The Haavara Agreement: Zionist Defiance Against Nazi Genocide – Saving 60,000 Lives While Crushing Antisemitic Lies

The Haavara Agreement: Zionist Defiance Against Nazi Genocide – Saving 60,000 Lives While Crushing Antisemitic Lies

In truth, the Nazis harbored a profound ideological revulsion toward Zionism and the very concept of a Jewish national homeland, viewing it not as a legitimate aspiration for self-determination but as a sinister extension of their paranoid fantasies about a global Jewish conspiracy. As historian Jeffrey Herf documents in his seminal Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Adolf Hitler himself ridiculed Zionism as an impossibility for Jews, whom he deemed inherently incapable of building or sustaining a sovereign state.[1] Far worse, Nazi propagandists portrayed a potential Jewish state in Palestine as a “Vatican for the Jews”—a fortified nerve center from which Jews could orchestrate their alleged domination over Germany and the world.[2] This venomous rhetoric, disseminated through radio broadcasts to Arab audiences and publications like Joseph Goebbels’ Der Angriff, underscored the regime’s core antisemitism: Jews were not a people deserving of sovereignty but a rootless, scheming “race” whose every national impulse threatened Aryan purity.[3]

Declassified German foreign correspondence further exposes this vehement opposition: Nazi Germany did not want German Jewish colonies in Mandatory Palestine to form a unified administration or separate state, as it would fuel "political Judaism"—deemed utterly unacceptable. Even if Britain declared a Jewish state, Germany would forbid its emigrants' colonies from joining.[4] Writer and historian Rizkallah Boutros, who first presented many of these secret Nazi documents to the Arab world in his 2006 book The Arab World in German Secret Documents 1937–1941, showed that Berlin actively monitored German-Jewish immigrants to Palestine and remained opposed to any merger of their settlements into a future Zionist entity.[4][17] On November 2, 1943, the Nazis explicitly declared to the Palestinian Mufti: "that the destruction of the so-called Jewish National Home in Palestine is an immutable part of the policy of the greater German Reich."[5] As Boutros also documents, Nazi reports on talks with King Abdulaziz Al Saud concluded that "Saudi Arabia and Germany have one common enemy: the Jews."[6]

Before the Wannsee Conference of January 1942—where the "Final Solution" was coordinated—the Nazis’ immediate policy was expulsion. Zionist contacts, driven by desperation to save lives, navigated this via the 1933 Haavara (Transfer) Agreement. Hitler saw all Jews, regardless of ideology, as subhuman; the pact was cynically exploited for ethnic cleansing while Zionists faced the agonizing dilemma of breaking the global anti-Nazi boycott to rescue lives.[7][8] At the time, the right-wing Revisionist Zionists under Ze’ev Jabotinsky fiercely opposed any dealings with Nazi Germany whatsoever, insisting on an uncompromising worldwide economic boycott and refusing even pragmatic contact that might save lives—demonstrating that the Zionist movement was far from monolithic and that accusations of “collaboration” are a grotesque slander against the entire Jewish people.[16]

Fact: Haavara saved over 60,000 German Jews in the 1930s alone, with up to 80,000 from Greater Germany reaching Palestine between 1933 and 1941—lives that would otherwise have been lost in the Shoah.[9] Holocaust scholar Francis R. Nicosia, Yad Vashem, and the Jewish Virtual Library all emphasize that claims of “Nazi-Zionist collaboration” are malicious antisemitic distortions.[10][11]

Ironically, the most fervent demonization of the Haavara Agreement in recent decades comes not from Holocaust scholars, but from radical Arab nationalists and Islamists who remain furious that it succeeded in rescuing tens of thousands of Jews and strengthening the Yishuv that would later declare the State of Israel. For them, every Jew who escaped the Nazi death machine and reached Palestine represents a bitter defeat—proof that Jewish lives were saved when, in their ideology, they should have perished. As recently as 2019, articles in Arab media still mourned that Hitler did not finish the job, with titles such as “Hitler’s Arab Fans’ Long Wait for Salvation” openly expressing disappointment that more Jews survived to build Israel.[15][17] This is why the agreement is routinely distorted into “proof” of Zionist-Nazi[sic] collusion in Palestinian, Iranian, and far-left propaganda: the real outrage is not moral, but that the rescue worked.

Never forget: 1.5 million Jews fought in Allied armies against the Nazis; Zionist leaders Ben-Gurion and Weizmann campaigned tirelessly for a Jewish fighting force; and the Yishuv in Palestine made a “glorious contribution to the Allied cause.”[12][13][14]

In stark, heroic contrast to the world’s moral abdication at Évian, the Zionist Transfer embodied redemption and resilience—transforming persecution into the seeds of Israel’s rebirth. Today, amid resurgent blood libels, Haavara stands as proof of Zionist ingenuity: a defiant bridge from ashes to sovereignty.

Notes & Sources

1. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009) – https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300145793/nazi-propaganda-for-the-arab-world/
2. Herf, Israel’s Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2022) – https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/israels-moment/...
3. Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, chapters 3–5.
4. Rizkallah Boutros, The Arab World in Secret German Documents 1937–1941 (Arabic, 2006).
5. Baron Russell of Liverpool, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann (Heinemann, 1962), p. 39 – Google Books excerpt
6. Boutros, op. cit.
7. Francis R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge UP, 2008) – https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/zionism-and-antisemitism-in-nazi-germany/...
8. Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement (Dialog Press, 2009) – https://www.transferagreement.com/
9. Nicosia; Yad Vashem aliyah statistics – https://www.yadvashem.org
10. Jewish Virtual Library – “The Transfer (Haavara) Agreement” – https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-transfer-agreement
11. Yad Vashem research files on Haavara.
12. Yad Vashem – “Jewish Soldiers in World War II” – https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/jewish-soldiers.html
13. Rick Richman, Racing Against History: The Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler (Encounter Books, 2018).
14. Jeffrey Herf, Israel’s Moment (2022), p. 28.
15. Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and analyses of PA/Iranian media usage of the libel.
16. Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Revisionist opposition: Yaakov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement (1988); Colin Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism (I.B. Tauris, 2005).
17. Ehab Omar, “Hitler’s Arab Fans’ Long Wait for Salvation,” Raseef22, 4 Sep 2019 (archived: http://web.archive.org/web/20210708223533/https://raseef22.net/article/1074998-hitlers-arab-fans-long-wait-for-salvation). The Arab article cites Boutros’s work extensively while expressing open disappointment that Nazi Germany did not prevent more Jewish immigration to Palestine and that the Holocaust did not eliminate the Jewish presence there entirely.

Additional primary documentation available at:
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – https://www.ushmm.org
Yad Vashem Archives – https://www.yadvashem.org/archive
Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem – http://www.zionistarchives.org.il