Ha'avara Agreement

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Haʿavara Agreement ( Hebrew הֶסְכֵּם הַעֲבָרָה Heskem Haʿavarah , German 'Agreement of Transfer' ) or Palestine Transfer , also Hoofien Agreement after Elizer Sigfrid Hoofien (1881–1957), the then director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank , was the name of an agreement concluded on August 25, 1933 which came about after three months of negotiations between the Jewish Agency , the Zionist Association for Germany and the German Reich Ministry of Economics . It should facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine and at the same time promote German exports. It was controversial in the Zionist movement because it ran counter to boycott measures against the National Socialists that were being carried out at the same time as the agreement was passed in 1933.

history

The agreement originally emerged from a private initiative in Palestine. Sam Cohen was general director of Hanotea, a company for citrus plantations, and in May 1933 signed a contract with the Reich Ministry of Economics worth 1 million Reichsmarks, which was soon expanded to three million Reichsmarks. German Jews wishing to leave the country could deposit up to 40,000 Reichsmarks into a blocked account and received the equivalent in Palestine pounds or material assets such as houses or citrus plantations in Palestine. Hanotea used the funds from the blocked account to import German goods into Palestine. The Reich Ministry of Economics assumed that this had been approved by the Zionist organizations, but this was contradicted by Georg Landauer from the Zionist Association for Germany (ZVfD), and Jewish organizations in England and the USA, on the contrary, pushed for a boycott of Germany. That changed with the increasingly threatening situation of the Jews in Germany. A proposal from the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency for Palestina Chaim Arlosoroff to the German consul general in Jerusalem Heinrich Wolff from April 1933 was further developed. This had since been further developed by Pinchas Rutenberg, the founder of the Palestine Electric Company, and in July 1933 Werner Senator informed the Zionist executive in London in confidence. The Jewish assets in Germany were to be dissolved by a trust company and transferred to Palestine via a liquidity bank that was to be established by shareholders outside Germany. The trust fund paid into the bank, which in turn issued bonds to Jews abroad, who received foreign currency in return. The German government was supposed to take over a transfer guarantee for interest and repayment of the bonds. In return, the bank was supposed to use the assets left behind to support German exports to the new home countries of the Jewish emigrants. In August 1933 there was a decisive meeting in the Reich Ministry of Economics. On the Jewish side were the Hanotea (Sam Cohen, Moses Nachnes), Arthur Ruppin (later head of the German department of the Jewish Agency), Siegfried Hoofien from the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Tel Aviv and the representatives of the ZVfD (Georg Landauer, Siegfried Moses) present. It was not agreed to found a liquidity bank, but a trust company in Palestine, which paid the emigrants what had been paid into a Reichsmark special account of the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Bank of the Temple Society at the Reichsbank and also took over the sales of German exports . The trust company also received a de facto monopoly on such property transfers by Jewish emigrants to Palestine. On August 28, 1933, the contract was implemented in circular no. 54/1933 of the Reich Ministry of Economics. He was given the name Haavara (Hebrew for transfer). The trust company in Palestine was named Trust and Transfer Office Haavara Ltd. and was under the direction of Werner Feilchenfeld . In Germany, the Palestine Trust Agency for Advising German Jews GmbH (Paltreu) was set up with the participation of the banks MM Warburg (Hamburg), AE Wassermann (Berlin) and the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Tel Aviv.

Losses brought compensation payments to reduce export prices, which would otherwise have been too high due to the non-devaluation of the Reichsmark. In addition, from 1937 there were negative lists for goods with a high proportion of foreign raw materials, for which compensation had to be paid. In Palestine, under pressure from the Palestinian Arabs and the temple society, there were positive lists that restricted the imported goods to those that were only sold in other countries with export subsidies. In order to sell more goods, Haavara founded a subsidiary NEMICO for the sale of goods in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. At the urging of the British Colonial Office, the Haavara had to refrain from applying for contracts in cases in which a British company expressed interest. Within the international Zionist movement, the agreement met with fierce opposition, particularly in America. At the 19th Zionist Congress in Lucerne in 1935, the supporters of the Haavara prevailed. However, some restrictions were decided (limitation to Palestine) and the shares in Haavara were transferred from the Anglo-Palestine Bank to the Jewish Agency.

execution

On November 5, 1933, the Trust and Transfer Office Haʿavara Ltd. registered, as it were as a private company. At its conference in Lucerne on August 20, 1935, the World Zionist Organization approved the Haʿavara degree by a majority and even took all of its activities under its own direction.

The British administration of Palestine required those willing to immigrate to have an immigration certificate ( capitalist certificate) and, associated with this, proof of financial resources of £ 1,000 P ( Palestine pounds ) per capita, which corresponded to around ℛℳ 8,000 ( Reichsmarks ). According to the German foreign exchange regulations - the Reich flight tax decided in 1931 in the course of the global economic crisis , officially to curb capital flight and foreign exchange speculation , but instrumentalized from 1933 to confiscate the assets of emigrating mainly Jewish Germans by tax - high discounts were withheld from foreign transfers .

The Haʿavara Agreement made it possible for those affected to transfer part of their property to Palestine , while a certain percentage of the property to be transferred was withheld by the German tax authorities as an escape tax. Initially this tax rate was 25%; it was gradually increased in the course of the increased state-controlled extraction of property from Jews. Compared with exile countries, the German tax authorities levied a lower rate of the Reich flight tax on transfers to Palestine. In other words, German refugees on the way to Palestine were taxed less by the tax authorities when trying to save at least part of their property than their peers when they fled to other countries of exile. Jewish German emigrants paid a sum in Reichsmarks into a German account at the Transfer Office and at the same time paid the resulting amount of Reich flight tax to an account held by the tax authorities.

German manufacturers used the credit balances in the Transfer Office's German accounts to pay for goods that were then exported to Palestine, while the importer deposited the equivalent in Palestine pounds into an account at the Transfer Office in Palestine. The Palestinian currency board kept the Palestine pound at par with the pound sterling until May 1948 . In other cases, emigrants brought the machines they paid for through the Transfer Office and then exported as a stake in existing or newly founded Palestinian companies, and instead of a pound credit they received shares in these companies; so many new companies arose in Palestine. In turn, the future emigrant could sell these shares to investors through appointed trustees who could pay the shares in pounds if he still had to raise the 1,000 Palestine pounds in order to obtain a capitalist certificate called an entry visa for Palestine. These payments also went to the Transfer Office's Palestinian accounts . On arrival in Palestine, the emigrants were then reimbursed in Palestinian pounds from such sterling balances in Palestinian accounts of the Transfer Office .

Because of the strict allocation of German foreign exchange income, primarily for imports of German armaments requirements, all other payments between Germany and Palestine also had to go through the accounts of the Transfer Office . For example, non-Jewish Palestinian Germans in Sarona or Bir Salem were paid fewer and fewer citrus exports from year to year, with the result that German consumers were increasingly deprived of their popular Jaffa oranges , while at the same time the Reich government kept fewer and fewer Palestine pounds in the Transfer Office's accounts for donations and current Granted grants that German organizations needed to give to their many charitable institutions in Palestine and to pay wages to German expats working there . Experts from abroad from Germany were accordingly sent back to the Reich and the charitable work was gradually reduced.

The contract was used by around 50,000 to 60,000 Jewish Germans , goods and goods were exported at an estimated price of 140 million Reichsmarks , which resulted in corresponding payments from the importers in Palestine pounds. From 1937 the British authorities increasingly blocked the execution because of the uprising of the Arab population. With the start of the war in 1939, foreign exchange transfers (although formally permitted until 1941) were no longer possible.

Contemporary criticism and reception

In Palestine and abroad, the agreement between individual Jewish organizations and the Nazi regime was heavily criticized. At the 18th Zionist Congress in Prague in 1933, for example, the writer Shalom Asch described the agreement with Hitler's regime as a “betrayal of world Jewry”. Chaim Arlosoroff , then chief negotiator for the Jewish Agency, was probably the victim of an assassination attempt in June 1933 .

reception

Today the Haʿavara Agreement is used by investigative journalists like Edwin Black and critics of Zionism like Lenni Brenner to prove a community of interests between Zionism and National Socialism . A contrary position this represented Alexander Schölch in his study The Third Reich, the Zionist movement and the Palestine conflict .

See also

literature

  • Edwin Black : The Transfer Agreement . The Dramatic Story Of The Pact Between The Third Reich And Jewish Palestine . 25th Anniversary ed.Dialog Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-914153-13-9 (English, first edition: 1984).
  • Avraham Barkai : German Interests in the Ha ʿ avara Transfer Agreement 1933–1939 . In: Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute . tape 35 , 1990, pp. 245-266 , doi : 10.1093 / leobaeck / 35.1.245 (English).
  • Werner Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis, Ludwig Pinner: Haʿavara transfer to Palestine and immigration of German Jews 1933–1939 (= series of scientific treatises by the Leo Baeck Institute. Vol. 26). Mohr, Tübingen 1972, ISBN 3-16-833851-6 .
  • Tom Segev : The Seventh Million. The Holocaust and Israel's Politics of Remembrance. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-498-06244-1 , especially p. 31 ff.
  • Yfaat Weiss : Haʿavara Agreement. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 490-494.
  • David Yisraeli: The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement . In: Journal of Contemporary History . tape 6 , no. 2 , 1971, p. 129–148 , doi : 10.1177 / 002200947100600207 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to “De-Jewification”: The Economic Struggle for Existence of the Jews in the Third Reich 1933–1943, Fischer 1988
  2. ↑ Fritz Kieffer, Persecution of the Jews in Germany - an internal matter? International reactions to the refugee problem 1933–1939, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2002, pp. 79ff
  3. ↑ Avraham Barkai: From Boycott to “De-Jewification”. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 111ff.
  4. ↑ These were z. B. The Jerusalem Association , Association for the Syrian Orphanage , Association of the Holy Land and others.
  5. ↑ These were z. B. the Deaconess Hospital Jerusalem , the Galilean, Philistine and Syrian orphanages , the Jesushilfe asylum for lepers, Talitha Kumi , the Carmel Mission , the Auguste Viktoria Hospital or German schools abroad such as the one in Sarona .
  6. ↑ Alexander Schölch: The Third Reich, the Zionist Movement and the Palestine Conflict . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . tape 30 , no. 4 , 1982, pp. 646-674 ( ifz-muenchen.de [PDF]).