Mildenstein.[11]

Between 9 September and 9 October 1934, Der Angriff published a series of twelve pro-Zionist reports by Mildenstein, entitled A Nazi Goes to Palestine, in honour of which the newspaper issued a commemorative medallion, cast with the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other.[2][7] Goebbels then had the work printed also in the

Völkische Beobachter, the newspaper of the Nazi Party.[12]

From August 1934 to June 1936, Mildenstein worked in the headquarters of the

Judenreferent (Jewish Affairs Officer). This title meant that he was responsible for reporting on "Jewish Affairs" under the overall command of Heydrich.[13] During those years, Mildenstein favoured a policy of encouraging Germany's Jewish population to emigrate to Palestine, and in pursuit of this policy he developed positive contacts with Zionist organisations. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to Nazism.[2][14]

Adolf Eichmann, later one of the most significant organisers of the Holocaust, believed that his big break came in 1934, when he had a meeting with Mildenstein, a fellow-Austrian, in the Wilhelmstrasse and was invited to join Mildenstein's department.[15][16] Eichmann later stated that Mildenstein rejected the vulgar antisemitism of Streicher. Soon after his arrival in the section Mildenstein gave Eichmann a book on Judaism by Adolf Böhm, a leading Jew from Vienna.[17]

In the summer of 1935, then holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer, Mildenstein attended the 19th Congress of the Zionist Organization in Lucerne, Switzerland, as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation.[18]

Mildenstein's pro-Zionist line was overtaken by events, and after a dispute with Heydrich in 1936 he was removed from his post and transferred to the Foreign Ministry's press department. He had fallen out of favour because migration to Palestine was not happening quickly enough. His departure from the SD also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet written by Eichmann warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East.

RSHA, of which the SD became a part in September 1939.[21][22]

As Germany moved into the Second World War, Mildenstein continued to write propaganda articles and books, including "Around the Burning Land of the Jordan" (1938)[23] and "The Middle East Seen from the Roadside" (1941).[24][2]

Life after the war

After the war, Mildenstein's works were placed on the list of proscribed literature in the

German Democratic Republic
. Like the Haavara Agreement, Mildenstein's visit to Palestine in 1933, the medal to commemorate it, and the pro-Zionist articles in the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff, they were unwelcome evidence of a relationship between the Nazis and Zionism during the 1930s.[2]

Mildenstein visited the

Gamal Abdul Nasser to work for its Voice of the Arabs radio station. In June 1960, soon after the capture of Eichmann by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960, Mildenstein announced that he had had an operational relationship with the CIA and as a former U.S. intelligence agent claimed immunity from prosecution. This relationship was neither confirmed nor denied by the CIA.[25]

In 1964, Mildenstein published a new book on the mixing of cocktails, including some non-alcoholic ones,[26] but after that no more was heard of him until he died in November 1968.[27]

In 2011, the Israeli director Arnon Goldfinger, a grandson of Mildenstein's companions the Tuchlers, produced a film called The Flat,[28] in which Mildenstein's friendship with his grandparents is discussed at length. Goldfinger's film showed that his grandparents had kept in touch with the Mildensteins after the war. Having researched in the German National Archives, Goldfinger states that Mildenstein joined the Ministry of Propaganda under Goebbels in 1938 and that he later worked as a press officer for Coca-Cola in West Germany until the public Eichmann hearings of 1961, in which Eichmann named him as "the specialist in Jewish affairs." The film ends with an interview in which Goldfinger discusses his findings with Mildenstein's daughter Edda Milz. He has described this scene as "highly conflict-laden" and has said of it "I wanted to show Edda von Mildenstein as a victim of her own father and his lies."[29] Goldfinger finds that she remembers his grandparents and knows more about their lives than he had known himself.[30]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ Joseph Verbovszky, Leopold von Mildenstein and the Jewish Question (Cape Western Reserve University, May, 2013), p. 7
  2. ^
    Jacob Boas
    , "A Nazi Travels to Palestine" in History Today, Vol. 30, Issue 1 (1980), pp. 33–38
  3. ^ Pascal Bruckner, Steven Rendall, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), p. 68
  4. ISBN 978-0-671-62420-0
    , p. 184
  5. ^ Jacob Boas (1977), The Jews of Germany: Self-Perception in the Nazi Era as Reflected in the German Jewish Press 1933–1938, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Riverside, p. 111.
  6. ^
    OCLC 430841472
    ; page needed.
  7. ^ a b Yad Vashem studies, Vol. 37, part 1, p. 134
  8. ^ Lenni Brenner (1983), Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. London: Croom Helm Ltd, online edition at marxists.de, accessed 27 March 2011
  9. ^ Yf’aat Weiss, "The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust", Yad Vashem Shoah Center, accessed 17 January 2023
  10. ^ "Dokument 1: Memorandum des SD-Amtes IV/2 an Heydrich, 24. Mai 1934" in Wildt, Judenpolitik, p. 66
  11. ^ Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 329
  12. ^ Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and Der Angriff (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 126
  13. ^ Max Williams, Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography: Volume 1 (2001), p 61.
  14. ^ Yad Vashem studies, Vol. 37, part 1, p. 134
  15. ^ Anna Porter, Kasztner's Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust (2008), p. 94: "His first big break, as he saw it later, presented itself in 1934, when he was told to report to Second Lieutenant Leopold von Mildenstein at 102 Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. Mildenstein ran the SD "Jews Section," or Section II/112. A fellow Austrian with an easy manner, Mildenstein took an interest in teaching Eichmann the basics of his department."
  16. ^ Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, Cassel & Co, London, (2001) [1990], p. 198
  17. ^ Serge Klarsfeld, Joseph Billig, Georges Wellers, The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (1978), p. 12
  18. ^ Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich & the Palestine Question (2000), p. 61
  19. ^ Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (2001) [1990], pp. 198, 199, 275
  20. ^ Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler's Bureaucrats: the Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (2005), p. 20
  21. ^ Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (2001) [1990], p. 334
  22. ^ Adrian Weale, Army of Evil: A History of the SS (2012), pp. 140–144
  23. ^ Stollberg, Berlin, 1938
  24. ^ Union, Stuttgart, 1941
  25. ^ Richard Breitman, U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis, pp. 342-343
  26. ^ Mix mit und ohne Alkohol (Munich: Copress-Verlag, 1964, 93 pp., illustrated by Walter Tafelmaier), reviewed in Libreria svizzera, Volume 22 (1964), p. 700: "Leopold von Mildenstein: MIX MIT UND OHNE ALKOHOL, 96 Seiten mit vielen farbigen Illustrationen Mehrfarbiger animierter Einband."
  27. ^ K[arl] S[eeger]: "Dipl[om]-Ing[enieur] Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein †" in Sportjournalist Jg. 18 (1968), H. 11, page 16
  28. ^ Eyelet Dekel, The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger at midnighteast.com
  29. ^ Something Greater Than Your Own Story, Interview with Goldfinger by Jan Oltmanns, at remembering.today, accessed 8 May 2018
  30. ^ Yael Munk, "Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat: Holocaust Memory, Film Noir, and the Pain of Others", in Jewish Film & New Media 4, 1 (2016), 25,
    doi:10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.4.1.0025

Further reading

External links

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