Declassified files reveal Zionist militia Lehi explored pact with Nazi Germany

Newly declassified documents from the IDF and Israeli state archive reveal Avraham "Yair" Stern, leader of Lehi, an underground militia also known as the Stern Gang had was either trying to establish contact or had a connection with Nazi Germany. It was trying to stir up a revolution in the British Mandate of Palestine. It argued that the Zionist militia did not believe that the British would ever fulfill its promise of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, whereas Germany, which was trying to cleanse Europe of Jewish could simply transfer them to their supposed “homeland”.

"According to the information, there is a man who contacted the Germans. This man is known; his name is S," said Eliya Golomb in 1941, the de facto commander of the Haganah, the pre-independence army of the Jews in then-British Mandatory Palestine, in a small, closed forum. "S" was Avraham "Yair" Stern, leader of Lehi.

"The Jews are a party in the war and therefore cannot be neutral. Britain betrayed the Jewish people and will never allow the establishment of a Jewish state. On the other hand, Germany has no special interest in Palestine, and since the Nazis want to cleanse Europe of Jews, nothing is simpler than transferring them to their own state," read the document as reported by Israeli news outlet Haaretz.

Stern believed that he could persuade the Germans to reach an agreement where the European Jewish would be “recruited into a special army that would fight its way to Palestine and conquer it from the British”.He argued that the Germans would be happy to help them get rid of the British from the East.

According to Stern, German officials believed that strengthening the Jewish community in Palestine, as it would later assist them. “We will manage somehow with the Germans after they conquer the land, just as the Soviets managed with them when necessary”. Another such document in a similar file shows that Stern believed he was considering becoming a 'Jewish Quisling,' with the help of a foreign power.

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The documents reveal that the contact was not merely theoretical; there was historical evidence of the proposal of an "active partnership" based on “shared interests between German policy and Jewish national aspirations,” that a Jewish state would form an alliance with the German Reich.

Golomb further claimed that these contacts did not succeed: "Several Jews were arrested, suspected of connections or attempts to connect with Italians or Germans, most likely with the Germans."

Zalman Shazar, who would later become the Minister of Education and the President of the State, was also present in the closed forum. "The Nazis are indeed against the Jews, but their hatred is directed at the Jews of the diaspora. There is no opposition in the Nazi program to a Judenstaat (a Jewish state)." said Shazar, quoting the ideological pamphlet of Lehi.

The file also quotes Naftali Lubenchik, someone who met the Nazis, and rejected the idea that the Nazis wanted to exterminate Jewish, “the Axis does not seek the physical destruction of the Jewish people, but rather their expulsion from Europe and their concentration in one place.”

It further states that he sought, “to prove to Axis policymakers that it would be worthwhile to designate Eretz Yisrael as that place of concentration, thereby gaining the friendship of the Hebrew people, who would enlist for this purpose in the war against England.”

According to the documents, Natan Friedman (Natan Yellin-Mor), another leader of Lehi, who later became a member of the Knesset, wrote, “Germany has not yet been defeated and may still become our ally.”

The document concludes that these contacts did not succeed and that “nothing came out of it”. However, postcolonial historians who deconstruct the orientalist narrative of exotic east suggest that the Zionist movement, “like Nazism, embraced dissimilation, the notion that Jews could not be assimilated into European societies" applied it on the indigenous territory of West Asia, hence there is a perpetual conflict that rages on.