ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of National Socialist attitudes toward Zionism from early years of movement to World War II, including the role of Zionism in National Socialist Jewish policy from the Machtergreifung to the onset of the "final solution". Early Zionist leaders accepted the desirability of national separateness, while rejecting the Social Darwinist theories of racial superiority and struggle that were becoming the cornerstone of anti-Semitic political ideology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Alfred Rosenberg developed his major theoretical contributions to National Socialism before he left Estonia in 1918, namely, that Bolshevism and Zionism were instruments of a Jewish world conspiracy. Adolf Hitler said and wrote about Zionism during the period 1920-1924 than during the twenty-one years of his life. There is evidence that Hitler, like Rosenberg, found some utility in Zionism and was willing to encourage Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine, in spite of the apparent ideological incompatibility engendered by the conspiracy theory.
