Leopold von Mildenstein

Born in 1902 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, Mildenstein belonged to the lowest tier of the Austrian nobility and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He trained as an engineer and joined the Nazi Party in 1929, receiving the membership number 106,678. In 1932 he joined the SS, becoming one of the first Austrians to do so. According to Dieter Wisliceny, his former SS colleague, Mildenstein visited the Middle East, including British-administered Palestine, several times until 1935.[1][2] On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany.

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 Jewish question: as a way of making Germany Judenrein (free of Jews). Some Zionists, whose movement had grown tremendously in popularity among German Jews since Hitler came to power, co-operated. On 7 April 1933, the Juedische Rundschau, the bi-weekly paper of the Zionist movement, declared that of all Jewish groups only the Zionist Federation of Germany was capable of approaching the Nazis in good faith as "honest partners".[3][4] The Federation then commissioned Kurt Tuchler to make contact with possible Zionist sympathisers within the Nazi Party, with the aim of facilitating emigration to Palestine, and Tuchler approached Mildenstein, who was asked to write something positive about Jewish Palestine in the press. Mildenstein agreed, on condition that he be allowed to visit the country in person, with Tuchler as his guide. So, in the spring of 1933 a party of four set out from Berlin, consisting of Mildenstein, Tuchler, and their wives. They spent a month together in Palestine,[1][5] and Mildenstein began to write a series of articles for Der Angriff, a Nazi Party newspaper in Berlin, founded by Joseph Goebbels in 1927. Mildenstein himself remained in Palestine for a total of six months before his return to Germany as an enthusiast for Zionism, and even began to study 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.

On his return to Berlin, Mildenstein's suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. From August 1934 to June 1936 Mildenstein worked in the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, in Section II/112, in charge of the Jewish Desk, with the title of Judenreferent (Jewish Affairs Officer). This title meant that he was responsible for reporting on "Jewish Affairs" under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.[7] 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 organizations. 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. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist provision, allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.[1][5]

Adolf Eichmann, later one of the most significant organizers 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.[8][9] Eichmann later stated that Mildenstein rejected the vulgar anti-semitism of Streicher. Soon after his arrival in the section Mildenstein gave Eichmann a book on Judaism by Adolf Boehm, a leading Jew from Vienna.[10]

Between 9 September and 9 October 1934 the Nazi Party newspaper Der Angriff published a series of twelve quite pro-Zionist reports, titled A Nazi Goes to Palestine, by Mildenstein, to which honour, the newspaper issued a commemorative medallion, cast with the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other.[1][5]

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.[11] Mildenstein's apparently pro-Zionist line was overtaken by events, and after a dispute with Reinhard 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 proceeding at a fast enough rate. His departure from the SD also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East, written by another "expert" on Jewish matters who had been invited to join Section II/112 by Mildenstein himself, Eichmann.[1][12] Mildenstein was replaced as the head of his former section by Kuno Schroeder.[13] Later in December 1939, Eichmann was made chief of the Jewish Department Referat IV B4 of the RSHA, which the SD became a part in September, 1939.[14][15]

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)[16] and "The Middle East Seen from the Roadside" (1941).[17][1]

After the war, Mildenstein's works were placed on the list of proscribed literature in the Soviet occupation zone and later 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.[1]

Mildenstein visited the United States in 1954, having been granted a visa to do so at the request of the government of West Germany. In January 1956, he asked the U. S. Embassy in Bonn to help him obtain an exchange grant for journalists, although he was not one. By then a member of the Free Democratic Party, in May 1956 he was elected to its Press Committee. In December 1956, a CIA report from Cairo confirmed that he had been employed by the Egyptian government of 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.[18]

In 1964, Mildenstein published a new book on the mixing of cocktails, including some non-alcoholic ones,[19] but after that no more was heard of him until he died in November 1968.[20]

In 2011, the Israeli director Arnon Goldfinger, a grandson of Mildenstein's companions the Tuchlers, produced a film called The Flat,[21] 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. 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."[22] Goldfinger finds that she remembers his grandparents and knows more about their lives than he had known himself.[23]

• Glossary of Nazi Germany
• List of Nazi Party leaders and officials
• List of SS personnel

• Jacob Boas, 'A Nazi Travels to Palestine', in History Today, vol. 30, issue 1, pp. 33–38
• 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
• Saul Friedländer, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden ("The Third Reich and the Jews") (Bonn, 2006), p. 77
• Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Owl Books, 1994; German edition, Hamburg, 1995)
• H. G. Adler, The Jews in Germany (1969)
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1970)
• Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (1975)
• G. L. Mosse, German and Jew (1970)
• Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1983)[24]
• Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (2002) — includes the full text of one of Mildenstein's articles for Der Angriff[24]
• Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Cassel & Co, 1990, reprinted 2001), ISBN 978-0-304-35839-7

• Itay Ilnai, ‘A Nazi travels to Palestine’: A swastika and Star of David on one coin, Ynetnews
• Isabelle Daniel, „Alle haben vergessen zu fragen“, Goethe-Institut, April 2014 (in German)
• 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)