Leo Herrmann: The Untold Story of a Man Who Rescued Max Brod and 2,500 Other Czechoslovak Jews from the Nazi Occupation
Talk by Zbyněk Tarant
Introduction by Rabbi Norman Patz, President Emeritus, SHCSJ, and Pavla Niklová, Director, Jewish Museum in Prague
This lecture will introduce the rescue plan for 2,500 Czech Jews by means of a ha‘avara scheme in 1939–1940, negotiated by the Bar Kochba alumnus Leo Herrmann (a cousin of Hugo Herrmann). Born in Lanškroun/Landskron in 1888, Herrmann was truly a renaissance personality – lawyer, diplomat, Zionist, but also peace activist, journalist, editor-in-chief of several newspapers, film producer, and longtime secretary general of Keren Ha-Yesod. Herrmann studied law at today’s Charles University in Prague, and in 1908 he chaired the famous student club Bar Kochba. There he met leading figures of the Prague and German Jewish communities and representatives of the moderate branch of so-called “cultural Zionism,” such as Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, and Martin Buber.
Herrmann ascended quickly through the hierarchy of the Zionist movement, attaining the position of Secretary General of the Zionist fundraising and development agency Keren Ha-Yesod in 1921. During his involvement in the Paris Conference (1919–1920), he established a close friendship with Jan Masaryk. In the mid-1920s, he joined the group of German-Jewish peace activists known as Brit Shalom/Tahalluf as-Salam, which lobbied for the inclusion of Palestinian Arabs in the Zionist enterprise. In 1934–1935, he produced the first-ever Zionist movie with sound, directed by Juda Leman, which received high critical acclaim. The year 2025 marks the 90th anniversary of the movie’s famous 1935 screening in New York’s Astor Hall, attended by many leading personalities, including Albert Einstein.
Seeing the rapidly deteriorating situation of Czechoslovak Jewry after the Munich Agreement, Herrmann mobilized all efforts of his institution to design a rescue plan akin to the German ha‘avara that would use a portion of the British post-Munich gift and loan for legal emigration to Mandatory Palestine. Using his unique skills in fundraising and crisis management, as well as his excellent contacts within the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, Herrmann designed a scheme that allowed the rescue of thousands of Czechoslovak Jews, including notable Zionists such as Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, and David Paul Meretz—often in the last possible moments. When Brod and others recounted their fateful escape from Czechoslovakia on the night of the Nazi invasion (March 15, 1939), it was Leo Herrmann who made this last-minute escape possible. Without Herrmann, Franz Kafka’s archive, smuggled by Brod from Czechoslovakia, would likely have been lost forever.
About the speaker: Zbyněk Tarant, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. His research focuses primarily on Holocaust memory, Czech Israeli relations, and contemporary antisemitism.
The event will be video recorded and accessible later on the SHCSJ YouTube channel.
The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews in partnership with the Jewish Museum in Prague and with the support of the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York and the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
