The Transfer Agreement (3 page)

Of course, there were many other generous archivists too numerous to list here, but they as well have my special thanks. Libraries were also vital to my work because each library is distinguished by its own special collections and its own unique selection of publications from the period. Moreover, without the interlibrary loan program, I could not have worked with forgotten volumes suddenly discovered in distant cities but needed urgently. And so I give sincere thanks to the library staffs of Spertus College; Northwestern, Harvard, Columbia, and Roosevelt Universities; Hebrew Union College; the University of Bonn; the University of Frankfurt; the Israel National Library at Hebrew University; the University of Texas at Austin; the public libraries of Chicago, Boston, and New York; the American Jewish Periodical Center in Cincinnati; the Center for Library Research in Chicago; and the British Library in London.

Doors throughout the world were opened for me through the gracious help of many people. At the top of the list of those who helped is Rosemary Krensky, followed by Byron Sherwin, Sybil Milton, Robert Wolfe, Fannie Zelcer, David Kahn, Maynard Wishner, Carol Voss, and friends in the Israeli government. Once inside the doors, I needed guidance, and it was granted by many who gave me their time and expertise, including those mentioned above as well as Shaul Arlosoroff, Yehuda Bauer, Jack Boas, Ehud Evriel, Werner Feilchenfeld, Morris Frommer, Yoav Gelber, Moshe Gottleib, Ben Halpern, John L. Heineman, Yehiel Kudaschai, Abraham Margoliot, Dolf Michaelis, Justine Wise Polier, Arthur Schweitzer, David Yisraeli, and many others.

The monumental challenge of this book would have been impossible to face without the support of my friends, including Robert Tamarkin, Max Pastin, Richard Kimmel, members of my research team, my loving parents Harry and Ethel Black, and Elizabeth Black, plus the one man who pressed me endlessly but without whom this book would never have come to pass: Edward T. Chase.

On August 7, 1933, leaders of the Zionist movement concluded a controversial pact with the Third Reich which, in its various forms, transferred some 60,000 Jews and $100 million— almost $800 million in 1984 dollars— to Jewish Palestine. In return, Zionists would halt the worldwide Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year. Ultimately, the Transfer Agreement saved lives, rescued assets, and seeded the infrastructure of the Jewish State.

Fiery debates instantly ignited throughout the pre-War Jewish world as rumors of the pact leaked out. The acrimony was rekindled in 1984 with the original publication of
The Transfer
Agreement
and has never stopped. Understanding the painful process and the agonizing decisions taken by Jewish leadership requires a journey. This journey will not be a comfortable one with clear-cut concepts and landmarks. The facts, as they unfold, will challenge your sense of the period, break your heart, and try your ethics… just as it did for those in 1933 who struggled to identify the correct path through a Fascist minefield and away from the conflagration that awaited European Jewry

To discover
The Transfer Agreement
, I took that journey.

My journey began in 1978 when a small bank of misfits preaching Nazism and waving swastikas decided to march through the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie. Suddenly an unimportant group of bigots provoked an important controversy. The outraged community was determined either to prevent the march or to confront the neo-Nazis on the parade route. Many Skokie residents were Holocaust survivors and remembered well that only fifty years before, Hitler's circle had also started as a small band of social misfits. The Jewish community would not ignore an attempt to reintroduce the Nazi concept—no matter how feeble the source.

But establishment Jewish leaders counseled Jews to shutter their windows and pay no attention. And a Jewish attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union rose reluctantly to champion the neo-Nazis' right to freedom of expression—over the survivors' right to be left alone. In covering the issue as a young journalist, and reacting to the crisis as a Jew and the son of Holocaust survivors, I was confused by the response of Jewish leaders.

To prepare for a
Chicago Reader
interview with the Jewish ACLU attorney representing the neo-Nazis, I spoke with Jewish scholar Rabbi Byron Sherwin. He told me there were many enigmas about the Jewish response to Nazism, one of which was a long-rumored arrangement between the Third Reich and the Zionist Organization involving the transfer of German Jewish assets to Palestine. He added that little was known about the arrangement, if it indeed existed.

I couldn't believe what I had heard. The possibility of a Zionist-Nazi arrangement for the sake of Israel was inconceivable for a person of my background. My mother, as a girl, had been pushed by her mother through the vent of a boxcar on the way to the Treblinka death camp. She was shot by Nazi soldiers and buried in a shallow mass grave. My father had stepped out of line during a long march to a destiny with death. While hiding in the woods, he came upon a leg protruding from the snow. This was my mother. Together, by night and by courage, these two Polish teenagers survived in the forest for two years. When the war was over, they cautiously emerged from the woods believing that nearly all Jews may have been exterminated—except them. The question for them was whether there was still any use being “Jewish.” And yet—believing themselves to be among the last of their people—they decided to live on, as Jews, and never forget.

Quickly, my parents learned that others had survived, although almost none from their families. They resettled in the United States. I was born in Chicago, raised in Jewish neighborhoods, and my parents tried never to speak of their experience. Like the other children of Holocaust survivors, my life was overshadowed by my family's tragedy. And, like other Jews, I saw the State of Israel as the salvation and redemption of the remnant of the Jewish people. I had spent time on a kibbutz and returned to Israel several times after that. For years, I considered emigrating to Israel. The very meaning of Israel was a deep motivation in my life.

Yet there were incongruities I could never understand. Everywhere I looked in Israel, I saw German equipment. The icons of Nazi commerce— Mercedes, Grundig, Siemens, Krupp—were thriving in the Jewish State, even as the ban on Wagner's music was strictly enforced. And so many families were German Jews who had come to Israel during the Hitler era.

For a year, I filed Rabbi Sherwin's rumor in a mental box of imponderables. He had said many times that the most important rule in approaching the Holocaust is that nothing makes sense. And yet I needed to make sense out of it. If I could, then perhaps there was a reason my mother and father had lived, while six million had died.

Working through the staff and resources of Spertus College of Judaica, I was able to obtain some rare Hebrew and German materials that documented in skeletal form that the arrangement indeed existed. After a great deal of personal anguish, I made my decision.

When I told my parents, my mother threatened to disown me and my father threatened to personally strangle me if I dared lend any credence to the notion of Nazi-Zionist cooperation. This was done against a background of rising anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli attempts to somehow link the Nazi regime with Zionists.

When I later showed my parents a hundred-page summary of my proposed book, my mother cried and said, “Now I understand what I could never understand. Write the book.” My father, who fought in the war as a Zionist Betar partisan, also gave me his blessing with the simple words: “Go write the book.”

My agent said he thought there was only one editor with the stamina to take on this book. That man was Edward T. Chase, editor-in-chief of new York Times Books, a man with preeminent credentials in WWII and Holocaust books. Chase read the proposal and said yes.

I spent the next several years traveling through Germany, Israel, England, and the United States, locating forgotten files in archives, scouring newspapers of the era, interviewing principals, and surveying government papers. Millions of microfilm frames of captured Nazi documents had never been analyzed. Boxes of boycott papers had never been organized. Worse, I found that little had been written about Hitler's first year—1933. For months, the information confounded me. Nothing made sense. There were so many contradictions. Nazis promoting Jewish nationalism. American Jewish leaders refusing even to criticize the Third Reich. Principal players who said one thing in public and did the opposite in private. Everything was upside down. And historians of the period told me they were equally confused about what had really occurred.

Finally I was able to piece the information together and reconstruct events. To do so, I had to clear my mind of preconceived notions and stare at the situation through the eyes of those who lived through it. And yet, after all the researching and reading and writing, my intense inner attachment to the Zionist concept and Jewish nationalism and the State of Israel only deepened. That's because I had finally made
sense
of it. And anyone who does will understand Zionism for what it is: a national movement, with the rights and wrongs, the ethics and expediencies, found in any other national movement.

The Jews were the first to recognize the Hitler threat, and the first to react to that threat. The fact they were foiled by their own disunity merely puts them in the company of all mankind. Who did not confront the Hitler menace with indecision? Who did not seal pacts of expediency with the Third Reich? The Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Supreme Moslem Council all endorsed the Hitler regime. The United States, England, France, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Japan, Ireland, Poland, and dozens of other nations all signed friendship and trade treaties and knowingly contributed to German economic and military recovery. The international banking and commercial community—no less than the Zionists—saw Germany as indispensable to its salvation. The Zionists were indeed in the company of all mankind—with this exception: The Jews were the only ones with a gun to their heads.

Hitler was not unique; he was organized. But among Hitler's enemies, none were organized—except the Zionists. The world recognized the Hitler threat and hoped it would not arrive. The Zionists recognized the Hitler threat and always expected it. The events of the Hitler era and the Transfer Agreement were ultimately determined by those factors.

My belief in the Jewish people, in American Jewish organizations, in Zionism, and in the State of Israel and its founding mothers and fathers was never shaken. Those who sense outrage or anger in my words are hearing but the echo of their agony.

Edwin Black
Chicago
February 27, 1984

S
HOCK
WAVES
rumbled through the world on January
30, I933.
The leader of a band of political hooligans had suddenly become chief of a European state. Before January
30, I933,
the repressive ideology of the National Socialist German Workers Party-NSDAP-had been resisted by the German government. That would all change now.

Hitler had become chancellor of Germany-a shock, but no surprise. The November
I932
general elections were held amid public hysteria over Germany's economic depression. Despite expensive emergency makework programs, more than 5 million people were still unemployed on election eve. In some areas the jobless rate was
75
percent. More than
I7
million persons—about a third of the entire population—were dependent upon a welfare stipend equivalent to a few dollars per family per month. Such families knew hungry nights once or twice weekly. Destitute people slept in the streets. The memory of closed or defaulted banks was fresh. The Nazis blamed the Jews and sought voter support through street violence against Jewish members of Germany's urban middle class.