The Holocaust deniers claim: “The Zionists collaborated with the Nazis through the Haavara Agreement of 1933, which allowed German Jews to emigrate to Palestine while transferring their assets through a German-Jewish trade arrangement. The Zionists were partners with Hitler in moving Jews out of Germany. Jewish-Nazi collaboration is a documented historical fact.”
The Haavara Agreement (Hebrew “transfer”, from the Haavara Company of Jerusalem and the German Reich Ministry of the Economy) existed and operated from 1933 to 1939. The denier framing inflates a limited and specifically conditioned commercial arrangement, in which Jewish emigrants from Germany to Palestine could transfer a portion of their assets in the form of German export goods, into a “collaboration” between Zionism and Nazism. The framing fails on the actual operation of the agreement (a commercial workaround, not a political alliance), the position of the Zionist organisations that negotiated it (an emergency rescue measure under conditions of crisis, opposed by other Jewish organisations who preferred a boycott approach), the position of the German government (which used the agreement instrumentally and ended it when its purposes diverged from those of the Jewish parties), and the chronology (the agreement covered only Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1933 to 1939 period, not the killing operation of 1941 to 1945).
What the agreement actually was
The Haavara Agreement was negotiated in August 1933 between representatives of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (the Zionist banking institution), the Zionist Federation of Germany, and the German Reich Ministry of the Economy under Hjalmar Schacht. The economic logic of the arrangement was that Jews emigrating from Germany faced confiscation of most of their assets through the Reich Flight Tax and the foreign-currency restrictions; the agreement provided a mechanism by which a portion of an emigrant’s assets could be transferred to Palestine in the form of German goods purchased by the Jewish-owned Haavara Trust and Transfer Office in Tel Aviv, with the emigrant receiving the proceeds in Palestinian pounds on arrival.
The arrangement allowed approximately 53,000 German Jews to emigrate to Palestine in the 1933 to 1939 period, transferring approximately RM 140 million in assets to Palestine in the form of German exports (machinery, chemicals, automobiles, industrial equipment). The figures are well documented in the surviving Haavara Office records and in the German Reich Bank statistics. The emigration represented approximately 60 per cent of all Jewish emigration to Palestine in the period and approximately 10 per cent of all Jewish emigration from Germany. The Haavara was the principal route by which German Jews could legally emigrate with significant assets.
The German government’s position
The German government’s interest in the agreement was straightforward. The Reich wanted to remove Jews from Germany and to obtain hard currency through exports. The Haavara delivered both: Jews emigrated, and German goods were exported to Palestine, where they generated foreign-exchange earnings for the Reich Bank. The agreement was bitterly opposed by some Nazi factions (particularly Joseph Goebbels and the Sturmabteilung leadership), who objected on ideological grounds to any cooperation with Zionists. It was supported by Schacht and the Foreign Office, who viewed it as economically beneficial. The compromise position, ultimately determined by Hitler personally, was that the agreement could continue as a temporary measure until Jewish emigration was completed by other means. The agreement was effectively ended by the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the closure of the relevant trade routes.
The deniers’ framing depends on treating the German government’s instrumental use of the agreement as evidence of a Zionist-Nazi alliance. The German government also signed commercial agreements with the Soviet Union (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939), with Britain (the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935), with the United States (various trade agreements), and with dozens of other states whose policies the Nazi government opposed. Commercial agreements between governments are not political alliances; the Haavara was a commercial workaround that served different purposes for the two parties to it.
The Jewish opposition to the agreement
The Haavara was opposed by a substantial portion of the Jewish community at the time, particularly in the United States. The American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War Veterans of America, and the General Jewish Council had organised a boycott of German goods from 1933 onwards, and viewed the Haavara as breaking the boycott. The 18th Zionist Congress in Prague in August 1933 voted on the agreement and divided sharply; the Mapai (Labour Zionist) leadership under David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Arlosoroff supported it, the Revisionist Zionists under Vladimir Jabotinsky opposed it, and the religious and other parties were split. Arlosoroff, who had negotiated the agreement on behalf of the Jewish Agency, was assassinated in Tel Aviv in June 1933 in circumstances the assassination has never been definitively resolved (Revisionist sources have been suggested as responsible). The internal Jewish debate about the agreement was substantial, public, and reflected the genuine difficulty of choosing between rescue (some Jews could escape with some assets) and resistance (a boycott that would weaken the German economy).
The standard scholarly treatment of the agreement, by Yfaat Weiss, Edwin Black, and Francis R. Nicosia, treats it as a rescue measure adopted under emergency conditions by some Zionist organisations, opposed by other Jewish organisations, and used instrumentally by the German government for its own purposes. None of the scholarly literature treats the agreement as a political alliance.
The chronology problem
The Haavara Agreement operated from 1933 to 1939, covering Jewish emigration before the war. The killing operation, the Holocaust proper, ran from 1941 to 1945, after the agreement had ended. The Jews who escaped to Palestine via the Haavara were not killed in the Holocaust; the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were not those who had emigrated under the Haavara. The two operations did not overlap in any meaningful sense. The denier framing, which uses the 1933 to 1939 emigration arrangement as evidence of Zionist responsibility for the 1941 to 1945 killing, is chronologically nonsensical; it requires the listener to confuse a commercial arrangement that saved approximately 53,000 lives with a killing operation that took approximately 6 million lives several years later.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful because it weaponises a real but limited rescue measure into a charge of “Zionist-Nazi collaboration”, embedding an antisemitic conspiracy theme that has been a staple of post-war denier and far-right discourse. The Haavara was a difficult rescue arrangement, made under coercion, opposed by significant portions of the Jewish community, and used instrumentally by the German government. Calling it a collaboration is the move of converting an attempt to save lives into evidence against the people who attempted the saving. The framing also relies on the listener not knowing the chronology: that the agreement ended six years before the killing began, and that the people saved by it were not in any sense responsible for the people not saved.
What was the Haavara Agreement? How many Jews did it allow to emigrate? When did it end, and when did the killing begin?
See also
Sources
- Yfaat Weiss, “The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust”, in Yad Vashem Studies, 26, 1998
- Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, Macmillan, 1984; revised edition Carroll and Graf, 2001
- Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, Tauris, 1985; revised edition Transaction, 2000
- Francis R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews 1933 to 1943, University Press of New England, 1989
- Ronald Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference, Frank Cass, 2001
- Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations 1933 to 1945, Yale University Press, 1994
- Werner Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis and Ludwig Pinner, Haavara-Transfer nach Palästina und Einwanderung deutscher Juden 1933 bis 1939, Mohr Siebeck, 1972, the standard archival study
- Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt, 1993
- Yad Vashem, “The Haavara Agreement”, https://www.yadvashem.org
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Refugees” and “Pre-War Jewish Emigration”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org