"A Nazi Travels to Palestine" – Nazi Medal with a Swastika and a Star of David, 1934

A medal struck in honor of the series of articles "A Nazi Travels to Palestine", published in the Nazi journal "Der Angriff" (The Attack). A memento of the cooperation between the Nazi Party and the German Zionist Federation, in their mutual goal of tranfering German Jews to Palestine (the "Ha'avara"). Germany, 1934. German.
Obverse: a Star of David in the center is surrounded by the German legend "A Nazi Travels to Palestine" (Ein Nazi fährt nach Palästina). Reverse: a swastika and the words "And he tells about it in The Attack" (Und erzählt davon in Angriff).
In the early days of Nazi rule in Germany, the Zionist Movement was inclined to cooperate with the line that the Nazi government adopted at the time – encouraging immigration of German Jews to Palestine. In the spring of 1933, the leaders of the German Zionist Association decided to contact elements within the Nazi party who might support the Zionist cause. Kurt Tuchler, a German-Jewish jurist and judge, and a member of the managing committee of the German Zionist Federation, contacted Leopold von Mildenstein, a senior Nazi officer who was head of the Jewish department of the SD (the security service of the SS and the Nazi party), and asked him to publish an article in the Nazi press about the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. In 1933, the two men traveled to Palestine with their wives and spent a month touring the country, to enable von Mildenstein to get an impression of the achievements of the thriving Zionist enterprise. In a report submitted to Yad Vashem years later, Tuchler wrote, "The purpose of the visit was to create, in an important Nazi newspaper, an image that would promote the Zionist cause in Palestine". After their return to Germany, von Mildenstein published a series of 12 illustrated articles in the Nazi newspaper "Der Angriff" (The Attack), which was the mouthpiece of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister. The articles were published under the headline "A Nazi Travels to Palestine". To commemorate the article series, Goebbels commissioned this medal.
Diameter: 35 mm. Good condition. Stains.
Provenance: Morton Leventhal Collection, New York.