Leopold von Mildenstein
Leopold von Mildenstein | |
---|---|
Nickname(s) | LIM |
Born | Prague | 30 November 1902
Died | November 1968 (aged 65–66) |
Allegiance | Nazi Germany |
Service/ | SS |
Years of service | 1932–1945 |
Rank | Officer |
Other work | Writer, 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
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 "
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
From August 1934 to June 1936, Mildenstein worked in the headquarters of the
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.
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
Mildenstein visited the
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
- Jacob Boas, "A Nazi Travels to Palestine" in History Today, vol. 30, issue 1, pp. 33–38 (1980)
Notes
- ^ Joseph Verbovszky, Leopold von Mildenstein and the Jewish Question (Cape Western Reserve University, May, 2013), p. 7
- ^ Jacob Boas, "A Nazi Travels to Palestine" in History Today, Vol. 30, Issue 1 (1980), pp. 33–38
- ^ Pascal Bruckner, Steven Rendall, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010), p. 68
- ISBN 978-0-671-62420-0, p. 184
- ^ 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.
- ^ OCLC 430841472; page needed.
- ^ a b Yad Vashem studies, Vol. 37, part 1, p. 134
- ^ Lenni Brenner (1983), Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. London: Croom Helm Ltd, online edition at marxists.de, accessed 27 March 2011
- ^ 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
- ^ "Dokument 1: Memorandum des SD-Amtes IV/2 an Heydrich, 24. Mai 1934" in Wildt, Judenpolitik, p. 66
- ^ Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS (Penguin Books, 2000), p. 329
- ^ Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and Der Angriff (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 126
- ^ Max Williams, Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography: Volume 1 (2001), p 61.
- ^ Yad Vashem studies, Vol. 37, part 1, p. 134
- ^ 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."
- ^ Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS, Cassel & Co, London, (2001) [1990], p. 198
- ^ Serge Klarsfeld, Joseph Billig, Georges Wellers, The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (1978), p. 12
- ^ Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich & the Palestine Question (2000), p. 61
- ^ Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (2001) [1990], pp. 198, 199, 275
- ^ Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler's Bureaucrats: the Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (2005), p. 20
- ^ Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (2001) [1990], p. 334
- ^ Adrian Weale, Army of Evil: A History of the SS (2012), pp. 140–144
- ^ Stollberg, Berlin, 1938
- ^ Union, Stuttgart, 1941
- ^ Richard Breitman, U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis, pp. 342-343
- ^ 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."
- ^ K[arl] S[eeger]: "Dipl[om]-Ing[enieur] Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein †" in Sportjournalist Jg. 18 (1968), H. 11, page 16
- ^ Eyelet Dekel, The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger at midnighteast.com
- ^ Something Greater Than Your Own Story, Interview with Goldfinger by Jan Oltmanns, at remembering.today, accessed 8 May 2018
- ^ 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,
Further reading
- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1970)
- H. G. Adler, The Jews in Germany (1969)
- Magnus Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden: Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1883-1945 ("Madagascar for the Jews: anti-Semitic ideas and political practice, 1883-1945") (Munich, 1998), p. 171 onwards
- Isabelle Daniel, „Alle haben vergessen zu fragen“, Goethe-Institut, April 2014 (in German)
- Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (1975)
- Saul Friedländer, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden ("The Third Reich and the Jews") (Bonn, 2006), p. 77
- Itay Ilnai, ‘A Nazi travels to Palestine’: A swastika and Star of David on one coin, Ynetnews
- G. L. Mosse, German and Jew (1970)
- ISBN 978-0-304-35839-7
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Owl Books, 1994; German edition, Hamburg, 1995)
External links
- Leopold von Mildenstein, Mix mit und ohne Alkohol (1964), archive.is
- Die Artikelserie "Ein Nazi fährt nach Palästina", bpb.de, 18.11.2014 (in German)
- Revelations: Nazi medal commemorating Zionist collaboration with Hitler, blogspot.it