Background
Max Naumann was born in Berlin on 12 January 1875, the son of a merchant, descended from a long-established West Prussian family.
Max Naumann was born in Berlin on 12 January 1875, the son of a merchant, descended from a long-established West Prussian family.
Obtained a degree in law from the University of Berlin in 1899.
Having his university studies completed, he was admitted to the bar. In 1902 he received a Reserve Officer’s commission in the Bavarian army - non-baptized Jews were denied such commissions in the Prussian Reserve Officer Corps - and during World War I he distinguished himself as an infantry commander, being awarded the Iron Cross (First and Second Class), Naumann emerged after World War I as the foremost advocate of the total assimilation of Jews into the German national community (Volksgemeinschaft).
On 20 March 1921 he founded the League of National-German Jews, which called for the conscious self-eradication of Jewish identity, the expulsion of East European Jewish immigrants from Germany and criticized Jewish behaviour in quasi-anti-semitic terms.
Equally, he denounced Zionists as a foreign body within the German Volk, a threat to Jewish integration and purveyors of a ‘racist' ideology which served British imperial interests. His special hatred was reserved for cosmopolitan, rootless, Jewish left-wing intellectuals. Chairman of the League from 1921-6 and its chief ideologue and spokesman throughout the Weimar Republic, Naumann was reinstalled at its head in December 1933 under Nazi pressure. Naumann’s organization had originally supported Ludendorff and other right-wing politicians during the early 1920s, though he himself was a member of the right-of-centre German National Party (DVP).
After 1929 it was increasingly oriented to the radical Right and was the only Jewish group to support a Nazi-led national revolution. Naumann personally endorsed the NSDAP in 1932 as the only party capable of realizing the ‘rebirth of Germandom’. This stance totally isolated him from the overwhelming majority of German Jews. In spite of their ultra-German patriotism, Naumann and his circle were unsuccessful in convincing the National Socialists to accept their goal of mass assimilation or to grant them a special status in the Third Reich. The Verband nationaldeutscher Juden was dissolved by the Gestapo in 1935 because of attitudes hostile to the State' and its monthly journal was obliged to cease publication. Naumann himself was temporarily incarcerated in Columbia Haus, the notorious Gestapo prison in Berlin, but freed after a few weeks. He died of cancer in Berlin in May 1939.