https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-perfidious-among-us-past-and-present/
Peter Beinart is moving fast and furiously to solidify his acceptance by his co-progressives, at a time when Jew-hatred permeates their politics.
Max Naumann was the founder of Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (League of National German Jews). In his efforts to resolve his brand of “the Jewish Question,” he called for the elimination of Jewish ethnic identity through Jewish assimilation. Naumann advocated total assimilation as an answer to Jew-hatred. With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, while many German Jews were still very much in denial about their precarious future in Germany, Naumann’s league, a minority within a minority having only about 6,000 followers, took it further, pushing his skewed ideology.
During the Weimar Republic, Naumann was active with the German People’s Party. Advancing a delusional perspective, the League supported a Nazi-led national revolution, which was to realize the “rebirth of Germandom.” Nauman continued to be faithful to the “fatherland.” Detesting the Zionist Jews, he was noted as saying, “Unwilling to slough off their oriental traits, they are a disturbing factor to us who are bound to the soil.”
The Zionists were an embarrassment to the patriotic German Jews like Max Naumann, and went so far as to say that the Nazis were justified in putting a price on Albert Einstein’s head for speaking out against the Nazis and for being supportive of Zionism. But, like all patriotic German Jews, Max was in for a rude awakening.
With the rise of Hitler, the German People’s Party naturally did not want anything to do with Nauman’s group. His league was outlawed by the Nazis and dissolved by the Gestapo in 1935. Naumann was imprisoned and later released. Max Naumann was one of the lucky ones—he ended up dying from cancer in 1939.