The Haavara Agreement was a transfer arrangement, signed in August 1933 between the German Ministry of Economics and the Zionist Federation of Germany, that allowed German Jews emigrating to Palestine to take some of their wealth with them in the form of German export goods. Around 60,000 German Jews used it to get out of Germany between 1933 and 1939. They got perhaps 40 per cent of their assets across; the regime got hard currency, market access, and the diplomatic cover of being seen to facilitate Jewish emigration. The agreement is one of the most uncomfortable episodes in early Holocaust history, and it remains an argument inside Jewish historiography to this day.
How it worked
The mechanics were straightforward. A Jewish family wishing to emigrate to Palestine deposited their money in a blocked account at one of two German banks. The deposited funds were used to buy German manufactured goods, which were shipped to Palestine and sold there by Haavara, the Hebrew word for transfer, the trust company set up by the Zionist Federation to run the operation. The proceeds of the sale, in Palestine pounds, were then made available to the emigrant on arrival.
The system relied on the willingness of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, to buy German goods. It did. German agricultural and industrial equipment dominated the Palestinian market through most of the 1930s. Around 140 million Reichsmarks worth of goods went through the scheme. The emigrants received perhaps 40 to 50 per cent of the value of their original deposit, the rest being absorbed by the German state and the system’s overheads. Better that than the alternative, which would have been receiving nothing at all, since the regime’s emigration tax and currency restrictions confiscated the assets of Jews leaving Germany by any other route.
Why the German regime agreed
The deal served the regime’s purposes for as long as the regime’s purpose was to drive Jews out of Germany rather than to kill them. Until late 1941 emigration was the regime’s preferred policy. Anything that increased the rate of Jewish departure, particularly to a destination that would visibly absorb the emigrants, was useful. The deal also gave Germany an export market for goods at a moment when the country’s foreign currency reserves were under severe pressure. And it allowed the regime to make the propaganda case, used repeatedly by Goebbels, that Germany was being humanitarian: it was not preventing Jews from leaving, it was actively helping them to settle in their own land.
None of these motives was a mark of decency. The regime was driving Jews out of Germany at the same time as making the conditions of their lives intolerable. The Haavara Agreement was the back end of that operation, the channel that gave the front end its cover.
The argument inside the Jewish movement
The Haavara Agreement was one of the most divisive issues in pre-war Jewish politics. Most non-Zionist Jewish organisations, particularly in the United States and Britain, opposed it on principle. The American Jewish Congress was running a boycott of German goods from 1933 onwards. The boycott was the main international Jewish response to the regime, and it was hurting German exports. The Haavara Agreement broke the boycott. To its critics, it traded Jewish lives for German trade and then dressed up the trade as rescue.
The Zionist movement was itself split. The Labour Zionists who ran the Jewish Agency and would later run Israel were in favour of the agreement: they thought saving any German Jew at any cost was preferable to losing them. The Revisionists under Vladimir Jabotinsky were furiously opposed, holding that no agreement of any kind should be made with the Nazi state. The 1933 Zionist Congress in Prague, which debated the agreement, was the most rancorous in the history of the movement. The Labour Zionists won the argument and the agreement went ahead. The argument was not really settled, however. It surfaced again at every subsequent Zionist Congress through the 1930s.
What it produced
Around 60,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine under Haavara between 1933 and 1939. They were a particular section of the German Jewish community: largely middle class, largely secular, often professionals, many of whom would shape the Yishuv and later the State of Israel. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects, musicians and academics from Germany made the Yishuv suddenly more European in character. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1936 by Jewish musicians who had been driven out of European orchestras. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem hired German Jewish refugees in numbers that transformed it. The Israeli legal system in its first decades was substantially shaped by German Jewish judges and academics. None of this was foreseen by the men who signed the agreement in 1933, but it is part of what the agreement produced.
Why it still matters
The Haavara Agreement is sometimes invoked, particularly in modern political argument, as evidence that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi regime. The implication is supposed to be damaging both to Israel and to Holocaust memory. The implication is dishonest. The agreement was a pre-war arrangement under conditions of forced emigration, and its participants on the Jewish side were trying to save Jewish lives in the only way available to them. None of them could have known what was coming after 1941, because the regime itself had not yet decided. To equate this with the wartime collaboration of, say, the Mufti of Jerusalem or the Vichy regime is to flatten the historical record beyond recognition.
But the agreement does belong on this site, in this section, because it is part of the story of how German Jewry was processed out of Germany before the killing began, and because it shows how the regime was, even at this stage, dictating the terms of Jewish life. The Jews who used Haavara to escape were the lucky ones. They lost most of their wealth and they had to start again from nothing. They also lived.
See also
Sources
- Yfaat Weiss, The Wertheim Affair, in The Holocaust and Other Genocides, Yad Vashem, 2009
- Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement, Carroll and Graf, 1984
- Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, University of Texas Press, 1985
- USHMM: Refugees