The German Vanguard: German Jewish Followers (German: Der deutsche Vortrupp. Gefolgschaft deutscher Juden) was a German association of pro-Nazi Jewish Germans. It was founded in February 1933 by the historian of religion Hans-Joachim Schoeps and dissolved in December 1935.[1]
Vanguard members were fiercely patriotic Germans who sought recognition as a Jewish political movement within the resurgence of German nationalism. They disdained Eastern European Jews and opposed Marxism, Zionism, and liberalism, while failing to grasp the uncompromising racial nature of Nazi antisemitism.[2]
Some of their members were also part of the larger Association of German National Jews, another group of Jews for Hitler outlawed by the Nazi authorities in 1935.
Schoeps went into exile in Sweden at the end of 1938, seven weeks after the Nazi Kristallnacht mobs destroyed most German Jewish businesses and places of worship, just before the organized persecutions of the Jewish people began in earnest.