Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (18 page)

In hindsight, it may be that Jewish expectations and German apprehensions were real at that time; but it did not take long before Ger-man economists and politicians became aware of the weakness of the

anti-German economic boycott movement. If they had become aware of this weakness and the needlessness of the agreement for political capital, why did the Nazis allow the Haavara Agreement to continue even after their economy had reached the peak of full employment by the end of 1935? There is, indeed, ample evidence of growing opposition to the Haavara Agreement within the Nazi government. In November 1935, and again in November 1936 and october 1937, interministe-rial conferences discussed the continuation of the Haavara Agreement. Spokesmen for the Reichsbank, the Auslandsorganisation (overseas organization) of the Nazi party, German settlers in Palestine, and the Foreign Ministry argued that the Haavara system endangered German political interests in the Middle east by alienating the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine and in neighboring countries. At this time, even the most ardent supporters of the Haavara, for instance, officials in the Ministry of economics who had signed the agreement in 1933, were convinced that the Jews could be pressured to emigrate without their property or with only a negligible part of it. Nevertheless, the Haavara transfer system continued to function until the outbreak of the war, and its volume increased from year to year until 1939, when the agreement was terminated. After a total of 27.3 million Reichsmarks was transferred in the years 1933 and 1934, 78.5 million were transferred from 1935 to 1939, almost half of which (31.5 million Reichsmarks) were transferred in the peak year of 1937 alone.
²⁰
The ever-declining part of their capital that was paid out in Palestine and not in Germany—in the last stage, scarcely one-third of the amount was paid to the Haavara offices in Berlin—did not deter other Jewish refugees from leaving, even though emigrants to other countries could transfer only a miniscule part of their frozen accounts of so-called
Sperrmarks.

In the years following the war, Jewish officials who had been involved in the Haavara transfer system came to the conclusion that it was solely based on Hitler’s personal decision to prevent the termination of Haavara transfers after 1935, to the displeasure of some of the involved government and party agencies.
²¹
The political and economic arguments of those agencies opposed to the Haavara transfer system were well founded and reflected real German interests. However, Hit-ler decided against them in the interest of promoting Jewish emigration. Still, it remains an enigma as to why similar incentives were not granted to emigrants to other countries. Many informed guesses and speculations have tried to explain this, but have not come up with a convincing answer. what is certain is the significance of the subject

in the broader context of the road to the
Shoah
. Protagonists of the so-called “intentionalist” and “functionalist” schools of interpretation are faced with two undisputed facts: the first is that up until the war and even later, until 1941, the expulsion of the Jews from Germany by emigration was the centerpiece of Nazi
Judenpolitik
; secondly, there was the relatively marginal question of whether to expel the hated Jews penniless or to let them take with them some small part of their possessions, preferably to Palestine. This was a question that had to be decided by Hitler himself.

For Germany’s Jews, cooperation with the Nazis in the case of the Haavara Transfer Agreement did not pose a dilemma. In retrospect, I believe that it was also fully justified. Close to 40 percent of the 53,000 German Jews who were able to escape to Palestine between 1933 and 1941 arrived as “capitalists” thanks to the Haavara Agreement. It is true that the 140 million Reichsmarks they were able to rescue through Haavara represented only a very small part of the assets owned by Ger-man Jews in 1933. But for the people who brought those assets to Palestine, as well as for the economy of the Jewish
yishuv
, they were of great importance.

Conclusion and Postscript

Many questions still remain with regard to the dilemmas of cooperation. In a very few, very specific instances, it indeed turned into condemnable collaboration. Those scholars who dare to tread this path should beware of the pitfalls of historical hindsight. They should also try to mobilize all of the human empathy they can before they pass judgment on the unfortunate women and men who were burdened with the responsibility of making decisions under extremely inhuman and desperate conditions.

I am now in my eighty-eighth year. After having spent four decades researching the topics discussed at the Miller Symposium, the readers will (I hope) not regard it as improper if I conclude my essay on a personal note from my 1989 book,
From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943
:
²²

As long as Jews were still living in Germany, Jewish representatives considered it their duty to provide services for them. Since 1939, that had encompassed almost all spheres of life . . . all the way to providing for the basic necessities of everyday life . . . even if, in

connection with deportations, they were forced to act as accomplices for the Gestapo, most of these leading officials were motivated by the best of intentions. They sincerely believed, rightly or wrongly, that they could ameliorate the sufferings of Jews and prevent worse things from happening. In this they may have been mistaken, but who today has the right to stand in judgment and condemn them for that error? even after the beginning of the deportations in october 1941, there were still 150,000 Jews living in the
Altreich.
These individuals had to be provided for and given the most basic essentials for daily survival.

This paragraph was written long before 1985, the year I submitted the text of the German translation to the publishers. Both editions were given the cold shoulder by most scholars in the field, and rightly so given a number of technical errors that included some wrong dates and generally poor editing. For these, I have only myself to blame. But more importantly, there was also an almost general rejection of what was erroneously believed to be my main thesis. At the height of the heated debates between so-called “functionalists” and “intentionalists,” the book was dismissed as an argument for an alleged determin-istic linear development from the Nazis’ party program of 1920 to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But nowhere in this book or in my later publications is such an argument to be found. In fact, I was never an “intentionalist” or a “functionalist.” To prove this, I need to quote myself again. The distinction was introduced by Tim Mason at a conference in London in June 1979, and appeared in print in Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar kettenacker,
The “Führer-State”: Myth and Reality
. In my review of this volume, I wrote:

[after one has read Mason, Hans Mommsen and klaus Hildebrand] who respectively represent the ‘functionalist’ versus the ‘intentionalist’ interpretation, it remains unclear, whether the multitude of competing authorities . . . or the dictatorship of the
Führer
was the decisive factor. one is rather forced to face the fundamental question about the methodological relevance of this highly theoretical debate. After all presented arguments, one remains in the dark why both elements could not have been involved, side by side and com-plementing each other, in the process [of ‘cumulative radicalization’ (Hans Mommsen)] . . . It is, on the contrary, my opinion, that the combination of ideologically fixed targets . . . and pragmatic-tactical improvisation was characteristic for the Nazi regime.
²³

Despite some technical shortcomings, my book has opened new vis-tas of research, and some of its theses that at the time were still partly hypothetical have been confirmed by many local and regional studies. I am aware that the impression of my claiming the gradual unfolding of a pre-conceived “master-plan” for the
Shoah
may easily have arisen in the minds of readers, and even (not so unusual) of reviewers, who are content with reading the introduction of a book, some random pages, and its conclusions. Today, being twenty-five years older and familiar with the current stage of historical knowledge, I certainly would have formulated many of my statements differently. Still, I see no reason to change my general approach and most of my theses, including my evaluation of the intentions and functions of most leading persons of the Jewish leadership as outlined above.

Notes

1. x. Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz vom 4.7.1939 (Tenth Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, 4 July 1939),
   Reichsgesetzblatt
   I, 1097ff.
   
2. Raul Hilberg,
   The Destruction of the European Jews
   (Student edition) (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 62ff. The text is translated unchanged in the Ger-man edition,
   Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden
   (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990), 196ff. Here, “Jewish Council” is rightly translated as
   Judenrat
   .
   
3. Hannah Arendt,
   Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil
   (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 111.
   
4. Isaiah Trunk,
   Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation
   (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
   
5. See Avraham Barkai,
   From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943
   (Hanover: University Press of New england, 1989), and Avraham Barkai and Paul Mendes-Flohr,
   German-Jewish History in Modern Times
   , Vol. IV,
   Renewal and Destruction
   , ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
   
6. See Shalom Adler-Rudel,
   Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1880–1940. Zugleich eine Geschichte der Organisationen, die sie betreuten
   (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1959), and
   Jüdische Selbsthilfe unter dem Naziregime 1933–1939
   (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1974). of the more than half a million Jews in Germany at the end of world war I, some twenty percent were generally un-assimilated and were less affluent Jews from eastern europe.
   
7. Avraham Barkai,
   “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 1893–1938
   (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002).
   
8. Isaac Deutscher,
   The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays
   , ed. Tamara Deutscher (Lon-don: oxford University Press, 1968).
   
9. eugen Fuchs, “Aus der Jugend des Centralvereins,” in
   CV-Zeitung
   , 4 May 1922.
   
10. See Avraham Barkai, “Zionist and Non-Zionist Reactions to the Rise of the Nazi Party in Germany’s September 1930 elections,”
    Moreshet. Journal for the Study of the Holocaust and Antisemitism
    6 (Spring 2009): 119–136.
    
11. Francis R. Nicosia,
    The Third Reich and the Palestine Question
    (London: I.B. Tauris, 1985), 52ff.
    
12. See Michael wildt, ed.,
    Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938
    (Munich: oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 139ff.
    
13. Leaning on the centuries-old tradition of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, immigration to Israel is termed
    aliyah
    (Hebrew for “ascent” or “improvement”) in Zionist termi-nology.
    Hachschara
    is the Hebrew term used for the “occupational retraining” that many young Jews in europe underwent before their
    aliyah
    to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.
    
14. Nicosia,
    Third Reich
    , 54.
    
15. See Francis R. Nicosia, “Jewish Farmers in Hitler’s Germany: Zionist occupational Retraining and Nazi ‘Jewish Policy,’”
    Holocaust and Genocide Studies
    19 (2005): 365–389.
    
16. Nicosia,
    Third Reich
    , 58.
    
17. Joel könig (ezra Ben-Gershom),
    David: Aufzeichnungen eines Überlebenden
    (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 115ff.
    
18. The most comprehensive study of internal Jewish discussions about the Haavara Agreement and its influence on the anti-German boycott is Yoav Gelber’s MA the-sis, “Zionist Policy and the Haavara Agreement,” published only in Hebrew in Nos. xVII and xVIII (January/November 1974) of
    Yalkut Moreshet
    , Tel Aviv. For a condensed version, see his “Reactions of the Zionist Movement and the Yishuv to the Nazis’ Rise to Power,”
    Yad Vashem Studies
    18 (1987): 41–69. See also Nicosia,
    Third Reich
    , ch. 3, and edwin Black,
    The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine
    (New York: Brookline Books, 1999). Black’s volume is a new edition of the book that was originally published by Macmillan in 1984 with the different and entirely misleading subtitle “The Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.” The reader can find much interesting and detailed information in both editions, although Black incorrectly believes that the boycott could have toppled the Third Reich at its very start.
    
19. See Avraham Barkai,
    Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy
    (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
    
20. werner Feilchenfeld, Dolf Michaelis, and Ludwig Pinner,
    Haavara-Transfer nach Palästina und Einwanderung deutscher Juden 1933–1939
    (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1972), 75.
    
21. See Avraham Barkai, “German Interests in the Haavara-Transfer Agreement,”
    Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
    xxxV (1990): 245–266.
    
22. Barkai,
    From Boycott
    , 183–184.
    
23. Review in
    Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte
    xIV (1985): 376ff.
    

    Chapter Four