The Transfer Agreement (81 page)

And still, the pace was not fast enough for Nazi Germany. No matter how much the Zionists expanded the economic structure of Palestine, the British did all in their power to obstruct the entry of Jews. With war imminent, Britain was worried about oil and strategic cooperation from Moslem groups in Iraq, Egypt, and India who opposed Jewish entry into Palestine even under these most dire circumstances. In mid-1938, an intergovernmental conference was held at Evian in an attempt to solve the crisis of both the refugees and the Jews still remaining in Germany. The Jewish Agency presented a plan for a worldwide German merchandise sale to finance the rescue of the remaining Jews of Germany and other European countries and their transfer to Palestine-the only haven available. But no action on a global transfer plan was taken. Few refugees were helped.

Nazi Germany was outraged. The world would not cooperate in the expulsion of Jews from Germany. In early November 1938, as a clear warning shot, Nazi officials staged a spectacular national pogrom. In a single night, thousands of Jews were dragged into concentration camps; roving bands filled the streets, beating and killing any Jews they could find; nearly every synagogue in Germany was set aflame; thousands of Jewish-owned store windows were broken in a ritual of hatred and sadism that became known to history as the Night of the Broken
Glas—Kristallnacht.

By the summer of 1939, Austria had been "absorbed" by Germany; Czechoslovakia had been dismemberd under a Hitler
Diktat.
The question haunting the world was not whether war would come, but
when.
And still the British refused to reopen Palestine to admit the Jews frantic to leave Europe before the promised bloodbath. In desperation, Haavara officials shuttled from European capital to capital to negotiate transfer agreements.

One haavara was established with remnant Czechoslovakia pegged to the Jewish purchase of Czechoslovakian National Bank debentures. Rumania agreed to a haavara financing a fleet of freighters. Hungary, Italy, and several other nations under Fascist influence also signed agreements. By late summer of
1939,
transfer agreements existed in at least six European countries.

Palestine was not quite ready, but it would suffice. European Jews were facing utter annihilation, and Zionism, through the dispassionate mobilization of money and malice, was now ready to rescue, ready to receive, ready for redemption.

And then, in September
1939,
Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. Great Britain's mandated territory Palestine was forced to break all relations with Germany. The upheaval in Europe also forced the rupture of the other transfer agreements, most of them even before they began. Germany rolled through Europe, conquering or establishing puppet states with little difficulty. Its first order of business after every conquest was to ghettoize the Jews and then deport them to concentration camps where they were worked as slaves, often until death. At some point, too many Jews came under German jurisdiction. They could not be efficiently transported, housed, and worked in labor camps. Efforts were made to send them to Palestine via underground Zionist rescue routes. The Gestapo, working with elite Zionist rescue units known as Mossad, dispatched Jews in trucks, rickety ships, and on foot via Turkey, Bulgaria, and Rumania. When Britain would accept no more and the Zionist solution was no longer viable, a new solution was needed. In vast killing factories the Jews would be gassed and cremated. The names Auschwitz and Treblinka were added to the memory of man. This would be the Final Solution.

Six thousand per day went to Auschwitz alone. Some were fooled. Most knew. The world outside began to suspect. Newspapers reported the existence of the killing camps, front-page cartoons depicted the Angel of Death standing over the Jews of Europe, and the clouds over the world darkened with the smoke of incinerated human beings.

The struggle for a Jewish Homeland now entered a new and ever more painful phase. Without the transfer machinery, Zionist rescue committees were forced to pick and choose who would live and who would die. They could not save everyone in every place. Emphasis was placed on the young and the strong, who could survive the taxing journey to Palestine, often in the bottoms of leaky barges, squeezed between a cold, slimy wall and a grim, hungry comrade. They were also chosen for their ability to survive in a beloved but hostile land, wracked by desert heats, Arab enemies, and British masters. Last but not least, they were chosen to become a new breed of Jew that would never stand before a pit waiting for the bullet to arrive, never stand in a line waiting for a man with white gloves to send some to the left and some to the right—they would never stand and wait for destruction. They would fight first.

In the period between late
1933
and
1941,
over
$30
million had been transferred directly via Haavara. Perhaps another
$70
million had flowed into Palestine via corollary German commercial agreements and special international banking transactions, this during a period when the average Palestinian Jew earned a dollar a day. Some of Israel's major industrial enterprises were founded with those monies, including Mekoroth, the national water-works; Lodzia, a leading textile firm; and Rassco, a major land developer. And vast quantities of material were stockpiled, including coal, irrigation pipes, iron and metal products for companies and enterprises not yet in existence.

From
1933
to
1941,
approximately one-hundred immigrant settlements were established along strategic corridors in western Galilee, the coastal plan, and in the northern Negev. About sixty of these settlements were established between
1936
and
1940.
Most were possible only because Haavara or Haavara-related funds flowed to Zionist agencies for land purchase and development. And the settlements were made possible in large part because the Haavara economy had expanded the worker immigrant quota, allowing the influx of halutzim and German settlers. In 1948, the outline of these strategic settlements approximated the borders of the new Jewish State, for each settlement was not only a demarcation of Jewish life, each was an outpost of Jewish defense where battles were fought and a boundary line was ultimately drawn.

Between
1933
and
1941, 20,000
German Jews directly transferred to Palestine via Haavra. Many of them never collected their money, and often when they did, it was only partially in cash and mostly in mandatory stocks and mortgages. Another
40,000
German Jews emigrated to Palestine during this period via the indirect and corollary aspects of transfer. Many of these people, especially in the late
1930S,
were allowed to transfer actual replicas of their homes and factories—indeed rough replicas of their very existences.

And something intangible also transferred with the German Jews during those years. It had nothing to do with concrete or cash accounts and had everything to do with culture. A German fondness for music, for art, for spotless homes, for cafés with chocolate tortes, for philosophy, for antiquities, for theater, for the finer things that struggling Palestine had never stopped to develop. These intangibles were transferred like everything else.

After World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Jews from a dozen different nations wandered through Europe stateless and displaced, each Jew a remnant of a family, a town or a ghetto, all ravaged survivors without homes and without lives to return to, after the Holocaust, when the moment of the in-gathering of the exiles was at hand, Israel was ready. A nation was waiting.

Fifteen years earlier, it hadn't existed. Fifteen years earlier few could have visualized what was to come, what was to be. But a small group of men did. They foresaw it all. That's why nothing would stop them; no force was too great to overcome. These men were the creators of Israel. And in order to do so, each had to touch his hand to the most controversial underaking in Jewish history—the Transfer Agreement. It paved the way for a state. Was it madness, or was it genius?

by Abraham H. Foxman

For years, students of the Holocaust have struggled over whether the Zionists did right or wrong in negotiating the Transfer Agreement with the Hitler regime. This arrangement transferred some 60,000 Jews and $100 million—almost $1.4 billion in 2001 dollars—from Germany to Palestine during the pre-War years. To do so necessitated protracted commercial dealings with the Nazis, and flew in the face of the global Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott striving to topple the Hitler regime in its first years. The debate back in the thirties briefly tore the Jewish world apart before being relegated to the realm of a hushed necessity. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the whole subject of the
Haavara
, or Transfer, was reduced to an obscure footnote. Despite the enormity of its economic and human importance to the Jews of Europe and the development of Palestine, the entire subject is conspicuously absent from almost all standard histories of the period.

But the debate was rekindled in 1984 when Edwin Black's book,
The Transfer Agreement,
appeared and told the full story for the first time. It vividly describes in tense style the minute-to-minute negotiations as Zionists rushed to save who and what could be saved in the face of a darkening future.

People are still debating the Transfer Agreement, often just as acrimoniously as its proponents and opponents did in 1933. But what the men and women of those terrible years slowly grew to understand and painfully accept has eluded the comfortable among us. Why? Because those who look back were not there, and did not live through the terrifying hours of the twelve-year Reich.

I was born in Poland. I was hidden in Vilna by my Polish Catholic nurse-maid, who baptized me, and I was reunited with my parents only after the War. That is why I am alive today.

I have spent all of my adult life in the organized defense of Jewish rights and dignity. That is why I live today.

Desperate situations, hard choices, agonizing possibilities, and the debates between rescue and relief have filled my world since infancy. I have an understanding of the heartbreaking decisions that must be made by leaders, just as I understand the pressing compulsion by all people to confront those decisions.

In my mind, the Transfer Agreement's most important and indispensible element was the rescue of people. The rescue of assets comes second. But clearly, if the Zionists could rescue people only if they had assets and once rescued, assets were needed to maintain those people in Palestine; it was the Zionists' duty to deal in assets. The cruel reality was that the price of salvaging these lives and assets was widespread trafficking in German goods.

Unquestionably, without the Transfer Agreement, German Jewry's property—and the people it sustained—would have been completely liquidated by the Nazis. Today's headlines are filled with tales of pilfered Jewish gold, Jewish art, Jewish insurance, Jewish property, and Jewish slave labor. Of course, the ultimate and most inestimable—and irreplaceable—pilferage was the theft of Jewish life and culture that can never be replaced. The Transfer Agreement played a role for some 60,000 Jews who were allowed to live and transfer a modicum of their possessions to the only place in the world that would accept them—Palestine.

The potential for the subsequent transfer agreements negotiated in other countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, boggles the mind. Had the other
Haavara
agreements been implemented in the other European countries, we can only imagine how many more hundreds of thousands of Jews could have been saved. Unfortunately, the war broke out before these transfer organizations could make any meaningful progress.

The counterquestion is whether it was correct to deal with the Devil, and if the dealing itself strengthened that Devil. Decades later, it is easy to employ judgmental hindsight. Those who do so were not there but seem to think that books, records, and movies can adequately recreate the context. We are talking about the thirties—a very bad time for European Jews. But no one back then could imagine how bad things would actually become. Even Vladimir Jabotinsky, who opposed the
Haavara
and had the vision to urge all Jews to leave Europe, could not imagine how much worse it would get. In light of the bitter reality of the Holocaust and the world's unwillingness to stop it, the decision to transfer Jews and their possessions to Palestine was a wise one.

Today, it is easy to display wisdom and perspective in retrospect. It is easy for us to judge in hindsight. But try as we might, there is no virtual reality button for Nazi Germany. We cannot recreate the emotion and context surrounding those bleak days. We cannot fathom what was right and wrong as much as the threatened communities themselves. True hindsight belongs not to pundits, but to history.

Jewish and Zionist leaders of the day confronted a history repeatedly marked by pogroms and expulsion. Each time we emerged from crisis, we hoped for the best. We always thought times had changed, that enlightenment had come, that things would be better. “How could things be worse than the Middle Ages, worse than the Czar's oppression?” we asked. “How bad could it become in a cultured society such as Germany, where Jews proudly displayed military medals and falsely felt completely integrated into society?” But, “How Bad?” is indeed the central question Zionism has always posed…and always sought to preempt before learning the answer.