Theodore N. Kaufman

Theodore Newman Kaufman (sometimes known as Theodore Kaufman Newman, born February 22 1910 in Manhattan and died October 1980 in East Orange, New Jersey) was was an American businessman, but was known as the author of Germany Must Perish!, a text he self-published in 1941 which called for the extinction of Germans and the redistribution of the German lands. The text was used in Nazi propaganda in the wartime era as support that American Jewish groups had support of the U.S. government.

Family background

Theodore Kaufman was born in Manhattan, NY. His father, Dr. Anton Kaufman (1883-1943), had been a reporter for the Berlin Morgenzeitung in Berlin, Germany before immigrating to the USA in 1905. Anton Kaufman was the publisher of the Newark Jewish Chronicle in the USA.

Theodore Kaufman's mother died in 1939. His three brothers were Herbert, Julian, and Leonard.

Early Life and Career in Business

Kaufman traveled widely as a young man, as far away as the Sahara Desert and Algeria, which he spoke highly of in later interviews.

Eventually settling down in the business world, Kaufman was the owner of a small advertising and ticket agency in South Orange, New Jersey. He was an advertiser and published the New Jersey Legal Record. As of 1941, he ran a successful theater ticket agency in Newark, New Jersey. Kaufman founded the Argyle Press of Newark, New Jersey, USA, in order to self-publish his political sentiments.

Politics and Political Influence in The United States

Kaufman, politically a radical pacifist, wanted to end all future political conflicts in Europe and had an extreme belief to do so. in 1939, under the auspice of the "American Federation of Peace", an unknown entity of which he was the president and probably only member, he addressed the 1939 Congress of the United States and demanded, firstly, that the United States would refrain from involvement in any future wars in Europe and, secondly, all Americans should be sterilized so that their offspring would not become "murderous monsters".

Having proposed the totally unrealistic demand for mass sterilization in the United States, two years later he instead shifted his focus to the sterilization, through castration, of all German men. His effort was spearheaded by the self-publication of the book Germany Must Perish! which was met with little public awareness in the U.S. (except for negative reviews in Time magazine).

Kaufman was reportedly friends with Roosevelt speech writer Sam Rosenman. The German press of the time misinterpreted this to mean Kaufman was an FDR adviser himself, which was not true. Kaufman was a rogue political actor, and had neither the contacts he claimed to have within the White House nor the influence in the American public sphere. Regardless, some historical revisionists have used his publication as evidence of an alleged conspiracy of the so-called world Jewry against Germany.

Germany Must Perish

In late 1940, Kaufman began writing "Germany Must Perish", a 104-page booklet that was published in early 1941 and which inspired anger in Germany. According to a March 24, 1941, Time magazine review, Kaufman founded Argyle Press because, "he did not want to be edited."

An advertisement in the New York Times, stated that the book was released to the public on March 1, 1941, which Kaufman also promoted by mailing a miniature black cardboard coffin with a hinged lid to reviewers. Inside the coffin was a card proclaiming, "Read GERMANY MUST PERISH! Tomorrow you will receive your copy."

It was cited by Nazi politicians as justification for their assaults on German Jews.

"Since the fang’s poison and its deadly power rests not in the body but in the war psyche of the Germans, one can ensure the prosperity and security of mankind only by finally extinguishing this soul and the rotten body that houses it, removing it finally from the world. There is no other choice: Germany must perish!" (--From "Germany Must Perish", by T.N. Kaufman)

"Not only must there be no more German wars in fact, there must not even remain the slightest possibility of one ever again occurring. A final halt to German aggression, not a temporary cessation, must be the goal of the present struggle... [Germany] must be prepared to pay a Total Penalty. And there is one, and only one, such Total Penalty: Germany must perish forever! In fact -- not in fancy." (--From "Germany Must Perish", by T.N. Kaufman)

In the words of the 1945 Journal of Modern History, the book was intended to be "little more than self-indulgence in dire vituperation by a man who sees Germany as the sole cause of the world's woes."

Impact on Nazi Germany Politics

Nazi claimed that the writings represented official US policy. In a press conference called by the Reich government on 23 July 1941, a representative of the German Foreign Ministry said: 'We know that Roosevelt dictated individual chapters himself. This programme of annihilation of Roosevelt's deserves the sharpest possible repudiation. It really is a programme of Roosevelt's policy.' Following this claim, the Nazi daily newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, ran the story on 24 July 1941 under the headline: 'Roosevelt demands the sterilization of the German people.' The publication date of the book, which actually had been at the beginning of 1941, was manipulated to place it just after the signature of the Anglo-American Atlantic Charter in August, to give it a further appearance of being official Allied policy, 'the cornerstone of thousand-year-long Jewish plans for world domination'.

Having made it to the highest echelons within the Nazi Party, and spurring a great deal of Nazi propaganda, it became the constructive basis of the so-called "Kaufman Plan". This was was alleged in Germany to be a conspiracy among American Jews, in cooperation with the U.S. government, for the planned extinction of the German people and its lands.

External links

• Kaufman Portrait Kaufman's portrait photo at the U.S. Library of Congress
• Germany Must Perish Electronic Book, Germany Must Perish

See Also

• Germany Must Perish