Interview with Joachim Prinz

Audio-visual item #512: Interview with Joachim Prinz
Participant(s)/creator(s):    Lenni Brenner    Joachim Prinz
Date of issue: 8 February 1981
Type of content:
Length:
Topic(s) addressed:

• Nazi-Zionist collaboration
• Nazi-Zionist Transfer Agreement (HaAvarah)

People/entities mentioned in this item:
(Those seen or heard in the item are marked with a camera, )

• Blau-Weiss
• Georg Kareski
• Walther Rathenau

Timeline events mentioned in this item:

• 24 Jun 1922: Assassination of Walther Rathenau
•    May 1933: Sam Cohen of Tel Aviv signs trade agreement with Nazis

Commentary: These MP3 files were made by digitizing the content of two audio cassette tapes provided by Lenni Brenner in December 2006.

A partial transcript of this interview was published in the book 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis

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Brenner asks Prinz about this book which Prinz had published in 1934.

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Comment by Lenni Brenner

Prinz (1902-1988) definitely thought that Zionism could come to an accommodation with Nazism.

But he dramatically evolved in the 44 years since he was expelled from Germany. He told me, off tape, that he soon realized that nothing he said there made sense in the US. He became an American liberal. Eventually, as head of the American Jewish Congress, he was asked to march with Martin Luther King and he did so.

I decided that, beyond using the interview in my book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, I wouldn't do anything with it that would embarrass him in his old age. I did the right thing. The wannabe collaborator was very different from the gentleman who invited me into his home and honestly answered what he knew would be probing questions. But if he changed, Zionism didn't. Now it is obligatory for me to bring the interview to the world's attention for the indisputable confirmation it provides re Zionist fantasies about a deal with Hitler.

Abstract: Lenni Brenner interviews Joachim Prinz, asking him about the collaboration between German Zionists and the Nazis in the 1930s.

Prinz: "Well, we thought, in our discussions with intellectuals in the SS movement, that the time would come when they would say, 'Yes, you live in Germany, you are Jewish people, you are different from us, but we will not kill you, we will permit you to live your own cultural life, and develop your own national capacities and dreams.' We thought, at the beginning of the Hitler regime that such a very frank discussion was possible. We found among the SS intellectuals, some people were ready for such a talk. But of course such a talk never took place because the radical element in the Nazi movement won out."

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