The idea of giving Jews their own country and sending them all there has historically been quite popular with anti-semites. When we talk about Nazi’s “final solution” we often skip over their earlier solution to the Jewish Question, which was to send us all to Madagascar [0]. In 1933, Nazi Germany signed the Haavara agreement, which would have Germany subsidize Jews emigrating to Palestine. This caused a divide within the global Jewish community, most of which was attempting boycott German exports (which funded the Haavara program), and viewed the program as legitimizing the Nazis. Despite this general opposition among the global Jewelry, the Zionist Congress of 1935 voted overwhelmingly in favor of the program.

Fundamentally, most anti-semitism (and racism in general) is rooted in an ideology of ethnonationalist. In this view, the concept of an anti-semetic Zionist is not a contradiction at all. They don’t hate Jews, they just want them to go away so that the anti-semites can get their pure Aryan/Christian/Arab nation back. If that means that the Jews get their own pure Jewish nation for themselves, then that seems quite reasonable.

Dr. Achim Gercke seved in Nazi Germany’s Ministry of the Interior, where he was an expert on racial matters. He decided the system banning marriage between Jews and Aryans. In his article entitled “Solving the Jewish Question”, he writes

If we support Zionist plans and attempt an international solution by establishing a homeland for the Jews, we will be able to solve the Jewish Question not only in Germany, but in Europe and the entire world.

Dr. Johann von Leers served in the Ministry of Propaganda and was a highly influential Nazi thinker. In his paper,The End of Jewish Migration, he writes:

Only a barbarian standing outside of the last great divine manifestation of world history would propose a general anti-Semitic battle aimed at the extermination of this people. The goal of the highly developed peoples is not to promote hatred where there is a decent way to solve the problem.

The only imaginable, positive solution that will finally resolve the Jewish problem in Europe, and at the same time provide the real possibility of becoming a people, of becoming rooted to land, and even perhaps allowing its less valuable elements to be influenced by the more valuable elements, is a healthy region outside Europe.

Both of these articles are well worth reading to understand the thinking that ultimately led to the Holocaust. The final solution was only devised, when the Nazis realized that their other solutions would not work.

[0] Not that they were particularly tied to that location, it is just what they thought was most practical. They were initially concerned that attempting to establish a Jewish colony in mandatory Palestine would end up being a political and humanitarian disaster. A position that is difficult to dispute with the benefit of hindsight.