Nazi supporters march with torches through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to celebrate Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, January 30, 1933. Credit: AP
On August 25, 1933, just months after Hitler came to power, Zionist organizations signed an agreement with Nazi Germany’s Economics Ministry. Known as the Haavara, or Transfer Agreement, it allowed German Jews to emigrate to Palestine and bring part of their assets with them. Around 60,000 Jews left Germany under the arrangement before the war. It remains one of the most debated episodes of the 1930s.
Germany’s Jews under threat
Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933. Within weeks, the new regime began pushing Germany’s roughly half a million Jews out of public life and the economy, and violence against Jews spread. Hermann Göring declared that he refused to turn the police into “a guard for Jewish stores.”
Jews who wanted to leave faced a major obstacle: German currency laws made it almost impossible to take their money out of the country. Leaving often meant leaving with nothing.
How the agreement worked
At the same time, Jews abroad, in Poland and the United States, were organizing boycotts of German goods, and the Nazi government feared the damage to an already weak economy.
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The idea began with Sam Cohen, owner of the Hanotea citrus company in Palestine, who negotiated directly with the German government. Jews leaving Germany deposited money in special accounts in Germany. The funds were used to buy German goods – farm equipment, pipes, machinery – that were shipped to Palestine. When the emigrants arrived, they were paid back in local currency from the sale of those goods.
The Zionist leadership soon took over the arrangement. The final agreement was signed by the German Zionist Federation, the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the German Economics Ministry.
A painful choice
The agreement divided the Jewish world. Opponents, including the Revisionist Zionists, saw any deal with Hitler as unthinkable – and as undermining the boycott, one of the few weapons Jews had against the regime. Supporters argued that it rescued people and property, and helped build the Jewish community in the Land of Israel.
By the outbreak of war in September 1939, some 60,000 German Jews had reached Palestine through the agreement, bringing assets estimated at well over 100 million Reichsmarks. Germany, for its part, gained export sales. As the German economy shifted to rearmament and foreign currency became the regime’s priority, the arrangement lost its importance to the Nazis.
Many of those who left under the Transfer Agreement survived. Most of Germany’s Jews who could not get out did not.
At the March of the Living, we study the hard choices Jews faced in the years before the Holocaust – when no one could yet imagine what was coming, and every path out was narrow.
Adapted from an article first published in Haaretz.