All applications from Germany for immigration to Palestine had to be made through the offices of the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle (the Palestine Trust). The organisation had a remarkable history and was substantially different from the Nazi-run emigration offices later set up in Vienna and Prague by Adolf Eichmann, and which Reinhard Heydrich, as head of the SS under Himmler, was resolved after Kristallnacht to replicate in Berlin.
The Treuhand-Stelle’s partner, the Trust and Transfer Office Ha’avara Ltd in Tel Aviv, known simply as the Ha’avara, or ‘Transfer’, was established in the summer of 1933 as a result of a strange confluence of interests between the agricultural needs of the growing Jewish settlement in Palestine and the more rationally motivated departments of the Nazi government. A less likely coincidence of concerns would be hard to imagine. Yet ultimately the agreement, which was supported not only by the German Foreign office and the Treasury but even for a time by parts of the SS because it appeared to offer a practical resolution to the ‘Jewish problem’, allowed many thousands of Jews to escape Germany and avoid total destitution while enabling the Nazi state to rob them of most of their assets within the sanction of an ostensibly legal framework. It wasn’t until the second year of war, when the policy of removing the Jews beyond the borders of the Reich proved impracticable and no longer appealing to Nazi ideology that the words ‘solution’ and ‘Jewish problem’ combined irrevocably to form a rather different meaning. While filled with murderous rhetoric and contemptuous violence from the first, it was not initially obvious that Nazi policy would necessarily lead to systematically organised, comprehensive mass extermination, or how it would do so.
The agreement also had to conform to the policies of the British administration under which Palestine had been ruled since the League of Nations formally appointed his Britannic Majesty as the Mandatory for the territories in July 1922. This act incorporated almost verbatim the wording of the Balfour Declaration in which, in a letter dated 2 November 1917, Lord James Balfour announced to Lionel Rothschild, then chairman of the Zionist Federation, that His Majesty’s Government:
viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, [it being] clearly understood that nothing might be done which would prejudice the existing civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.
The meaning of ‘favour’ and the implications of the concurrent ‘understanding’ were to vary in the minds of the territory’s British rulers as the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine deteriorated over the following years, with disastrous implications for the Jews of Europe.
Negotiations with the German authorities began in 1932, the last year of the Weimar Republic, after the German government under Chancellor Brüning imposed a ban on the removal of capital from Germany in response to the global economic crisis following the great depression. A certain Sam Cohen ran a citrus growing company in Palestine, Hanotaiah Ltd of Tel Aviv, and was keenly aware of the need for heavy equipment to develop the land. In March 1933 he signed an agreement with the German Foreign Ministry to enable the transfer, in the form of agricultural machinery, of up to a million Reichsmarks belonging to German Jews. Through this device Jews already anxious to leave Germany could take with them a small portion of their assets, just enough to avoid immediate penury on their arrival in a country where, as the popular saying went, the only commodities available in plenty were sun, sand and stone. They were required to deposit a significant sum in a special account in Germany as payment for the equipment bought by Hanotaiah Ltd and other interested companies, and were subsequently reimbursed upon their arrival in Palestine by the importers, who paid in this manner for their purchases.
Obtaining the necessary papers to enter Palestine was far less difficult in the early 1930s than it would later become, because British policy was still relatively relaxed with regard to Jewish immigration. However, a White Paper issued by Colonial Secretary Passfield in October 1930 had expressed the view that the Balfour Declaration imposed on Britain an equal obligation to both Jews and Arabs, and that immigration should not be allowed to rise to a rate which would put the local Arab population out of work. But, due to the influence of Chaim Weizmann, who had the diplomatic skills and personal charisma of a world-class statesman without at that point representing a state, and to whom Britain felt indebted for his invention at a critical stage in the First World War of a way of manufacturing acetone out of maize, any change in policy was swiftly rejected. As a result, Palestine received between 40,000 and 60,000 Jewish immigrants each year, with an even greater total in 1936. How immigrants were chosen was left largely to the discretion of the Jewish Agency, recognised by Britain in 1930 as the authoritative body in this regard and named in Article 4 of the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations. It was during this comparatively relaxed period that Alfred and his family were able to procure certificates with relative ease.
Although Hitler’s rhetoric had long threatened them with a far more sinister fate, and violence was rife, Nazi policy throughout the 1930s was chiefly aimed at forcing the Jews out of Germany. With few countries willing to accept immigrants, let alone impoverished refugees, Palestine provided an essential destination. It wasn’t until towards the end of the decade that the Nazi leadership began to feel concern lest the establishment of a national homeland would allow the forces of international Jewry an increased opportunity to exercise their demonic influence over world affairs. Before then, the possibility that the Jews would actually succeed in forming a country of their own had seemed to them too remote to merit serious consideration. The Nazi government and the Zionist infrastructure thus found in one another improbable partners in promoting, for entirely different reasons, a common agenda of encouraging Jews to remove themselves from the Reich and resettle in Palestine.
But solving its Jewish problem wasn’t the only concern behind the readiness of the Nazi leadership to listen with interest to the overtures from Palestine. Germany badly needed foreign income and the Middle East offered a potential new market for its exports. Hjalmar Schacht, director of the Reichsbank, was a realist. He was well aware that too rapid an exclusion of Jews from Germany’s business infrastructure would be disastrous for the economy. From after the initial boycott of Jewish shops and businesses across Germany on 1 April 1933 until his eventual dismissal by Hitler in 1937, he sought to exercise a restraining influence on the Führer and his more militant ministers. He favoured the gradual and orderly takeover of Jewish assets, not out of concern for Germany’s Jews, but because he considered this to be in the country’s best economic interests. Hitler, too, came to understand that it was unwise to act drastically until the economy was sufficiently robust to finance the forthcoming war, which he had always regarded as inevitable, that is to say, desirable. The transfer of funds in such a way as allowed the greater part to be confiscated in the process with the apparent consent of their owners, and the sale of German goods abroad with the benefits it brought to the country’s balance of payments, both served these ends well.
There was yet another reason for the Nazi interest in establishing a trade relationship with the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Such an agreement would be a particularly eloquent way of breaking the boycott of German goods, which was perceived as being led by international Jewry abroad. In actual terms the boycott probably did relatively little damage to Germany, but it was taken very seriously in Berlin, precisely because of the exaggerated importance attributed to the influence of international Jewry. The myth that Jews were immensely wealthy and manipulated world affairs through their control of international finance and the media was not only carefully exploited, as evidenced by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda films, but widely credited, and not only by the Nazis.
The question of the boycott was hotly debated in Jewish circles as well. It came to a head at the eighteenth World Zionist Congress, held in the late summer of 1933 in Prague. In the end, it was judged that a pragmatic approach to helping Jews to get out of an ever more threatening Germany was more important than the boycott and would in the long term have a more constructive effect on the Jewish future.
As a result of this unlikely combination of interests, an agreement