Nicosia's meticulous research in more than two dozen German, Israeli, British, and North American archives illuminates the complex and contradictory relationship between Zionists and their Nazi interlocutors. Both groups rejected the ideals of the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, and both called for Jews to leave Germany. Yet despite their apparent ideological overlap, Nazi support of Zionism remained tactical and temporary.

In the opening chapter, Nicosia chronicles the interaction between racial German nationalism and Zionism. Many known anti-Semites of the ilk of Paul de Lagarde, Houston Stuart Chamberlain, and others, deemed Zionism useful in the pursuit of their race politics, and Theodor Herzl believed “that antisemites and their governments, perhaps more than most, would prove to be friends of Zionism” (p. 14). This political symmetry notwithstanding, German Zionists, like many others, underestimated the threat posed by the Nazis' seizure of power. Kurt Blumenfeld, chair of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (ZVfD), saw great prospects in the already radically changed Germany of April 1933. He mistakenly believed that “there exists today a unique opportunity to win over the Jews of Germany for the Zionist idea” (p. 42).

Zionists indeed fundamentally misread the significance of the Nazis' rise to power, but the increasing harassment and intimidation of Jews provided ample justification to engage the Nazi government regarding the issue of Jewish migration to Palestine. Zionists benefited from this short-lived convergence of interests. As early as September 1933 the Haavara Transfer Agreement enabled German Jews to emigrate to Palestine without having to leave all their personal assets behind. Representatives of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, for example, were allowed repeated entry into Germany in order to encourage Jewish emigration. The Nazi government even allowed Zionists to wear their uniforms, display their blue and white flag, and conduct retraining schools in Germany for Palestine resettlement despite the considerable opposition among those who feared that occupational education of Jews in agriculture and technology would foster undesirable social contact between the two groups. Even the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht pogroms did not end collaboration but temporarily shifted authority from the Interior Ministry to those Nazi agencies such as the SS, which favored a more “rational” and “systematic” approach to forcing Jews into expatriation.

As head of the Four-Year Plan, Hermann Göring authorized Reinhard Heydrich to centralize and forcibly expedite Jewish emigration. All independent Jewish organizations, including both the ZVfD as well as the Revisionist Zionist organization, were dissolved and brought under Gestapo control in 1939 as the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. As late as 1940, “the SS was still focused on emigration as the solution to the Jewish question within the borders of the Greater German Reich” (p. 264). Forced emigration of German Jews remained official German policy right up to the dissolution of the Jewish Agency's Palestine Office in Berlin in May 1941. The study thus confirms the current historical consensus that the Nazis had no plan for systematic genocide before 1941, even though, of course, the potential for genocide was always present in Nazi ideology as evidenced in the party's anti-Jewish policies (p. 292).

Nicosia concludes that from our post-Holocaust perspective, “it is easy today to dismiss early Zionist hopes of some form of accommodation with antisemitism as shockingly naive and illusory” (p. 291). His laudable book notably abstains from any moral indignation or anti-Zionist posturing. We undoubtedly feel uneasy with the tacit approval Zionists gave at first to Nazi ideology and policies. Yet we should remember that international visitors to the 1936 Olympics returned only with the thrill of new world records. Jean-Paul Sartre's travel to Germany in the early 1930s only enriched his literary and philosophical knowledge but not his awareness of Nazi politics. In 1936 W. E. B. Du Bois accepted a travel fellowship by the well-known Nazi sympathizer Oberlaender Trust. In accepting the grant, Du Bois was prohibited from participating as a founding member of the American Committee for Anti-Nazi Literature, for which Franz Boas had tried to win his support. To be sure, for the Nazis “Zionists were nothing more than convenient tools for facilitating the removal of Jews from Germany” (p. 206). Yet Zionists safely brought 50,000 Jews out of Germany to Palestine with assets worth more than 100,000,000 RM.