John Callaway (of WTTW's Chicago Tonight) interviews Edwin Black on the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement between Zionist Jews in Palestine and the Third Reich

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Economic wars. It led to a deal, the transfer agreement. That story on Chicago tonight with John Callaway..

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evening. On Chicago tonight.

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Edwin Black, Rabbi Byron Sherwin of Spertus College of Judaica, and Rabbi William Frankel, past president of the Chicago Zionist Federation, discuss the transfer agreement controversy with host John Callaway. Good evening and welcome to the program. And Edwin Black. Thank you very much for being here this evening. Help me set the stage, if you would, if I understand it's 1933. Your book centers on 1933. Hitler has just come to power. The German economy is in a terrible mess. It is really threatened by the prospect of a worldwide Jewish boycott because Hitler hasn't wasted any time going to work on the Jews inside Germany, punishing them in all sorts of ways. And then as a result of this, and we're jumping way ahead. A deal is struck, which you call in your book the transfer agreement. Give us a capsule of what that was and then we'll work our way backwards.

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exchange for the transfer of Jewish people and money from Germany to Palestine. The Zionists agreed to sabotage the boycott, which threatened to topple the Hitler regime in the first year.

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that it is a deal with the devil in effect, and it divided badly the Jewish world.

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deal with the devil to save Jewish lives.

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to create a Jewish state. You're arguing to save.

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Jewish lives.

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saying that's the first priority? That's right. Would a Jewish state would the state of Israel exist if this deal hadn't gone through?

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the continuing economic relationship between the Third Reich and the Zionist movement? It seems doubtful that there would be a state of Israel as we know it today.

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if the boycott, which never did finally come to fruition, that it potentially could have had come off. Could Hitler have been put out of business early on in 1933 or 34.

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a several-month period during the spring and early summer of 1933, there was a chance, a chance that if all the Jews were organized and the Zionist movement was behind them and the American Jewish Committee was there and the Christian world was mobilized, that the Hitler regime could have been toppled through the economic chaos that would have resulted. But there's no question that the blood of the German Jews would have been discovered underneath the ashes of the German economy because the retaliation and the massacres against the German Jewish hostages in Germany would have been certain by the time the summer of 33 comes. It's very difficult to overthrow the Hitler regime and the chances diminish radically as we get into 1933. And then it's simply a holding action to keep Hitlerism within the borders of the Third Reich and stop its spread from the rest of Europe.

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right. And it is because the Germans, the Jews inside Germany are being held hostage. 600,000 of them, in effect, are being held hostage. In 1933, the Jewish leaders, the members of the Jewish committee in the United States and other Jewish leaders around the world are saying go easy on this notion of a boycott, because you may enrage Hitler and you may see the punishment even worse. Was that not the governing factor against an immediate total boycott?

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was the governing factor by those Jewish leaders in America who were of German descent, those Jewish leaders who were of East European descent and or who represented an East European constituency such as the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War veterans felt that the only way to stop Hitler was an effective boycott was to to protest visibly, to isolate him diplomatically and economically. And and that we could not stop just because there were threats of reprisals. They knew that by opposing the czar several years earlier, they had increased the attacks upon the Jewish hostages there. And at that time, they said Jewish blood must be spilled in the war of liberty. But it's understandable how people could be fearful at that time for their own kith and kin living in Germany.

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the ironies are incredible in this story because there was a deep relationship between the Jews and Germany and the and the and Germany as a nation. Germany, you write, had, in effect, saved the Jews in Palestine from annihilation from the Turks during World War One. That's right. There was this great love of Germany and and the culture of Germany by many of the Jews. And while the deal was being made to get the German Jews to Palestine, the German Jews were the last Jews on earth. Apparently many of them who wanted to go to Palestine anywhere else but Palestine.

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right. The German Jews were one segment of the Jewish community which considered them themselves anti-Zionist. They considered themselves 101% German. They were Germans who were by accident of birth. Of Jewish religion. Many of them were reformed Jews, Jews of little identity. And the last place they would have gone to was Palestine. It is an extraordinary irony in one of the telling stories of the transfer agreement how an organization and a movement within Germany that represented just 1 or 2% of the community became the the custodian of the entire Zionism.

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represented 1 or 2% of the Jewish population of 600,000. In Germany, you're saying, according.

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its own best estimates.,

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in Palestine, you've got the Jewish portion of Palestine, you say is only 4% of the Arab parts, 20%. Great Britain has the rest in mandate. Half of that is desert. You're saying 800,000 Arabs, 200,000 Jews in Palestine? Roughly, roughly. Now, you introduce a character named Sam Cohen, who is the deal maker, at least at the beginning. Could it be argued that this is another one of those incredible chapters where somebody is really out to do good and make profit and change the course of history?

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exactly what the character of Sam Cohen is. This man was half devil and half deliverer, as he was called by his own associates and the people who who knew him. He he thought that by his own contrivances and intrigues, he could deliver the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland and in the prophets and in the process turned small prophets.

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Black Let me be just a little bit adversarial for the sake of discussion. The the publicity surrounding the publication of this book indicates that it was a very daring thing for you to do to write this book. And yet when I read it, you wrote it with compassion and context. And I'm saying this is another chapter of where where we see captors making deals with captives and captives, making deal with captors. Devil's agreements are riddled through history. We see Ronald Reagan tomorrow night going to China to sit down with those devil communists. And everybody's kind of seeing the context of that. Was it really I mean, is it really all that big a deal?

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are quite right. The fact of the matter is, those who criticize this book and those who criticize the transfer agreement are those who have not read the book and those who are not familiar with the agonizing details surrounding the tragic choices that the Jewish people had to make. This book accuses no one, but everyone is so afraid that they're going to be accused that they're worried about the book. They're frankly worried.,

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your parents were among those who were worried before they had a chance to read a 100 page outline. What did they say to you when you told them first told them that you were going to do this book?,

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my mother said she was going to sit chivvy on me, which, as you may know, is the Jewish ritual of mourning for a loved one who has died, and my father who himself was a Zionist Betar Partizan, who fought against the Nazis, literally offered to strangle me and I would not proceed without their blessing. And I finally convinced him to read this 100 page outline that you just mentioned, and it pointed out where the research would lead me and what the facts were. And when my parents finally read it, they said, Now we understand things we could never understand before. Please go and write the book.

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right. We'll be back with more of that story and with some response to your book right after this.

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to help us in this conversation about Edwin Black's book, The Transfer Agreement, I want to introduce Rabbi Byron Sherwin Spertus College of Judaica, and Rabbi William Frankel, who is a past president of the Chicago Zionist Federation, and Rabbi Sherwin, if I understand correctly, you in part were influential in Edwin Black's writing of this book. How do you feel it would tell us that story and how you feel about it?,

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it was in June of 1978, Edwin, who I didn't know at the time, called me regarding a story he was doing for the Sun-Times in connection with the Nazi March in Skokie. And the article had to do with not with anti-Semitism in America. In the course of our discussion in response to one of his questions, I mentioned the transfer agreement. He responded by saying, Such a thing couldn't have existed. It's impossible. A year and a half later, he called me back and he said, You remember you mentioned this thing called the transfer agreement. It Was there really such a thing? I said, yes. He said, Well, where can I find out about it? I said, It's documented in every one of the major histories of the Holocaust. There were at the time four. Major histories of the Holocaust, beginning with Polyakov's in 1954. Down to.

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I'm sorry. Let me interrupt. Why? Why was it important you think that it be written? Why would you encourage a writer?

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didn't encourage him or discourage him. He was so enthused by the story that he took it.

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him on to it.,

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I put him on in the course of that interview to many things, and this was the one that seemed so incredible, so unbelievable that he decided to pursue it.

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you read the book?

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read it through a number of its transmigrations in various manuscripts.

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its value?

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value is, I think that it opens up an area of Holocaust studies, an area of Jewish history, an area of American Jewish history that has been kept very quiet.

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Frankel, how do you feel about this book?,

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let me say this. The problem with the book is the way it's being perceived in the community before having been read and that is largely due to the publicity which surrounded it. For an example, another network announced a program on this book in a rather questionable manner. Is this a Channel five piece? I didn't want to mention.,

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we're all friends. Let's just call them..

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The Channel five piece, giving a picture of some kind of a sinister plot between the Zionists, whatever that means, and the Nazi government, when in fact, it was a incidentally, as Rabbi Sherwin mentioned, this can be found in any encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia Judaica has an article on the subject. It's nothing sinister. It was an arrangement. The possibility that the boycott would actually topple the Hitler regime was a far fetched possibility.,

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just. I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say it's not to be viewed as sinister at the time, if we can believe Mr. Black's quotes and research, there were quite a number of persons who felt that it was that it was doing business with the devil and that it divided Jewish groups and Jewish individuals and non-Jews all over this world.

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did. It did.

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that the characterization of it is sinister is certainly retrospectively.

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did succeed in saving 60,000 German Jews and brought $40 million to Israel. And in fact, it did not do much for the German economy because that money did never reach Germany. It was German goods which were exported to Israel with money of German Jews, which would never have left Germany.

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have one last question before we go to phone calls, Mr. Black, And that is that you make a great deal, I think I think you're on record here and elsewhere as saying that this really was critical to the development, the eventual development of the state of Israel. And yet, if only and maybe only isn't the word to use 60,000 German Jews from 1933 to 1941 ended up in in Palestine, and there are already 200,000 to start off with and many hundreds of thousands would follow. Statistically, it doesn't sound like that's the it sounds to me like you can make an argument that Israel would go on and become a state sooner or later anyway.

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right. It's not the 60,000 German Jews that came over. It's the 50 to $100 million in assets that came over, which expanded the Palestinian economy, increased the general immigration quotas for East European Jews that allowed hundreds of thousands of East European Jews to come in escape the spreading Nazis.

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talking the term leveraging is what we're talking about here.

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built the country.

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should we need to make, I think, one more point clear, and that is that the that the British mandate charged if you if you wanted to get out of Germany, you had to pay the equivalent of $5000 or 1000 pounds wasn't it. No. You had to have.

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enter Palestine to enter Palestine. You needed 1,000 pounds, but you couldn't take 1,000 pounds out of Germany. Like to also mention that although the transfer agreement is cited as a fact in many in many Holocaust references, that's all it is. No one knows. No one knew the details behind it. No one knew its relationship to the.

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there's a lot of original reporting that went on here.

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80 to 90%.

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it. All right. Now we have phone calls and we'll go to them now. Good evening. You're on the air. Hello? Yes, go right ahead.,

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Mr. Calloway, I'd like to.

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Mr. Black, what was the role of the British government in this transfer agreement being the fact that Palestine at that time was a British mandate? Did the British have.