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Black-and-white 1933 photo: smiling newly arrived immigrants from Germany, in coats and a hat, stand at a desk while a clerk in glasses checks their papers, with shelves of binders behind them.

THE HAAVARA AGREEMENT, 1933: EMIGRATION, BOYCOTT AND THE MYTHS THAT FOLLOWED

New immigrants from Germany go through passport control at Jaffa port, November 1933, the year the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement let German Jews emigrating to Mandatory Palestine recover part of their assets.
Photo: Zoltan Kluger / Government Press Office (Israel), National Photo Collection D7-078, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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In 1933 a German Jew who wanted to start again in Palestine faced Nazi rules that took most of what a family owned at the border. The Haavara Agreement offered a partial way around those rules. It divided the Jewish world at the time, and it is still misused today.

 

 

First published: October 7, 2026

 

 

Key Facts

  • What: An arrangement, made in August 1933, under which German Jews emigrating to Palestine paid money into accounts in Germany that bought German goods for export to Palestine; the emigrants were repaid in Palestine currency from the sale of those goods.

  • Who: The German Zionist Federation and the Jewish Agency's representatives on one side, and the German Economics Ministry and currency authorities on the other, with the Anglo-Palestine Bank and a Tel Aviv company, Haavara Ltd., handling the transfers.

  • Why it mattered: Nazi currency rules stripped emigrants of most of their assets, and British rules in Palestine required £P1,000 in capital for one class of immigration certificate.

  • Numbers: About 60,000 German Jews reached Palestine in 1933–39; about 20,000 of them brought part of their capital through the agreement.

  • Controversy: It cut across the Jewish-led boycott of German goods, and many Jews condemned it. The Zionist Congress at Lucerne endorsed it in 1935 by 169 votes to 12.

  • End: It ran until a few months after the Second World War began in September 1939.

  • Myth: Claims that Hitler "supported Zionism" or that Zionists helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust are false, according to the historians and museums cited below.

 

The Balfour Declaration and the 1922 Mandate opened Palestine to Jewish immigration under British rule. In 1933 that door suddenly mattered more. Hitler took power in January, the April 1 boycott of Jewish businesses followed, and German Jews looked for ways out, but Nazi currency rules stripped emigrants of most of their assets.

 

The Haavara, Hebrew for "transfer," was one answer. Under an arrangement made in August 1933 with the German government, Jews leaving for Palestine could recover part of their savings there, because their money was used in Germany to buy German goods that were then sold in Palestine. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it "an instance where the question of Jewish rights, Zionist needs and individual rescue were in deep tension." It let thousands of families start again with part of their savings. It also undercut a boycott of German goods that many Jews had joined at real cost, and it served the Nazi state's own aims.

 

Those uncomfortable facts have also made the agreement a recurring theme in antisemitic and Holocaust-denial material, which uses it to blur the line between the Nazi regime and its victims. This article sets out what the agreement was, why Jews argued so bitterly over it at the time, why the German government accepted it, and where the claims built on it go wrong.

 

Germany in 1933: Persecution and the Cost of Leaving

About 523,000 Jews lived in Germany in January 1933, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). The Nazis came to power on January 30, and persecution began at once.

  • The April boycott: On April 1, 1933, the regime staged a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops and professionals. SA men stood outside with signs reading "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!" The regime presented the day as a reprisal against Greuelpropaganda, "atrocity stories" that German and foreign Jews were allegedly spreading abroad (USHMM).

  • The first wave: Some 37,000 to 38,000 Jews left Germany in 1933 (USHMM).

  • The Reich Flight Tax: A tax of 25 percent on the assets of emigrants, introduced in the last phase of the Weimar Republic, became a tool against Jews. The German Federal Fiscal Court's own history of the period quotes a 1938 commentary by Gustav Jahn: "Jews must pay under all circumstances."

  • Currency controls: The USHMM names German legislation banning the export of foreign currency as "the main obstacle to emigration." Jews who left between 1933 and 1937 lost an estimated 30 to 50 percent of their net worth; from 1937 to 1939 the loss was 60 to 100 percent. "Many Jews became penniless once they left," the museum writes.

  • The British condition: Article 6 of the 1922 Mandate told the administration of Palestine to "facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions," and Britain set limits by category. Immigrants with capital of at least £P1,000 could qualify for a "capitalist" certificate. The Encyclopaedia Judaica puts that sum at $4,990 at the time. It was proof of means, not a fee.

 

The two sets of rules worked against each other. Palestine favoured immigrants who had money; Germany made sure that Jews who left would not keep it.

 

The Boycott, and the "Judea Declares War" Headline

Outside Germany, news of beatings, arrests and dismissals in the spring of 1933 set off protest meetings and calls to stop buying German goods.

  • What it was: A consumer and trade boycott. Shopkeepers, importers and members of the public refused German products, and some merchants cancelled orders. There was no army, no state and no single command.

  • Who called it: The calls came from many directions. Yf'aat Weiss, writing in Yad Vashem Studies, dates the organised American movement from the rally sponsored by the American Jewish Congress under Rabbi Stephen Wise at Madison Square Garden on March 27, 1933. In London, traders called for boycotts in March. The movement was strongest in Poland, where Jewish merchants bore heavy losses to keep it going. Christian, labour and other non-Jewish groups joined protests in the United States, according to the German reference site h-ref.de.

  • Who held back: Many established Jewish bodies were cautious. The Board of Deputies of British Jews said boycotts and protest meetings were spontaneous and not organised by the Board, as h-ref.de reports from The Times of March 27, 1933. German Jewish leaders and the Zionist Executive feared that open confrontation would bring reprisals against the Jews still in Germany (Weiss).

  • How much it hurt: Weiss shows German exports to Poland falling from 173 million zloty in 1932 to 108 million in 1934, but she judges that, for all the fears it raised in Berlin, the boycott had "only a marginal effect" on the German economy overall.

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Cropped banner headline from the Daily Express of March 24, 1933, reading 'Judea Declares War on Germany.'

The 'Judea Declares War on Germany' headline reported calls by Jewish groups for a boycott of German goods after the Nazi takeover; it was a protest boycott, not a war, though antisemitic and denial material still cites it as proof that Jews started the conflict. Daily Express, 24 March 1933.
Daily Express (London), 24 March 1933. Scan via Internet Archive. Used under fair use for historical commentary.

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On March 24, 1933, the London Daily Express ran a six-column front-page headline: "Judea Declares War on Germany." The unsigned report beneath it, credited to the paper's "Special Political Correspondent," described boycott plans as a reaction to "German Jew-baiting." It said Jews around the world were "uniting to declare an economic and financial war on Germany," and predicted that "the Hitlerite cry will be: 'The Jews are persecuting Germany.'"

  • What the headline left out: No Jewish government existed to declare anything, and the paper named no body that had done so. h-ref.de notes that the headline partly contradicts the article under it, and that the Board of Deputies, Britain's main representative Jewish body, had yet to meet when it appeared.

  • How the regime used the idea: Nazi leaders cast the April 1 boycott as self-defence against Jewish "atrocity" propaganda (USHMM). Weiss writes that, from the German point of view, the boycott seemed to uncover the mythical "world Jewish conspiracy," and that "the very belief that the Jews possessed such economic power was an outgrowth of the overblown antisemitic stereotype of Jewish economic influence."

  • How it is used now: The headline circulates widely in antisemitic and denial material, which presents it as a declaration of war by world Jewry, so that Jews appear as the aggressors and Nazi persecution as a response. h-ref.de, which documents such material, points out that it leaves out the earlier violence and boycotts against Jews in Germany, the non-Jewish protests, and the efforts of major Jewish organisations to restrain the boycott. The same fantasy of hidden Jewish power drives the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the media control myth.

 

What the Agreement Was

In the summer of 1933 the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the German Zionist Federation and the German Economics Ministry drafted a plan "meant to allow German Jews emigrating to Palestine to retain some of the value of their property in Germany by purchasing German goods for the Yishuv," the Jewish community in Palestine (Weiss). Yad Vashem's lexicon describes the result as an "agreement made in August 1933 between the Nazi regime and the German Zionist Federation." A German government circular of that month, published in English translation by the Jewish Virtual Library, states its purpose: "to enable German Jews to continue to emigrate to Palestine with the aid of allocations of the required funds, but without making excessive demands on the foreign-currency reserves of the Reichsbank. At the same time, German exports to Palestine will be increased."

  • Paying in: An emigrant paid Reichsmarks into Special Account I at the Bank of the Temple Society, held at the Reichsbank. The circular set RM 15,000 as "then equivalent to LP 1,000," the capitalist minimum.

  • Buying goods: The money paid German firms for goods exported to Palestine, at first up to a budget of RM 3 million.

  • Getting paid out: In Palestine, Haavara Ltd. in Tel Aviv sold the goods and paid emigrants in Palestine pounds, with the Anglo-Palestine Bank acting until a trust company was set up. A second account allowed further sums, capped at RM 50,000 a person.

  • The losses: To keep German goods competitive as the mark weakened, the Haavara subsidised importers, and the emigrants carried the cost. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says this discount rose "from 6% in 1934 to 50% in 1938."

  • The secrecy: Weiss writes that "until 1935 the Jewish Agency masked its role in the Agreement and attempted to pass it off as an economic agreement between private parties."

 

The talks had a human cost of their own. Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, saw an agreement with the German authorities as the only way to get Jews and their property out legally. He was murdered in 1933, after a mission to Germany that April, in the middle of the election campaign for the Eighteenth Zionist Congress. Stavski, a member of the Revisionist group Brit ha-Biryonim, was accused and acquitted about a year later for lack of evidence, and the killing deepened the feud between the Labor and Revisionist movements over the agreement (Weiss).

 

The Numbers, and How It Ended

The figures most often quoted come from the museums and reference works below, and they need careful wording. The agreement did not carry every German Jew who reached Palestine, and it was not a rescue programme for German Jewry as a whole.

  • Arrivals: About 60,000 German Jews reached Palestine between 1933 and 1939. The USHMM says "over 60,000" came "during the 1930s, most under the terms of the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement"; the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls the transfer "a major factor" in making that immigration possible.

  • With their capital: About 20,000 of them, some 37 percent of immigrants from Germany after 1933, brought part of their capital through the agreement, according to the historian Yehuda Bauer as cited by Weiss. Yad Vashem's lexicon speaks more cautiously of "several thousand immigrants" who used it. Sources differ, and these figures are best read as approximate.

  • The money: The total transfer came to about £P8.1 million, including £P2.6 million provided by the Reichsbank in coordination with the Haavara, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Higher Reichsmark totals appear elsewhere and are not used here.

  • Who it served: Weiss writes that it "solved the problems of an affluent class of German Jews" but "did not improve the living conditions of the Jews left behind." Later emigrants also recovered less, as the discount on their money rose toward 50 percent by 1938.

  • Wider context: By September 1939 about 282,000 Jews had left Germany and 117,000 had left Austria, according to the USHMM. Most went elsewhere than Palestine.

  • The end: By 1938, Yad Vashem writes, the agreement "became the only possibility for large-scale emigration from Germany to Palestine." It "operated until a few months after World War II broke out in September 1939, when it was cancelled because of the Allies' economic blockade on Germany." The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that it survived "in spite of vigorous attempts by the Nazi Party to stop or curtail its activities."

 

In October 1941 the regime forbade Jews to leave (USHMM). By then the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union had begun, and the Holocaust was under way.

 

The Jewish Argument at the Time

Jews did not argue about whether Nazism was evil. They argued about what could be done against it, and at what price. Weiss writes that these "were not merely different tactics in pursuit of the same goal" but reflected different views of Nazism, antisemitism and Jewish life in the Diaspora.

  • Prague, 1933: The Eighteenth Zionist Congress met from August 21 to September 3, 1933. Its first resolution expressed "indignation at the discrimination and degradation inflicted upon" German Jews and declared that Zionists worldwide "will not rest until the discrimination and degradation inflicted upon the Jews in Germany shall cease." On the agreement itself it took no stand: it referred the matter to the General Council "for careful examination," with the proviso that nothing be done "inconsistent with the attitude taken up by the Congress on the German-Jewish question."

  • Geneva, 1933: At the World Jewish Conference in Geneva that September, the joint Polish Jewish delegation unanimously protested the agreement, and many delegates called it a "disgrace" (Schande). "The Palestinian agreement pains us because it infringes on our dignity and weakens the Jewish people in its struggle," said Henryk Rosmarin (Weiss).

  • The Revisionists: Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionist Zionists, was "a staunch opponent of the Transfer Agreement and a leading supporter of the boycott" (Weiss). The exception was Georg Kareski of the Revisionist party in Germany, who backed mass emigration and urged Jews abroad to buy German goods to make it possible.

  • Doubts inside Labor: Even the agreement's supporters in the Labor movement had misgivings. After a visit to Germany in 1933, Eliezer Kaplan of the Jewish Agency called the sums involved "but a drop in the ocean." Zalman Aharonowitz said in 1934: "We shall befoul ourselves irreparably." In 1935 Herzfeld said: "Instead of effecting a great rescue, we achieved a piddling rescue and humiliated ourselves in the process" (all quoted by Weiss).

  • The case for it: Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) opposed the boycott as "a Diaspora-style gesture" and said: "Building the country is our war with Germany." Weiss also notes a less flattering motive: as conditions in Germany briefly stabilised, the Yishuv's leaders were "increasingly preoccupied with the economic advantages" the transfer brought to Palestine.

  • Lucerne, 1935: The Nineteenth Zionist Congress, held at Lucerne from August 20 to September 6, 1935, endorsed the agreement by 169 votes to 12, with 17 abstentions, and placed the Haavara under the control of the Zionist Executive. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Jewish State Party delegates walked out shouting "Hitler Agents buy German goods!" Emil Schmorak of Poland warned that the boycott in Poland, "conducted at a great loss to the Jews," could not continue "if the Zionist Executive agrees to act as official agents for Germany." Goldie Meyerson, later known as Golda Meir, replied that "the boycott against Hitler should not be converted into a boycott against the Jews in Germany."

 

A Jewish Agency poster in the USHMM collection, whose text refers to the Lucerne decision, shows how bitter the fight became. It called the transfer German Jews' "last bridge" and urged "responsible and disciplined" Zionists not to take part in a referendum on it.

 

Why the Nazi State Agreed

The German side had its own reasons, and none of them was sympathy for Jews or for Zionism.

  • Breaking the boycott: Weiss writes that "one of the German authorities' principal goals in negotiating with the Zionist movement was to fragment the Jewish boycott of German goods." Correspondence of Heinrich Wolff, the German consul in Palestine, shows this was a key motive.

  • Exports and currency: The circular itself lists both aims: protecting the Reichsbank's foreign-currency reserves and increasing German exports to Palestine.

  • Getting rid of Jews: The Encyclopaedia Judaica sums up the German motives as a wish to "get rid of their Jews, increase their exports and a propaganda victory by dividing the Jews regarding the boycott."

  • No policy for a Jewish state: The historian Timothy Snyder, writing for BBC News, says that some German officials took an interest in Zionism, "but there was never a German policy to support Zionism or a future Israel." The official German policy, "enunciated clearly in 1937, was to oppose the creation of a State of Israel."

 

Until October 1941, the USHMM notes, German policy officially encouraged Jewish emigration, while stripping emigrants of their property. Pushing Jews out, with or without their savings, was a step in persecution, not a sign of goodwill.

 

The False Claims Built on the Agreement

The real history is uncomfortable enough. The myths take its facts and turn them into something they were not: proof of a partnership between Nazis and Zionists, or proof that Jews brought persecution on themselves.

  • "Hitler supported Zionism": In 2016 the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said that when Hitler won his election in 1932, "his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews." He was suspended by the Labour Party. Snyder replied that the statement "is categorically false." Hitler, he wrote, saw Zionism as one of many "deliberately deceptive labels" that Jews supposedly used in a striving for global power, and there was no Israel in 1932 to send anyone to.

  • "Zionists helped carry out the Holocaust": This claim has a history of its own. Paul Bogdanor, writing in Fathom, a pro-Israel journal, traces it to Soviet-bloc propaganda, which claimed that "together with the Nazis... the Zionists bear responsibility for the destruction of the Jews in 1941-45 in Europe." The Holocaust was planned and carried out by the Nazi state and its collaborators; the Haavara, a pre-war emigration arrangement, had ended within months of the war's outbreak.

  • "Jews declared war first": The Daily Express headline, described above, is presented as proof that Jews started a war against Germany. It reported a protest boycott that followed Nazi violence against Jews.

  • "The Nazis only wanted emigration": Holocaust deniers point to the agreement as evidence that Nazi policy was emigration, not murder. The regime's own 1941 ban on Jewish emigration, followed by deportation and mass murder, is the answer (USHMM). A full treatment of denial claims is planned.

  • The Brenner books: Much of this material draws on Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983), a polemic by an anti-Zionist writer. Bogdanor calls it "An Antisemitic Hoax" and shows how it cuts quotations, such as a passage from Rabbi Joachim Prinz, short of the words that follow. Even a broadly sympathetic 1985 review in MERIP Reports called it worth reading for its documentation but objected to Brenner's "hectoring second-guessing" of Jewish leaders and asked: "Just how many options did they have?" According to Bogdanor, Brenner loathed the deniers, yet America's main Holocaust-denial organisation, the Institute for Historical Review, called the book a "bombshell exposé" and sold it to its supporters. Livingstone cited Brenner in defending his remarks.

 

Behind every version is the same move: a hard choice made by a persecuted minority is recast as a partnership with its persecutors, and the persecutors' own propaganda, from "atrocity stories" to the claim of world Jewish power, is taken at face value. That pattern runs through the wider set of antisemitic tropes explained on this site.

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The honest bottom line is not comfortable, and it does not need to be. Zionist leaders negotiated with a regime that was persecuting Jews. The agreement weakened a boycott that many Jews, above all in Poland, had joined at real cost, and it helped the Nazi state with currency and exports. Many Jews said so at the time, loudly. It also let some 20,000 people, by Bauer's count, reach Palestine with part of what they had owned, and it kept a legal route open as Nazi pressure on German Jews grew. Weiss, who documents the criticism in detail, concludes that it "proved to be a correct and farsighted measure, even if it did not provide a solution for German Jewry as a whole." None of that makes the Nazi state anything but the persecutor, and none of it makes the victims responsible for what was done to them. Understanding the Haavara means holding both truths at once, and recognizing that responsibility for the persecution lay with the persecutors.

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The Haavara ended with the war. By then Britain had changed course: its White Paper of May 1939 capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over five years, just as the war that would bring the Holocaust was about to begin. After 1945, with Europe's Jews murdered in their millions and Britain unable to govern Palestine, the question went to the United Nations. How the State of Israel emerged from that, and the arguments and myths that surround it, is the subject of the final article.

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Dates and figures are given as reported by the sources below. Where sources differ, as on the number of emigrants who used the agreement, the range or the more cautious figure is given. The exact signing date in August 1933 is not given because the sources consulted give only the month.

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Sources

Primary documents

Historians, reference works and reporting

Last updated: October 7, 2026

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