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The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine

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This is a typical Edwin Black book. As in his other important Holocaust related work, IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST, he goes into great detail on events, speeches, and other occurrences that took place mainly in 1933 with the rise of Hitler to power. The Nazis did not waste any time and immediately started with the persecution of the approximately half a million German Jews. There was an immediate world wide boycott against German commerse. The labor Zionists in Palestine and elsewhere, being opportunistic in nature, used this calamity that preceded the Holocaust and negotiated a secret deal with the Nazis. The Nazis allowed some Jews to leave Germany for Palestine with money, and in return the Zionists did not participate in the boycott against German goods. Information about this shameful affair was suppressed by all Israeli goverments headed by labor in the last 50 years. Black's description of this affair is very detailed but overly repetitious. A major problem is the lack of sufficient summaries. Black describes the events and more or less leaves it to the reader to arrive to conclusions. Examples: he mentions the complete silence of FDR on the persecution of the German Jews (which lasted later throughout the war) but there is no comment on it. There is a good description of the paranoid hatered of Jabotinsky and his followers by the labor Zionists but no comment on it. In several comments, however, Black expresses the opinion that the transfer agreement was beneficial to the future establishment of Israel because of the German goods and some German Jews that went to Palestine. The price was dealing with the devil. History showed otherwise. The transfer agreement constituted a minor factor in the establishment of Israel, and that is why Ben Gurion and his cronies tried to hide it. The irony is that during the Holocaust the labor Zionists again made deals with the Nazis to save their own people at the expense of others (see PERFIDY by Ben Hecht). This book is a very important historical document. I hope that somebody will use Black's hard work in digging up all the details of this forgotten dark period, to throw more light on the actions (or inactions) of the labor Zionists during the Holocaust (Ben-Gurion, Stephen Wise, Nachum Goldman, etc), because of their sick devotion to socialism and their love affair with FDR.

I cannot praise the author, his research, his explanations and his writing enough for this singular tome. Like other reviewers have said, the reader goes into this book, whether Jewish or not, with their mouth open at the incredibility of this occurence. It's easy enough in hindsight to make judgement calls about what the the leaders of the Jewish community world-wide should have done about Hitler's rise to power. However, given the economic situation of the time and the Reich's strategems to place all blame for Germany's economic hardships on the Jews throughout Europe, it's hard to determine that even had the massive boycotts been organized and on schedule, would they have work? And even more important, if Hitler was ousted due to the economic stranglehold on Germany,who or what would have taken his place? And would that have been any less devastating for the Jews in Europe.

There are few obvious heros and anti-heros in this book, except for the Nazis as being the ultimate in villains. One man paid dearly for his attempts to save European Jewry...with his life. It was not conclusive as to whome the assassins were and who put out the price on his head. It's all too easy to blame the reactionary groups, but there are obvious questions about whether his death was one of convenience so that blame could be placed by the leading group of Mapai at the door of the reactionary Jewish groups.

Sam Cohen was a businessman through and through. His reasoning to press The Transfer agreement was purely motivated by money, and not the need to either save European Jewry or to establish Israel as a separate state. It is this 'selling' of the agreement by so many that is so mind-boggling. So many were willing to take the wealth of German Jewry (and later the funds that were supposed to be used to save the lives of Jews who had no homes or businesses to return to) and use it to set up a home in Palestine...it's beyond my ability to pass judgement on these men as to their motivation, yet I am not certain I could possibly decide to shake the hands of these men. The fact that there was a need to set up a Jewish state, and that there was all this money to fund its establishment is beside the fact. At no other time, was any other method even considered to rescue the millions of Jews trapped, even the children...this is so reprehensible as to curdle anyone's blood.

And though this happened, our countries, including the U.S. and Britain were equally at fault for closing immigration quotas, even though they knew what was going on in Germany. It was easier to merely close their eyes and ignore The Holocaust, until it became obvious that no one was safe from Hilter and his cronies.

This story is just so incredible that I wish there was some way to make it into a movie that does the story justice. I don't suppose that is a possibility. But it is a tremendous story that needs to be included in European history, as it's impact was great. Edwin Black did a fantastic job. (...)

This was an area of World History that I had no clue about prior to reading this book. This is indeed a tragic story of the plight of Jews in Europe during Hitler's regime. This book was so suspenseful I simply could not put it down. Black does an excellent job of engaging the reader and does not reveal the details of unfolding events until the last moment. Simply WOW!

As person who is not Jewish I think it is important for everybody to learn the lessons of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. However, equally important is that there were greedy and ideology zealots that contributed to the growth of the Third Reich via the Transfer Agreement, i.e., Sam Cohen and even Hoffien and Landauer. The Transfer Agreement was just that a business arrangement to transfer German Jews to Palestine in return German exports would be bought through Zionist entities to ensure the economic growth and wealth of Palestine. Moreover, what was incredibly stunning was the ability of the 18th Zionist Congress to go against the international boycott movement by suppressing the Revisionists- strong arming them into abandoning their ideology.

This makes me wonder what would have happened if the boycott prevailed and the Third Reich "cracked"? Would there still be a Germany today? Would we even have had the Holocaust? I know it may sound harsh and I am sure I will be labeled an anti-Semite because of this, but the reality is according to Black, the Zionists contributed significantly to the rise of the economic and military might of the Third Reich.

This book is simply a phenomenon in and of itself. It completely forces one to reshape how they view events during that time period. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn about a different dimension of relationships between the Third Reich, German Jews, and Zionists. This will definitely throw you off and have you thinking for days. Definitely one of my top 10 books of all time.

In an interview after the war, the former head of the Zionist Federation of Germany, Dr. Hans Friedenthal, summed up the situation: "The Gestapo did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine. We often received their help when we required anything from other authorities regarding preparations for emigration."

At the September 1935 National Socialist Party Congress, the Reichstag adopted the so-called "Nuremberg laws" that prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and, in effect, proclaimed the Jews an alien minority nationality.

A few days later the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau editorially welcomed the new measures:

Quote:

"Germany ... is meeting the demands of the World Zionist Congress when it declares the Jews now living in Germany to be a national minority. Once the Jews have been stamped a national minority it is again possible to establish normal relations between the German nation and Jewry. The new laws give the Jewish minority in Germany its own cultural life, its own national life. In future it will be able to shape its own schools, its own theatre, and its own sports associations. In short, it can create its own future in all aspects of national life ...

Germany has given the Jewish minority the opportunity to live for itself, and is offering state protection for this separate life of the Jewish minority: Jewry's process of growth into a nation will thereby be encouraged and a contribution will be made to the establishment of more tolerable relations between the two nations."


Georg Kareski, the head of both the "Revisionist" Zionist State Organization and the Jewish Cultural League, and former head of the Berlin Jewish Community, declared in an interview with the Berlin daily Der Angriff at the end of 1935:

Quote:

"For many years I have regarded a complete separation of the cultural affairs of the two peoples [Jews and Germans] as a pre-condition for living together without conflict... I have long supported such a separation, provided it is founded on respect for the alien nationality. The Nuremberg Laws ... seem to me, apart from their legal provisions, to conform entirely with this desire for a separate life based on mutual respect... This interruption of the process of dissolution in many Jewish communities, which had been promoted through mixed marriages, is therefore, from a Jewish point of view, entirely welcome."

Zionist leaders in other countries echoed these views. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, told a New York rally in June 1938: "I am not an American citizen of the Jewish faith, I am a Jew... Hitler was right in one thing. He calls the Jewish people a race and we are a race."

The Interior Ministry's Jewish affairs specialist, Dr. Bernhard Lösener, expressed support for Zionism in an article that appeared in a November 1935 issue of the official Reichsverwaltungsblatt:

Quote:

"If the Jews already had their own state in which the majority of them were settled, then the Jewish question could be regarded as completely resolved today, also for the Jews themselves. The least amount of opposition to the ideas underlying the Nuremberg Laws have been shown by the Zionists, because they realize at once that these laws represent the only correct solution for the Jewish people as well. For each nation must have its own state as the outward expression of its particular nationhood."

In cooperation with the German authorities, Zionist groups organized a network of some forty camps and agricultural centers throughout Germany where prospective settlers were trained for their new lives in Palestine. Although the Nuremberg Laws forbid Jews from displaying the German flag, Jews were specifically guaranteed the right to display the blue and white Jewish national banner. The flag that would one day be adopted by Israel was flown at the Zionist camps and centers in Hitler's Germany.

Mindboggling and SHOCKING facts.

Read this book!!!

This scholarly, fact-filled book tells of such things as western European Jews looking down upon the Ostjuden (p. 4), the American-Jewish founding of the NAACP and the ACLU (p. 40), Jews in Mussolini's Fascist government (pp. 61-62), large Jewish-led boycotts against tsarist Russia and against Henry Ford (pp. 26-33; the latter of whom caved). Ironically, such boycotts played into the hands of those who portrayed Jews as powerful. Some Jewish leaders opposed them in part because of possible ineffectiveness or backfiring. (p. 21, 272). [Moshe Shonfeld, in his THE HOLOCAUST VICTIMS ACCUSE, goes as far as reckoning the boycott of Hitler a tragic miscalculation that radicalized Nazism, prompting Hitler to up the ante by taking Europe's Jews hostage and eventually retaliating collectively against them through genocide.]

Hitler successfully blamed the Versailles accords for Germany's problems, and they are, to this day, sometimes invoked as an excuse for his rise to power. In actually, such things as WWI-era hunger (p. 21) and part of post-WWI German economic problems (p. 24) were caused by German policies themselves. The Versailles accords themselves were, far from exceptionally harsh and unprecedented, at worst comparable to German policies against, for example, vanquished Russia: "Lenin was forced to submit his new nation to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Its terms defrocked Russia of a third of her farmland...a third of her railroads...half her industrial capacity..." (p. 22).

Early Zionism had a pronounced German geopolitical orientation. (p. 121). Those who try to marginalize the 1933 Zionist-Nazi accord point out the fact that only 1-2% of pre-WWII German Jews supported ANY form of Zionism. Black agrees with this percentage (p. 35, 168), but highlights the effectiveness of a small number of influential people (p. 250), and notes that the overwhelming opposition of German Jews to Zionism stemmed primarily from their deeply-rooted attachment to Germany. Among religious Jews, there was also the belief that only the Messiah could restore Israel.

Ironically, among Zionist factions, the Mapai were the ones that struck the deal with the Nazis (p. 158) while the Revisionists, supporting the boycott all along, had a fascist ideology, and its paramilitary branch (Betar) even used Nazi-style uniforms and salute. Ben Gurion called Revisionist leader Jabotinsky "the Jewish Hitler." (p. 143).

The fully-realized deal would not only have ended the boycott; it would've actively helped Germany sell products while enabling Jews to acquire inexpensive farmland in Palestine. (p. 127). Black portrays the Transfer Agreement as one in which both sides were using each other for their own ends (p. 176), both sides realizing that they had sealed a devil's pact (p. 172), one that came the closest, up to that time, of creating a Jewish state (p. 250) and which, although significantly increasing Jewish population (p. 373) and wealth in Palestine (p. 373, 375, 379), ultimately failed because German-Jewish settlement of Palestine was too little, too late.

Black believes that Jewish cooperation with Germany was an indispensable step in the creation of the State of Israel (p. 382), yet concludes: "The Holocaust, World War II, and the success of the Nazis is the fault of no one except the German people. The Nazis were democratically elected and popularly supported." (p. 381).

I originally read this book when it came out as a Macmillan hardback some years ago. The new Carrol Graf edition has some fascinating new insights by the author as of 2001. Undoubtedly this re-issue was timed to coincide with Edwin Black's other major book, IBM and the Holocaust. Although I have read both books, I am still gripped by the power and drama of Transfer Agreement--must reading for those who to understand the State of Israel, Zionism and its intersection with the Nazis. Powerful reading, this is history written as no one else can.

This book is an amazing insight into Israel's tremendous historic drama--one obviously overlooked by others. Anyone who reads this book should be prepared for a whodunit style history, with gripping and tragic moments that stay with you long after the book is put down. No wonder The Transfer Agreement continues to thrill and inform people.

A revelatory account of the world Jewish community's attempt to fight the incipient Nazi regime's goal of the total destruction of the Jewish race. Rather than sit back and wait to see if conditions in Germany improved, this book documents the aggressive response of the international Zionist movement (and other Jewish groups) to combat the rabid anti-Semitism practiced almost immediately after Hitler's ascension to power. Two opposing views surfaced among these groups to how effectively to respond to the growing Nazi threat: an anti-Nazi boycott to economically destroy the Reich and a trade agreement with the Nazi to allow jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for stopping the boycott and indeed purchasing German goods to be used in the economic development of Palestine.

In case you don't think you've read that right, let me say it again: The labor faction of the Zionist movement were in favor of establishing a trade agreement with the Nazi regime under which there would be a substantial, yet limited, emigration of German Jews to Palestine in exchange for rescinding the call for anti-Nazi boycotts AND agreeing to purchase German goods! This, to me, at least was an astonishing revelation! I believe I've read my fair share of histories dealing with that time period, and nowhere, especially in accounts dealing with the formation of the state of Israel, had this information been revealed.

Leave it to Edwin Black again to expose the machinations that went into the agonizing decisions taken by the international Jewish community to fight for the lives of their brethren while at the same time having the will (yes will!) to look beyond the horrifying reality of 1933 and to building a future where the Jews would never again be victims of the deranged psychosis of anti-Semitism.

Every Jewish person should read this. This piece of Jewish history should be known to all Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists alike. Very well written book.

Glen Yeadon, author of Nazi Hydra in America, had this to say about The Transfer Agreement:

I found it very boring--it was steeped with internal Jewish politics and very little about the actual negotiations with the Nazis or the actual deal and its results. It is geared to Jewish historians and only vaguely to the war and the Nazis... I liked IBM and the War against the Weak - both were good and I bought this one on the strength of the other two. It tried to remain neutral rather than to place the blame on the Zionists. For example, there was no mention of the Zionist who helped load the trains in Hungary to Auschwitz, who was hanged in Israel in the 50s. That type of material was neatly sanitized by omission.