The Jews Who Voted for Hitler

On the evening of February 5, 1930, the art and theater critic Paul Fechter took the podium before the League of Nationalist German Jews, in Berlin, to discuss purported Jewish control of the press and the arts in the country. “When Dr. Max Naumann invited me to give a lecture in your circle, I rather impulsively said yes,” Fechter began. “When he then told me the topic he wanted me to address, my immediate reaction was: Good grief ! One could not have found a better topic for making oneself thoroughly unpopular and for antagonizing everyone in the room.”Explore the Special Preview: October 2026 IssueCheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read.View MoreFor too long, Fechter said, people had been too “shy, fearful, cautious” to speak openly about the Jews. Fechter, an editor at the conservative newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, was pulling no punches. The popular Jewish humorist Kurt Tucholsky, Fechter said, had insulted the German people with his recent book, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, an acid satire about the army, the police, the civil service, the national anthem, even Sekt, a popular sparkling wine.“A large portion of the literary and art worlds are in Jewish hands,” Fechter continued. “The theaters, the major publishing houses, the major art dealers are all at least partially under Jewish control.” Jewish art dealers, Fechter said, filled their galleries with works by “Manet and Monet and Renoir and Gauguin and Picasso and Cezanne”—French Impressionists and Modernists, in other words, rather than traditional German painters. The Antigermanismus among Jews, Fechter declared, was “far more robust” than the Antisemitismus among right-wing German nationalists.Naumann, the founder of the league, published the Fechter tirade in his monthly publication, The Nationalist German Jew, circulated to his group’s 7,000 members, mostly middle-class professionals in more than 20 chapters around the country. Naumann himself was a Berlin-based Jewish attorney who was decidedly antidemocratic, belligerently nationalistic, and unapologetically critical of other Jews.He blamed Ostjuden—the “Eastern Jews” fleeing pogroms in Russia, Romania, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—for flooding the country with unwanted immigrants. He felt pity but no solidarity. “It is the same pity we feel when there is talk of the Turks massacring Armenians or of lynch mobs targeting black people in America,” Naumann wrote—an abstract pity without emotional connection. In his league’s founding treatise, On Nationalist German Jews, published in 1920, Naumann had compared Zionists, those seeking a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to Nazis, whose political movement had just been founded. “Both groups, the fanatics of Zion and the knights of the swastika, are basically the same in that they have turned a question of ancestry into a question of nationality,” Naumann argued.Naumann defended his German and Jewish identities in equal measure, a stance reflected in the term nationaldeutscher Jude—a blood-and-soil German Jew.Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 daysNaumann drifted right with the rest of German politics in the early 1930s, first abiding and then supporting the extremist, right-wing, rabidly anti-Semitic positions of Adolf Hitler. It is impossible to imagine a more tragically misplaced political calculation than Naumann’s embrace of national socialism. Though the Hitler Juden—or Nazi Jews, as Naumann’s adherents came to be known—represented less than 2 percent of Germany’s half-million Jews, they provide a cautionary tale of members of a minority within a minority who cast their lot with a political leader who openly despised them.Naumann was born in 1875 into a middle-class family—bankers, landowners, cloth merchants—in an era of unprecedented opportunity for German Jews. They had recently gained the right to vote. They could run for office. They enjoyed equal protection under the law. Professions formerly restricted were now open—law, medicine, academia. Naumann studied jurisprudence at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he joined a fraternity and was given a Schmiss across his chin, the honorific dueling scar of a true Prussian. But prejudice persisted.When Naumann was denied an officer’s title in the Prussian military because of his Jewish heritage, he enlisted in the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment. Naumann advanced through the ranks, from lieutenant to first lieutenant and eventually to captain, serving with distinction during the First World War. He was awarded an Iron Cross First Class and an Iron Cross Second Class, among other decorations, for “outstandingly brave deeds performed in the face of the enemy that went far beyond the call of duty.”But Jewish veterans of the Great War returned to find Jews collectively vilified for Germany’s defeat and surrender. The Reich Federation of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers countered with an information campaign highlighting their commitment and sacrifice—100,000 Jewish soldiers had served at the front; 35,000 had been decorated for bravery; 12,000 had given their lives for the fatherland. The Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, or Centralverein, sought to combat rising anti-Semitism through legal protections of Jewish identity and heritage. Meanwhile, the Zionist Federation of Germany urged German Jews to immigrate to Palestine for their own safety.From the World War I issue: Reinhold Niebuhr on Hitler, reduced to impotenceNaumann found these responses wholly inadequate or misguided. He denounced the members of the Centralverein as ineffective “Dummköpfe,” or idiots, and the Zionists as traitors, foremost among them “the world-famous scholar Einstein,” who placed his Jewish identity over his German heritage. “The spiritual and even the material misery of the Jews in Germany would never have assumed such frightening proportions,” Naumann claimed in 1927, “if steps had been taken in time to prevent the Zionists, and especially the Zionist Ostjuden, from positioning themselves before Jews and non-Jews alike as the only rightful spokesmen of Judaism.”Naumann believed that anti-Semitism needed to be “dismantled,” not legally challenged, the Centralverein’s preferred approach. During the war, Naumann had watched anti-Semitic sentiment evaporate in the heat of battle, where what mattered, he later recalled, were “actions,” not “words,” and where “a tough, resilient, determined willingness to put one’s head on the line” for comrades and the fatherland “transcended all class and racial difference.” This was the experience that shaped his approach to German politics.He was joined by Alfred Peyser, the chair of the League of Nationalist German Jews, who was also an eminent physician and the municipal counselor of an upscale Berlin district. In a foundational 1922 essay defining the concept of a “nationalist German” Jew, Peyser warned fellow Jewish Germans against returning to “Ghettoknechtschaft”—enslavement to the ghetto—or trying to escape to “Zion,” urging them instead to embrace the “German fatherland.” “Yes, we love this land, its language, its people,” Peyser wrote. “We feel as one with it!”Naumann and Peyser found a powerful ally in Samuel Breslauer, the editor of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, a popular conservative newspaper. Breslauer traveled to New York City in the spring of 1927 with a delegation of German newspaper editors to meet with their American counterparts, including Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. Breslauer advocated for fierce German nationalism and equally fervent Judaism. He defended this duality in an article titled “Me, an Antisemite.” “If over the course of three decades I have undergone a change,” Breslauer wrote, it had been a political drift to the right—but “certainly not” away from Judaism. Instead, he insisted, his Judaism had deepened and strengthened—“in the religious, not in the ethnic-national sense.”Naumann had initially aligned his league with the German People’s Party, a center-right party led by the Nobel laureate Gustav Stresemann. But the political picture changed in September 1930, when the National Socialists surged nearly tenfold in national elections. Fascism was suddenly fashionable. Siegfried “Fred” Bon, the Jewish author of a three-volume philosophical treatise, Does 2 x 2 = 4?, sought to square Judaism and national socialism. In a January 1931 article for The Nationalist German Jew, Bon cataloged Jewish contributors to the country’s conservative movements, foremost among them Walther Rathenau, a foreign minister in the Weimar Republic and the first person, according to Bon, who’d sought to merge nationalism with socialism—“the very positions that today constitute the foundations of the National Socialist program.” Bon’s article appeared under the title “Can Jews Be National Socialists?”Naumann, for his part, suggested that they could be, and he pointed to Italy as evidence. Jews had joined Benito Mussolini in the 1922 March on Rome. Guido Jung, a Jew, was Italy’s fascist minister of finance. Renzo Ravenna, a Jew, was the fascist mayor of Ferrara. When Girolamo Bassi, a Jewish lawyer in Venice, faced financial difficulties, a judge suggested that he join Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. “So, two months later, my father became a cardcarrying Fascist,” Bassi’s son Roberto later recalled, “and having bought a fine black uniform went with the others to demonstrate support for Il Duce.”Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting HitlerNaumann attributed the fascist receptiveness toward Jews in Italy not only to the absence of Zionists and Ostjuden in that country but also to Jews’ absence from “intellectual” professions. Naumann urged young German Jews to pursue careers in trades such as carpentry and masonry rather than professions such as law and medicine. “Of the approximately 200,000 Jews in Italy, at most 10% are doctors, lawyers, and journalists,” The Nationalist German Jew reported in a 1933 article titled “Why There Is No Hatred of the Jews in Italy.” (Although it’s true that there was less anti-Semitism in Italy than in Germany, the article’s premise would be proved grimly wrong when Italy passed a series of discriminatory racial laws starting in 1938 and deported Jews to Nazi extermination camps.)In July 1932, Naumann caused a sensation when he appeared to urge German Jews to vote National Socialist in the upcoming Reichstag elections. In an article in Fechter’s newspaper, Naumann claimed that national socialism was the only viable future for the country—“that here, and only here, a path is being forged that can lead to a rebirth of Germanness and to the restoration of German prestige.”Centralverein was outraged. An op-ed in the organization’s newspaper, Central-Verein-Zeitung, lambasted Naumann for inaccuracy and irresponsibility, and argued that to discount the threat posed by Nazi anti-Semitism was absurdly credulous. Whatever common values Naumann shared with Hitler—anti-communist, antirepublican, antidemocratic—hatred of Jews remained foundational to Nazi ideology. Central-Verein-Zeitung reminded Naumann of the Nazis’ “unbridled attacks” and “public incitement” against Jews, noting that “Herr Hitler has never, on any occasion, contradicted the speakers of his own party regarding their stance on the Jewish question.”But Naumann continued to believe that the heated rhetoric against the Jews was political posturing that would cool once Hitler was in office, and once the inciting political effects of Jewish Communists, socialists, and Zionists had been neutralized. A trove of about 11 million digitized National Socialist records, analyzed by an international group of scholars from Harvard and elsewhere in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper published last April, includes 580 personal statements by Nazis, given in 1934, explaining their reasons for joining the party. Fully 26 percent of these Nazis cited their dislike of Jews as an “explicit causal reason” for joining the party, which suggests that anti-Semitism was considerably more than an incidental element of the party’s ideology. But Naumann was fixated on the other motivations for joining the party, which are reflected in the scholars’ analysis of these statements: 63 percent cited a hope for national renewal and the restoration of public order, while 53 percent expressed a desire for social belonging, 49 percent the need to combat communism, and 29 percent the belief that the party could lift them out of economic hardship. Naumann’s fatally naive view was that if these other concerns could be addressed, anti-Semitism would be diminished.Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, in January 1933, anti-Semitic violence spiked horrifically. Jews were assaulted on the street, at their places of business, in their homes. One young man was lashed bloody, then had pepper rubbed in his wounds to heighten the agony; he died of sepsis. An apartment on Berlin’s fashionable Friedrichstrasse was repurposed as a torture room, its walls spattered with blood.The foreign press chronicled the atrocities prominently. On March 25, Hermann Göring, the powerful Nazi cabinet minister, summoned Naumann and other Jewish leaders to his office. Göring read from a stack of foreign-newspaper clippings with growing fury. “Unless you put a stop to these libelous accusations immediately,” Göring said, “I shall no longer be able to vouch for the safety of the German Jews!” Naumann had intended to use the meeting to protest the rising anti-Semitic violence; to that end, he confronted Göring with a list of attacks on Jews. But he left the meeting as a propagandist for the Third Reich. “While we readily acknowledge that there are excesses against German Jews,” Naumann declared in a public statement, “we are not interested in foreign interference in our internal affairs.”To his fellow Jews of German heritage, Naumann counseled patience. “Today we are enduring without question days of rage,” he wrote in May. “It was inevitable that this anger—built up and heightened over fourteen years—would initially erupt in an explosive outburst.” But Naumann anticipated the day, “in the not too distant future,” when the country’s anti-Semitic fever would break and “Aryan and Jew” would once again “join hands” in common cause for the fatherland. “When this day of self-reflection finally arrives,” Naumann wrote, “that will be the beginning of the real answer to the German Jewish question.”The preceding month, however, Hitler’s government had enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which banned “non-Aryans” from government posts, as well as the Law on Admission to the Legal Profession, which prevented Jews—including Naumann—from practicing law. The Law Against Overcrowding in German Schools and Universities, passed at the same time, restricted the enrollment of Jewish students.Amid these draconian measures, Hans Heinrich Peyser, the son of Alfred Peyser, ran into Naumann one day on the Berlin subway. Naumann was just returning from a meeting with leaders of the Nazi storm troopers. He spoke to Peyser of the Nazis’ “high ideals” and the need to try to understand things from their perspective. “I found this excessive self-absorption and inward-looking preoccupation, in light of what had already happened in Germany, to be absolutely grotesque,” Peyser wrote.From the April 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: Germany under the NazisThe Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in New York, a wire service covering the global Jewish community, viewed Naumann and his adherents with similar dismay. “Although their professions have been taken away from them, and although they live in a state of rigid suspense and fear of the moment when they will be humiliated, beaten, or imprisoned, a large number of German Jews continue to remain faithful to the fatherland,” the agency reported on August 13. The report noted Naumann’s denunciation of Zionists as “traitors to their country.”Stories circulated of “Naumann Jews” ending their meetings with Hitler salutes and the singing of “Horst Wessel Lied ,” the Nazi Party anthem. Though Naumann dismissed the alleged singing as “Jewish horror stories,” he defended the stiff-armed salutes and the presence of Nazi banners, saying that Jews needed to “overcome their fear of the swastika”: “After all, the Christian cross,” he wrote in April 1934, is also a symbol “in opposition to Judaism,” but “for a long time now no reasonable Jew has refused to accept the Iron Cross or other cross-shaped decoration.”In August of that year, when Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died, Naumann urged Jews to approve a public referendum transferring Hindenburg’s powers to Hitler in his capacity as chancellor, effectively handing Hitler unchallenged dictatorial rule. (He did so despite acknowledging to his fellow Jews that the Nazi regime had “brought rigors to us.”) “We urge all Jews who feel themselves Germans to vote ‘Yes’ on Aug. 19,” Naumann declared.Naumann reaffirmed his solidarity with Hitler’s government the following week, when he dispatched a telegram to the Nazi leader informing him that the League of Nationalist German Jews would not be attending a conference in Geneva for the establishment of the World Jewish Congress. Learning of this, Pariser Tageblatt, a newspaper for anti-Nazis in exile, responded: “Thank God!”A Gestapo report on a meeting of 400 nationalist German Jews in Berlin on May 27, 1935, confirms that Naumann’s support for Hitler persisted. Naumann “emphasized in particular that the members considered themselves genuine Germans,” the report noted, and “had welcomed the transformation in Germany brought about by the Führer.” The meeting ended with a rousing chorus of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”For all Naumann’s efforts to win approval or recognition from Nazi leaders for his organization, or for his view on what Jews’ place in the Third Reich should be, he never received any.On September 15, 1935, Hitler’s government introduced the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, collectively known as the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Naumann and half a million other Jewish Germans of their citizenship. By then, Naumann was divorced, and his daughter had broken irreparably with him over his pro-Nazi position.On November 18, Naumann’s league was forcibly disbanded. Naumann himself was arrested by the Gestapo that same day and taken to Columbia-Haus, an SS detention and torture facility. A few weeks later, after attempting to commit suicide by slitting his wrists with the glass from his spectacles, Naumann was released. He died of cancer in May 1939, isolated and abandoned.By that point, thousands of Jews had escaped abroad. Alfred Peyser was stripped of his medical license and briefly incarcerated before immigrating to Sweden in 1939, where he survived the war. Other Naumann Jews were not so fortunate. Siegfried “Fred” Bon was dispatched to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in September 1940; he was executed there in April 1944. Samuel Breslauer, who lost his editorial post and his property to the Nazis, also perished in Theresienstadt, along with his wife, Bertha.Naumann’s remains were interred in a Protestant cemetery in the town of Stahnsdorf, southwest of Berlin, where his headstone still stands. It bears his name and military rank, along with his dates of birth and death, but no indication of faith or family. Persecuted and forgotten as a Jew, he was buried as he’d wished to be—as a German.This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Jews Who Voted for Hitler.”