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The Haavara Agreement (Hebrew: הֶסְכֵּם הַעֲבָרָה, romanized: heskem haavara, lit. 'transfer agreement') was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. It was a major factor in making possible the migration of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.[1]
The agreement enabled Jews fleeing persecution under the new Nazi regime to transfer some portion of their assets to British Mandatory Palestine.[2] Emigrants sold their assets in Germany to pay for essential goods (manufactured in Germany) to be shipped to Mandatory Palestine.[3][4] The agreement was controversial and was criticised by Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky and by some non-Zionist Jews, as well as by members of both the Nazi Party and the German public.[4] For German Jews, the agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Germany; for the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, it offered access to both immigrant labour and economic support; for the Germans it facilitated the emigration of German Jews while breaking the anti-Nazi boycott of 1933, which had mass support among European and American Jews and was thought by the German state to be a potential threat to the German economy.[4][5]
- ^ "Haavara". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.
- ^ Krüger, C. G (2009). The English Historical Review 124 (510). Oxford University Press: 1208–10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40270563
- ^ Arab-Israeli Wars: 60 Years of Conflict, Ha Avara, ABC-CLIO, accessed 7 May 2013.
- ^ a b c Yf’aat Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center, accessed 28 April 2016.
- ^ Francis R. Nicosia The Third Reich & the Palestine question, pp. 41-49.