The Cutting Edge

The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Edwin Black, a 25th anniversary edition, afterword by Abraham Foxman, Dialog Press. 2009. 430 pages.

Seventy-six years ago a small group of Jewish German Zionists met with the Nazis and created a device for the rescue of the German Jewish community called the Transfer Agreement. That agreement helped rescue my wife’s aunt and uncle. That agreement rescued more than 60,000 Jews and permitted the transfer of their wealth to the tune of more than 100 million dollars or just fewer than 1.7 billion dollars in today’s money.

It also caused rifts in the Jewish community in Jewish Palestine and the US that are still being felt today. It caused division and bitterness in the Zionist movement that still is felt today. It provided anti-Zionist, anti-Israel propagandists with ammunition to question the very founding of the modern State of Israel. It was, without a doubt, one of the many choice-less choices that would confront the worldwide Jewish community throughout the years of the Shoah. Yet, it had to be done.

Edwin Black’s 25th anniversary edition of The Transfer Agreement tells the story of this tragic success wonderfully. He lays out all of the characters involved, the ups and downs, the emotional responses, the feeling of many that a devil’s agreement was being put together. Black insightfully shows us that the perception of the Nazis was that the worldwide anti-German boycott was feared by the Nazi hierarchy.

The Nazis in many ways were fooled by their own anti-Jewish propaganda which railed against world Jewry allegedly in control of the world economy. Yet, the Zionist leadership in Palestine before the war understood perfectly how weak the world wide Jewish community really was. So in a kind of brilliant turnabout the Zionist leaders used the very same myths to gain Nazi agreement for thousands of German Jews and their wealth to be transferred out of Germany to Palestine. This continued until just before the war began in 1939. As Black points out the Transfer Agreement “stands alone as the sole asset rescue that actually worked.”

Critical as we may be more than 76 years after the agreement, painful as the agreement was from a moral perspective it is clear from a Jewish view, the Transfer Agreement was done to rescue the captive, to ransom the enslaved. The Talmud and other Jewish sacred works speak in great detail about the Jewish community’s obligation to rescue kidnapped or enslaved Jews. It is considered akin to saving a life. So what the Zionists who met with the Nazis did in 1933 was a true mitzvah in all of its positive implications. But the old saw, “No good deed goes unpunished” also is at work here as Black shows in his descriptions of the fallout from the agreement.

Those 60,000 Jews and their $100 million helped in a major way set the ground work for the creation of a Jewish State in 1948. Not a few believe that the creation of Israel would have happened with or without the German Jewish contribution from the Transfer Agreement because the Jewish Agency was already well along in creating a state within a state in Palestine. But the resources of people, goods and money the Transfer Agreement provided made the creation of the state of Israel happen earlier than it would have naturally.

Troubling as it was to make a pact with the devil, this was no means-ends moral dilemma. It was a decision made based on realistic assessments of what the Jewish community could and could not do on the world stage in 1933. Based on that realism, the Zionist leadership succeeded—but at great cost.
After 25 years, The Transfer Agreement is worth reading again and its message just as important today as it was 25 years ago.

Dr. Samuel M. Edelman, Executive Director, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and Co-Director, The State of California Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance.